River sand puzzle in UP causing national loss
The belief of the administration that everything is wrong with the mining of abundantly and freely available river sand in Uttar Pradesh is restricting its availability for building and construction work making it costlier.
For ages, naturally available materials like clay, rock or forest produce were used as building material. River sand abundantly stored in the river beds in Uttar Pradesh was hardly of any use till recently. However, tremendous increase in the use of cement in construction works, both in urban as well as rural areas, has necessitated huge availability of appropriate quality of river sand at fair and economical prices.
In many parts of the world where no river sand exists, stone is crushed at great cost to obtain sand. However, the nature’s free gift to the common people of Uttar Pradesh is unfortunately being denied due to non-appraisal by the government machinery of correct pragmatic approach. In order to punish the guilty sand mafia who corner the natural wealth existing in rivers, the strategy adopted is incidentally heavily punishing innocent house builders and has also harmed the public sector projects being executed to develop necessary infrastructure.
It may be noted that one bag of cement requires six bags of sand which amounts to some seven cubic foot in volume. Cement costs about Rs 300 per bag. Hardly four years ago when things were close to normal, coarse sand which was abundantly available in river Yamuna used to cost Rs 12 per cubic feet in Allahabad (which is close to Yamuna) and about Rs 20 per cubic feet in Lucknow.
However, due to improper understanding of ground reality of sand-mining, a situation has been created in which tremendous shortage of sand has occurred for use in normal house building, repairs and execution of government projects causing great deal of avoidable financial loss to common man as well as to the government.
Besides scarcity, the price of coarse sand has shot up to Rs 120 per cubic feet. There- fore, for one bag of cement costing Rs 300, seven cubic feet of river sand worth Rs 840 is required which not only amounts to absurdity but is an administrative faux pas, as huge quantity of river sand is all the time available free of cost in river beds.
This phenomenon has already crippled essential house building activity in the last one year or so and has led to unemployment of many, including farm workers, who were till recently getting partial employment in construction sector.
The issue is related to an erroneous atmosphere created due to exaggerated importance being given to ‘illegal mining’ as also being projected and exploited by some activists for personal gains.
It has to be noted that mining of river sand is not at all an illegal activity. It has been a normal and essential activity for decades. Hardly a few decades back the government imposed a nominal royalty and permits to take out river sand were issued by local functionaries of revenue department.
The acute problem has got created due to steep increase in demand of coarse Yamuna sand and mafia’s effort in collusion with politicians for cornering the natural wealth through issue only of chosen licences for sand excavations and thereby increasing illegality in payment of royalty on sand excavation.
People have full faith that chief minister Yogi Adityanath is commited to checking the activities of the mafia.
However, the common man needs immediate relief through simplification of procedure for restoration of easy availability of river sand. This can be done by ordering issue of liberal licences to common people all along rivers for excavation.
Such a step will diminish the interest of the mafia as sand price will crash. Under the present scenario, the chief minister can help in solving the problem that the people are suffering.
ON BHARGAVA