65% of sand is used for govt projects, but depts have no bills to show; report points to ‘nexus’
SIDHU’S RECIPE TO ROLL BACK TAXES
CHANDIGARH :The Congress government’s crackdown on illegal mining will have to begin from home. As the cabinet sub-committee headed by local bodies minister Navjot Singh Sidhu tried to unearth the reasons for soaring sand prices and flaws in previous policy, it has not only found a “politician-police-official nexus”, but also that even government departments have no bills to show that their projects used sand from legal quarries.
The panel, which also comprises finance minister Manpreet Singh Badal and rural development minister Tript Rajinder Singh Bajwa, met government officials as well as private stakeholders on Friday following chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh’s one-month deadline to submit a report on illegal mining. The panel hopes to do so within a fortnight.
Of 110 contractors who have bid for quarries in the last two auctions, just 50 have paid the earnest money totaling to ₹130 crore against windfall of ~1,100 crore that the mining department had projected.
The annual revenue of the previous Akali-bjp regime was ₹40 crore from reverse bidding process.
The source of the government’s own construction material, too, is now under the scanner.
“Of the total sand demand, 65% comes from government infrastructure projects such as housing, roads, bridges etc and the rest from the private sector. Rules mandate that all government contractors use sand from mines auctioned by the state. However, no department has bills to show that the rules were followed. It hints at the possibility of the material being sourced from illegal mining,” Sidhu said after the meeting.
The government’s progressive Voices of dissent against new taxes are coming from the Punjab cabinet too. Pegging expected revenue from sand at ₹2,000 crore, tax on trucks entering state at ₹400 crore a year and royalty and power consumption charges from 800-1,000 stone crushers at ₹1,500 crore a year, Sidhu gave Manpreet his recipe to roll back taxes. bidding policy also came in for heavy criticism from around 50 contractors present at the meeting, who dubbed it a ‘failure as it tried to mint money from exhausted mines’.
They said that the amount of mining material was not ascertained scientifically before the auction. While some mines were already exhausted, villagers did not give access to few mines. “The progressive bidding policy contradicts the government’s efforts to tame sand prices. A bidder has to recover his money too,” a contractor present at the meeting said. They asked the government to opt for a uniform “The government would not have needed to impose new taxes if sand and gravel mining were well-regulated. Telangana came into existence in 2014; at that time, it had meagre income of ₹10 crore from mining; its government formed a corporation and the income jumped to ₹1,200 crore in 2017-18. Haryana, which is smaller than Punjab, is earning ₹900 crore from mining,” he said. bidding process.
Manpreet, who imposed new taxes in his March budget, was told by stone crushers that Punjab could earn revenue by taxing the trucks of gravel entering from neighbouring states of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) and Himachal, which charges ₹7 per unit power for crushing and ₹8 royalty per tonne from land owners. Official estimates say that nearly 2,600 trucks of gravel enter the state every month.
“We are on verge of closure and the state is suffering loss of revenue, while the gravel mafia is collecting goonda tax from trucks entering the state. The common man is paying higher prices too,” the owner of a stone crushing unit said.
The 2015 notification for allowing leveling of fields by farmers led to sand being dug out from even up to 70 feet.
“Not only was the quality of sand poor for construction, it damaged our ecology too,” an official said.
CABINET PANEL SAYS NO BILLS TO PROVE SAND FROM LEGAL QUARRIES, SOURCE OF GOVT’S OWN CONSTRUCTION MATERIAL THUS NOW UNDER THE SCANNER