BHOPAL: Economic Offences Wing of Jabalpur on Tuesday registered a case against five officials of mining department and four of Western Coalfield, Chhindwara district for allowing operations at coal mines sans pollution board permission.
SP EOW, Jabalpur Devendra Singh Rajput told Free Press that between 2004 and 2011, 42,864 metric ton coal was mined and dispatched from WCL Bhajipani, Chhindwara without the permission from Pollution Control Board, Jabalpur. The matter was reported to the EOW and in the investigations it came to fore that the officials had misused their posts and helped the contractors to operate mining illegally.
The EOW has registered a case against the then five mining officers including Anil Kumar, Prakash Pandre, Shashank Shukla, SN Patil and Arvind Tiwari.
Four officials of WCL including the then chief general manager of WCL Jitendra Tiwari, the then CGM PK Chakravarty, WCL mine manager P Koteshwar and sub area manager of WCL AK Rai have also been booked. Besides, the then scientist of MP Pollution Control Board, Jabalpur DBS Jatav has also been booked.
To take the permission from the board, Rs 1 lakh fee was charged and the annual renewal fee was Rs 80,000 per year.
State government and the MP Pollution Control Board, Jabalpur had instructed that without the clearance of air and water pollution permission mines cannot be operated.
But in Chhindwara, the officials of Pollution Control Board ignored the directives and allowed the mines to run. Besides, they did not make any effort to stop the mining sans permission and no inspection was carried out then. The officials did not serve notices on the contractors to obtain the No Objection Certificate (NOC) from the Board.
