Sand scarcity brings building activity in Vizag to a halt

Visakhapatnam, September 16:

Apartment builders are here facing great difficulty in procuring sand for construction activity due to the State Governments indecision over the sand mining issue.

According to members of the Visakha Apartment Builders Association (VABA), construction work at a few hundred sites in the city has come to a standstill for the past one month or so.

President of VABA, P Anand Kumar, said that sand was an important ingredient in civil construction and due to the ban on mining, there had been no supply of sand.

Construction activity has stopped due to the shortage of sand, he said and added that the association members had met the District Collector N Yuvaraj and he had assured them that the issue will be addressed in the next few days.

Vice-President KS Krishna said: About one lakh workers are engaged in the apartment construction sector and they have been idle since the last one month. They are poor people who survive on daily wages and they are hit badly..

Based on a Supreme Court directive that sand mining cannot take place without the clearance from the environment board, the government has banned mining.

Environment clearance is good but there are sites such as Konam reservoir which has got an environment clearance. The government can allow mining at such places, said Krishna.

Another issue is the setting up of the Environment Clearance Board (ECB).

After bifurcation, the AP state has no ECB. The governments plan of allotting the mining rights to the DWCRA groups will take some time, but something has to be done on a war-footing to save the industry, said Anand.

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Sand scarcity brings building activity in Vizag to a halt