YSR Congress party president and Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy’s decision to streamline sand supply by ensuring elimination of alleged sand mafia seems to have landed him in trouble.
Following his instructions, the authorities have stopped mining of sand in all the rivers and closed the sand reaches for which the previous Telugu Desam Party government had given permission.
As a result, there has been virtually no sand supply in the entire state, as a result of which the real estate activity has come to a standstill.
Even for government works, there is no availability of sand. Some construction agencies are “importing” sand from neighbouring states, resulting in skyrocketing of sand prices.
What is worse, the halt in construction activity resulted in large scale unemployment and construction workers have been laid off at least for the time being.
“We welcome Jagan’s intentions to eliminate corruption in sand mining. But that does not mean he should stop entire sand procurement. It will bring the economy to a halt and have a cascading effect on the other economic activities,” a real estate dealer said.
On Tuesday, Jana Sena Party president Pawan Kalyan wrote a letter to Jagan stating that due to stoppage of construction activity on the pretext of non-availability of sand has thrown thousands of construction workers on the roads.
“Every day, scores of workers are coming to me, complaining about lack of work due to sand policy of your government. There are incidents of workers committing suicide as there was no employment,” he lamented.
Jagan, however, declared that the new sand policy with stringent rules will come into effect from September. At Spandana programme on Tuesday, Jagan enquired about availability of sand.
He said under the new sand policy, there would be no scope for pilferage.
“Instructions will be issued to ensure that there is no shortage of sand hereafter. Video cameras would be fixed in all ramps and the policy should be transparent,” Jagan said.
But it is still one month to go for September. By that time, it is better the government takes action to relax rules on sand supply.
