PANJIM: In a major solace to Mayem villagers, the High Court of Bombay at Goa on Wednesday ordered that only 50 trucks be allowed to ply for five hours per day through the Mayem village till such time that the remaining 5,900 metric tonnes e-auctioned iron ore is transported.
The transportation timings have been set as 10 am to 12 noon and from 2 pm to 5 pm.
Importantly, even this allowance is conditional to setting up real time monitoring mechanisms
This includes two more pollution monitoring stations and two CCTV cameras with monitoring mechanism are installed at the local village panchayat.
After the hearing, Adv Norma Alvares representing the petitioners The Miulakh Khajan Farmers Association, Mayem and NGO Goa Foundation, said that the Court was not happy with the real time monitoring of iron ore transportation by the authorities.
The Division Bench comprising Justices Mahesh Sonak and Justice Valmiki SA Menezes has also directed that once the remaining ore is transported there should be no fresh transportation of iron ore through village roads. It asked the mining company i.e. M/s Blue Globe Exports Pvt Ltd to comply with the memorandum of Ministry of Environment and Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) guidelines prohibiting the entry of mining trucks and traffic on village roads.
The limit of 50 trucks per day as against 230 trucks which were plying though the village roads since January 8 this year. On December 28 last year, the Directorate of Mines and Geology had granted a transit permit to the mining company to transport 26,000 metric tonnes of ore from the Poira mine. The company started transportation of the ore on January 8, and has already transported a major chunk of the ore with only 5,900 metric tonnes remaining to be transported.
By public interest litigation (PIL) writ petition, the petitioners had prayed to stop transportation of mining ore through the village road of Mayem village in Bicholim taluka. They had pointed out that the Directorate of Mines and Geology had allowed transportation of iron ore through the village road of Mayem, despite the High Court in May 2022 had stopped the transport of mining dumps through the same village road in the absence of pollution control measures and had disposed the petition after recording an undertaking by the private party that they would not transport the ore through the Mayem village road.
The petitioners stated that last week they along with farmers had staged a protest to stop transportation of ore through the Mayem village, but they were detained by the police for almost six hours and transportation resumed under police protection. The road through the Mayem village was never used for ore transport in the past.
The petitioners apprehended that attempt to reuse the village road to transport mineral ore would result in renewed damage to the village road and dust and noise pollution for the villagers and cause serious hazard for the village community.