KOLKATA (miningweekly.com) – India’s Mines Ministry will complete the verification and mapping of about 3 900 mining blocks across the country by the end of this month, marking the first step towards implementing its technology-driven system to monitor illegal mining.

Government officials said that following the physical verification and demarcation of boundaries of mining areas, digital formats would be uploaded on cadastral maps under the Mining Surveillance System (MSS).

In the first phase, digital cadastral mapping would cover all major minerals, while subsequent phases would incorporate minor minerals, the officials said.

The project is aimed at providing real-time information on illegal mining activities. A central command and control office will be set up at Hyderabad, in southern India.

The digital cadastral mapping will be key for satellite monitoring of mining activities, in which real-time information on illegal mining activities detected will be transmitted to the central command and control centre, which, in turn, will inform designated authorities at provincial government level.

Plans are in the offing to have satellites hover over each mining area once every 24 days and collect data on mining boundaries and extraction, for transmission to the command and control centre, which will compare it with previous data to detect illegal activity in the area.

Further, the Mines Ministry is seeking to persuade provincial governments to set up special teams or designate special officers to deal with illegal mining notifications.

The federal Ministry is also advocating that all provinces adopt the practices of provinces such as Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, where the provincial governments have issued directives that deputy commissioners and superintendents hold monthly meetings to take stock of preventive and punitive action taken against illegal mining in their respective local districts.

The MSS project will enable more effective implementation of the penal provisions for illegal mining, which have been made more stringent now entailing a five-year jail term and financial penalties.

Data sourced from the Mines Ministry shows that in the April-to-September period of the 2015/16 financial year, 48 567 cases of illegal mining were registered across the country. This compared to 97 149 in 2014/15, 88 689 in 2013/14 and 98 597 in 2012/13.