Free sand policy in AP from today

Vijayawada: With an aim to give boost to construction activity in the state, the Andhra Pradesh government has decided to launch new free sand policy in Andhra Pradesh from Monday. Under the policy, the users can get free sand by paying online loading and seigniorage charges straight from the depots.

Announcing this, Minister for Excise, Mines and Geology Kollu Ravindra on Sunday said the operational charges would vary from district to district depending upon the distance between the sand reaches and the depots. He said for the present only B-1 category reaches are operational. No equipment is used in these reaches and all operations are done manually.

He said a committee headed by the District Collector and officials of the Mines department will fix the operational charges. Ravindra said 43 lakh metric tons of sand is available at the reaches. He said the state government has set the target of extracting one lakh metric tons of sand from the rivers and other places. The minister said each person can get up to maximum of 20 metric tons of sand at a time by producing the Aadhar card and mobile number. Arrangements are made for digital payments with apps like PhonePay, Google pay. Ward and village secretaries will assist the consumers to get the sand on payment of nominal charges from the stock points.

Meanwhile, Chief Secretary Neerab Kumar Prasad held a video conference with the District Collectors and Mines officials and explained to them regarding implementation of the free sand policy and the measures they need to take to ensure that it was done in a transparent manner.

It is learnt that Pratima Infra, JCKC representatives who were mining sand with the help of machinery till now were also present in the videoconference and informed the CS that they had handed over all the sand reaches which were under their control to the Mines department.