The Madras High Court on Friday advised the State government not to consider a public interest litigation (PIL) petition pending in the court since 2014 in connection with the multi-crore granite quarry scam in Madurai district as an adversarial litigation and instead utilise it as an opportunity to streamline the process and curb illegalities in the future.
A Division Bench of Justices T.S. Sivagnanam and G. Jayachandran told Government Pleader T.N. Rajagopalan that the government could not deny large scale illicit quarrying having taken place in Madurai since the district administration itself had filed numerous private complaints before the judicial magistrate in Melur complaining about illegal quarrying.
Therefore, it would be better for the government to come up with checkpoints to ensure such illegalities do not take place any further, the judges said after weeding out many connected writ petitions that had been tagged to the main case. They decided to take up the latter for final hearing on Tuesday when Advocate General Vijay Narayan would lead the arguments for the State.
‘Scientifically sound report’
Observing that they had also gone through the report filed by IAS officer U. Sagayam, who had been appointed as a Legal Commissioner by the court to inspect the quarries, the judges said that the report was scientifically sound since the officer had taken the assistance of geologists too apart from being assisted by revenue officials such as a retired tahsildar.
They refused to accept the contention of an association of granite quarry owners that the report was unscientific. It was activist ‘Traffic’ K.R. Ramaswamy who had filed the PIL petition seeking a direction to the Centre as well as the State Government to launch prosecution against all mining firms that had indulged in illicit mining activities.
On September 11, 2014, the first Division Bench comprising the then Chief Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Justice M. Sathyanarayanan had appointed Mr. Sagayam as Legal Commissioner/Special Officer to probe the issue in detail and submit a report. He submitted his report along with its errata on November 23, 2015 and January 4, 2016 respectively.
Thereafter, the incumbent Chief Justice Indira Banerjee had constituted a special Division Bench led by Mr. Justice Sivagnanam to hear the case and his Bench relieved Mr. Sagayam from the role of Legal Commissioner last month before deciding to hear the main case on the basis of his report and other materials before the court.
