The hearing at the Madras High Court of the huge batch of cases related to alleged illegal mining of beach sand minerals has taken an interesting turn, with garnet mining baron S. Vaikundarajan of V.V. Minerals contending that the scope of a suo motu public interest litigation petition taken up by the court in 2015 should be confined to the extraction of atomic mineral monazite from the beach sand, and not beyond that.
The plea was made before a Division Bench of Justices M. Sathyanarayanan and N. Seshasayee, who have been hearing the cases at regular intervals since July 9, 2018. Before that, the cases were heard by different benches of the court. The complex issues involved in the case had led to a marathon hearing with amicus curiae V. Suresh himself having taken several hours to make his submissions on a detailed study conducted by him.
‘Holistic view’
When the amicus curiae was half way through his arguments, advocate Srinath Sridevan, representing Mr. Vaikundarajan, contended that the scope of the suo motu PIL pertained only to monazite. The contention was opposed by Mr. Suresh, who said the intent behind the court taking up the issue suo motu was to take a holistic view on illegal mining of all kinds of minerals from beach sand.
Feeling that there was a necessity to pass a judicial order on the issue, the judges traced the history of the case since 2015, when the first Division Bench led by the then Chief Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul had converted a PIL petition filed by an individual into a suo motu case and held that the scope of the case was to inquire into illegal activities related to extraction and transportation of all kinds of beach sand minerals. The judges also directed the High Court Registry to issue certified copies of their order to the parties concerned so that they could take it on appeal before the Supreme Court if they preferred to do so. They posted the batch of cases for further hearing on Wednesday.
