SC panel slams Reddy brothers for illegal mining
08 Jan 2011
The Supreme Court-appointed central empowered committee has declared ''illegal'' the iron ore mining operations carried out by the politically powerful Reddy brothers in the Andhra Pradesh section of the Bellary reserve forest.
The committee suggested that three leases to the Reddys' Obulapuram Mining Corp be cancelled and exemplary costs recovered from them.
Last November, the forest bench of the court asked the committee to examine whether mining was going on in the forest area of the Bellary region in Anantapur district, comprising the border areas of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, and if so, what action should be taken to stop it.
Senior counsel Harish Salve presented the report to the bench of Chief Justice S H Kapadia and justices Aftab Alam and K S Radhakrishnan on Friday. It granted the Reddy brothers, G Karunakarana and G Janardhana, and others two weeks to file their response.
The committee said that besides the three leases of the Reddy brothers, the licence of Anantapur Mining Corp (AMC) should be cancelled, as its renewal was granted almost 17 years after it had expired.
The report narrates how the Reddy brothers got the licence transferred from the original lessee and how the licences were renewed up to 2017, without the period between 1984 and 1997 being calculated. This was clearly illegal.