SHILLONG: There will not be any further relief to the coal miners before Christmas and New Year as the scheduled hearing by NGT on December 8 and 9 pertaining to the ban on coal mining has been deferred.
Informing this, an official source said on Thursday said that though no date has been fixed by NGT, the next hearing will be held only in last part of January.
It was on April 17 that the NGT in an interim order banned rat coal mining in State.
Though the immediate reason is yet to be known, one of the reasons seems to be that that the lawyer of the Government was not in position to produce witnesses in the case related to the death of 15 miners in 2012 during the scheduled hearing on December 8 and 9.
The agenda before the NGT during the two-day hearing was issues concerning rat coal mining in the whole state, pollution of Wah Umkhrah and Umshyrpi and the death of miners in Garo Hills.
During the last hearing on October, the NGT provided interim relief to the coal mine owners by allowing them to pay three equal installments of royalty to facilitate the transportation of extracted and assessed coal.
However, there is a stalemate as far as transportation of the coal as the state transport department is yet to install necessary weighbridges as suggested by NGT.
The delay in clearing the extracted coal resulted in rampant illegal export of coal across the state with the police making several arrests and seizure of trucks.
