SHILLONG: The Meghalaya Commercial Truck Owners and Operators Association has asked the State Government to make immediate arrangement for weighing of coal after the Supreme Court on Thursday issued notice and decided to hear the case again on Monday following the hearing of the civil appeal filed by one local organization from West Khasi Hills.
MCTOOA president Augustine Shanpru said that in the hearing, state counsel Ranjan Mukherjee also supported the petitioner’s plea and submitted to the apex court that about 30 lakhs metric tonnes of the extracted coal is still lying in the open field and if transportation is allowed, state government will get revenue from the royalty to be collected from it.
Shanpru said that in every likelihood, the transportation might be permitted for another period of 3 months starting from Monday. According to Shanpru, it was the Comptroller Auditor General’s (CAG) report which pointed out that that state is losing revenue due to negligence of the transport department on weighbridges.
He however, said that from June 8, the commissioner of transport has sealed all the existing weighbridges in the state which has led to a large scale smuggling of minerals from the state and under payment of royalty, cess and taxes to the government due to the action of the commissioner of transport.
He said that the government is losing several crores of rupees daily due to under-payment of taxes, cess and royalty by transporters with the absence of weighbridges.
“Is the CAG going to turn a blind eye on this and not going to fix responsibility on any officials for causing such heavy loss of revenue due to their action,” he said.
