SP leader Gayatri Prajapati under lens over sand mining

New Delhi: Fresh trouble seems to be brewing for former mining minister of Uttar Pradesh and senior Samajwadi Party leader Gayatri Prajapati as the CBI on Thursday registered five preliminary enquirers (PEs) to probe illegal sand mining in five districts — Shamli, Hami-rpur, Fatehpur, Siddartha Nagar and Deoria — in the state. Although enquiries have been registered against unknown officials of the district administration and mining department of the state government, role of former state mining minister is also under the scanner of the agency. 

Sources said, “Enquiries have been initiated following the direction of the Allahabad high court. The agency has sent a team of its officials Lucknow to collect relevant documents from the mining department of the state government.” Sources did not rule out the possibility of probing the role of former state mining minister as part of CBI’s investigations into the enquiries. Prajapati, who is contesting as an SP candidate from Amethi Assembly constituency where polls are over, is also wanted by the UP police in multiple cases. The Uttar Pradesh police had lodged an FIR against Prajapati, who is absconding, on the Supreme Court’s order for his alleged roles in separate cases of gangrape and an attempt to rape another woman and her minor daughter.

Taking a grim view of illegal mining in UP, the Allahabad high court in July 2016 directed the CBI to investigate the matter across the state, including the role of government officials in facilitating the same. It had passed the order of CBI inquiry while hearing a public interest litigation filed by Vijay Kumar Dwivedi and others who had alleged that mining leases of a number of lessees had been “unlawfully extended” in the state after the same had expired in 2012.

The court had observed that the claim made in affidavits filed by district magistrates across the state that no illegal mining was taking place in their areas of jurisdiction was “false”.