The Central Mine Planning and Designing Institute (CMPDI), a Coal India subsidiary announced the use of satellite based surveillance system to monitor mining and land reclamation activities for all opencast mining projects under the CIL command area.
This initiative will ensure proper vegetation in abandoned coalmines and enable assessment of backfill area and monitoring of social forestry plans across the CIL command zone.
The institute is mapping coalmines across the country through satellites for the purpose. This will also ascertain the impact of coalmining and associated industrial activities on environment.
CMPDI in its the first phase, plans to take up 171 coalmining projects for satellite surveillance against their claims of land reclamation.
Singrauli, Talcher, Raniganj, Korba and Wardha valley coalfields are some of the areas where manual studies were carried out which revealed substantial increase in vegetation cover around the coalmines.
The Forest department has alleged serious anomalies in plantation on wasteland and abandoned mining area and asked for a high-level enquiry.
The institute plans to prepare a complete assessment of the entire project areas in the next couple of months.
