Vijay Kumar Garg, superintending engineer in the Water Resources Department, said a contractor, who was allotted the clusters in Ferozepur and Moga, two main sources of river bed and floodplain mining, was stopped from mining for non-payment of royalty since October 2021.
Though we stopped mining by him, we have already started the process to annul his contract and it will be allotted to a new contractor as per the state government policy, said Garg.
However, insiders in the sand business said while the contractor was stopped from mining sand and gravel in the last week of December 2021, the primary raw material for all kind of concrete construction was freely available in the local markets at Rs 65 to Rs 70 per quintal till the second week of March.
For this reason, buyers are forced to pay hiked price of Rs 90 to Rs 100 per quintal, which is only available here, said a dealer in construction material in Faridkot.
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