Union Minister of State(IC) for Power, Coal, New & Renewable Energy and Mines , Piyush Goyal launched Mining surveillance system (MSS) today, 15th Oct in New Delhi at Ashoka Hotel. On this occasion Media across 14 states , through video conferencing link interacted with the Minister who explained in detail about the MSS. 

Ministry of Mines , through Indian Bureau of Mines (IBM) , has developed the MSS , in coordination with Bhaskaracharya Institute for Space Applications and Geo-informatics (BISAG) , Gandhinagar and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology(MEITY) , to use space technology for curbing illegal mining activity in the country.

Been, developed under the Digital India Programme , MSS is one of the first such surveillance systems developed in the world using space technology. The system checks a region of 500 meters around the existing mining lease boundary to search for any unusual activity which is likely to be illegal mining.

Automatic software leveraging image processing technology will generate automatic triggers of unauthorized activities. A remote sensing control Centre of IBM is being set up with the help of NRSC. These triggers will be studied at the Remote sensing Control Centre of IBM and then transmitted to the district level mining officials for field verification. A check for illegality in operation is conducted and reported back using a mobile app.

A user friendly mobile app has been created which will be used by these officials to submit compliance reports of their inspections. This mobile app also aims to establish a participative monitoring system where the citizens also can use this app and report unusual mining activity.

There are in total 3822 mining leases of major minerals in India , out of which , there are 1706 are working mines and 2116 are non working mines. Most of the working mines have been digitized. Efforts for completing the digitization of non-working mines are being made through the State Governments, which would be completed in 3 month’s time.

In Udaipur, Video conference was held in NIC video conferencing room at Collectorate by 2 pm today. Mines and Geology Director Dr. D.S. Maru, SME Anil Khamesara,  M S Paliwal with other senior officials from Mines & Geology, IBM officials Pushpendra Gaur and Manish Gupta with media persons were present on the occasion.

Contributed by: Hritu Sodhi