Rachakonda Police Arrests Six For Sand Smuggling

Hyderabad: Rachakonda Police Special Operations Team along with the Ghatkesar police busted an illegal sand smuggling racket and arrested six members here late on Sunday. The gang was smuggling sand from a site on the outskirts of Malyala village of Mulugu district by fabricating waybills or transit passes allegedly in nexus with some outsourcing employees of the Telangana State Mineral Development Corporation.

#Sand_Mafia_Gang_Busted pic.twitter.com/njDMiboMjW

— Rachakonda Police (@RachakondaCop) July 20, 2020

The arrested persons were identified as K.Rajashekar, B.Kiran Kumar, P.Naveen Kumar, K.Mallikarjun, M.Bhargav and G.Laxman.

The existing procedure to transport the sand is to get an online sand order receipt from the official website’s Sand Sales Management and Monitoring System, which the customer has to produce before the on-duty Sand Reach officer at the sand reach concerned. The officer has to verify the receipt online and allow the vehicle inside the sand reach. After loading the sand in such vehicles, the officer collects the order receipt and issues a transit pass to that vehicle clearly mentioning the delivery address with the approximate delivery time.

Recently, two persons Madhukar and Ramakrishna were caught for illegally transporting. Based on their confession, the other suspects were arrested.

“Usually, the TSMDC deputes one of their cadres as Sand Reach assistants who shall be present at the sand reach, monitor the process of lifting the sand to the permitted vehicles and submit the details to the competent authority. But, by following the guidelines of TSMDC, the contractors were not getting huge profits as they expected. So they began searching for alternative sources for getting easy money by transporting sand illegally,” said Rachakonda Commissioner Mahesh Bhagwat said.

According to the police, the gang plotted to illegally transport sand by forging fake transit passes in consultation with the on duty employees of TSMDC. Police suspect on an average, nearly 30 trucks were illegally loading sand in such illegal manner and that the gang had so far allowed nearly 500 trucks for illegal transportation of sand from the Malyala sand reach.