Shillong, July 6: Even as the High Court continue to slam the government’s failure to act on the rampant illegal coal mining activities in the state, Meghalaya chief minister Conrad K Sangma on Thursday said that the people of the state needs to find an alternate forms of livelihood.

He said the state have been engaged in this form of mining for last 200 years and livelihood is based around that and unless and until alternate forms of livelihood don’t come up people will keep going back to those activities.

He made the comments while interacting with the media after attending the inaugural function of the conference on Nature Solves.

CM Conrad’s comment comes days after NGT banned illegal coal mining and transportation in the state in 2014.

“It is not possible for the administration to completely stop everything, in the sense that we cannot go and move from one side to another, but efforts are on. So therefore the only long term solution to put an end to such activities is having a legal policy and that has been done, the scientific mining has been introduced . The other option is to create more alternative for livelihood,” said Meghalaya chief minister.

When asked if the NGT ban was inhuman, Sangma said that hindsight if you look at the entire process NGT did what was their mandate.

“But at the end of the day all I’m saying is all of these kind of decisions need to be taken in the form of a transition aspect. So the way I would have looked at it is , I would see five years as a period where we stop certain activities, another five years to transit into new technology and another five years to stop everything completely. So you have to allow the transition to take place in a justified manner and that’s what we felt was missing to some extent. It was very sudden for people, they woke up next morning and what they’ve been doing for 200 years they were told that they can no longer do it. There are implications and challenges of it. And that’s what we have been seeing the trickle effects of that in the last 10 years,” Sangma added.

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