Udupi: MLA, K Raghupati Bhat, and former minister, Jayaprakash Hegde, held meaningful talks with Ritesh Kumar Singh, joint secretary in the union department of forest and environment at New Delhi on Friday . It is gathered that Ritesh was positive in the matter of helping the locals to get sand.
He expressed the view that there is no strict rule that contracts in this respect should be allotted to only those contractors who were extracting sand before the year 2011. He said that people who have entered this field even thereafter can be considered.
Bhat said that the official also told him that state government's principal secretary in the department of mines, Rajendra Kataria, had kept him abreast of the sand problem affecting people of Udupi district and also about the protest held there.
