Dhaka, Nov 9 (bdnews24.com) — The government has approved a compensation package for people affected by the Barapukuria coal mine, Dinajpur.
The Tk 1.91 billion fund will be used to acquire 646 acres of the country's lone functioning coal mine. It employs shaft mining method.
The Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (ECNEC) at its Tuesday's meeting chaired by the prime minister approved the project.
The long-sought demand for compensation comes after substantial subsidence and damages to arable land in the area due to the mining operations.
Planning minister A K Khandker after the meeting said, "The affected people on the Barapukuria coal mine area of 6 square kilometres will be relocated." But he could not give an idea of the number of affected people.
The compensation package project to be implemented in a period of July 2010 to Dec 2011 will be funded by the government.
An inter-ministerial meeting on Mar 11 discussed the proposal to acquire the land around the mine, following repeated calls from locals for compensation.
The meeting said it would consider rehabilitating 1,300 affected families of Barapukuria by acquiring their land belonging to seven villages in four phases between 2010 and 2013.
However, on September 8 this year, the state minister for land, also a local MP, Mostafizur Rahman Fizar, in a meeting with the locals made a verbal offer. Arable land was priced at Tk 2 million per acre (1 acre = 100 decimals). Residential and commercial land was priced at Tk 2.5 million.
This is inconsistent with the 10-point agreement between the government and the locals, which had fixed the price at Tk 4 million per acre.
Some people claim that they usually felt shakes, like earthquakes, when dynamites are set off in the mine and sought compensation besides those affected directly.
The matter of compensation has been prolonged since land subsidence was projected to be non-existent with 15 years of the mine operations.
Locals said top-ranking Petrobangla officials signed a memorandum of understanding on May 15 last year for Tk 35 lakh per acre to recompense the locals and had assured them of meeting all their demands by December.
But, they said, the chairman of state-run Petrobangla, which owns the mine, at a meeting with the locals on Jan 17, asked for another month and again, on Feb 19, requested them to wait until July.
Petrobangla chief Hossain Mansur had earlier told bdnews24.com that the method that prime minister Sheikh Hasina had asked for, was not accurate.
Hasina ordered officials concerned to calculated land prices at the same rate as that proposed for land acquisition for the proposed Padma Bridge accounting for land related laws.
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