Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy on Friday directed officers to take immediate steps to see that sand was available to people without difficulty. He was chairing a district-level review meeting at the Zilla Panchayat Hall, here.
Mr. Kumaraswamy said sand should be easily available to those who wanted to build their houses.
The district administration should provide opportunity for sand extraction to the extractors, who extracted it in the traditional way. Mechanized sand extraction should not be allowed.
The sand dunes should be identified after a report with regard to it was received from the experts from NITK- Surathkal. A high-level meeting would be called in Bengaluru soon deal with the problem of sand extraction in the coastal districts, he said.
K. Raghupati Bhat, Udupi MLA, said people were suffering a lot due to sand shortage in the district.
This problem could be solved only through simplification of rules. The government should help the traditional sand extractors in the district, he said.
V. Sunil Kumar, Karkala MLA, said that the works under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act Scheme were getting delayed under the pretext of social audit. With the result, the gram panchayats were hesitating to implement the NREGA scheme. The norms with regard to the NREGA scheme should be simplified, he said.
Halady Srinivas Shetty, Kundapur MLA, said many beneficiaries under the Anila Bhagya scheme were unable to get gas connections. But their ration cards showed that they had got them. This had made them ineligible to get kerosene, he said.