Bhubaneswar: The state government will incorporate District Mineral Fund (DMF) projects with Integrated Mines and Minerals Management System (i3MS) to bring transparency and ensure close monitoring of projects.
This decision was taken at a high-level meeting under the chairmanship of Chief Secretary Aditya Prasad Padhi at the Secretariat here. The Steel and Mines department has devised and successfully implemented the i3MS, which was acknowledged at the national level as a best practice of IT intervention in governance.
With the incorporation of the DMF projects with i3MS, the government will be able to track and monitor projects from the state headquarters. The Chief Secretary has asked the planning and convergence department to monitor DMF projects through this software. A technical committee was also formed to work out the scope of this integration.
Following the recommendation of the Central Coordination-cum-Empowered Committee of the ministry of mines, states like Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh have developed their systems in line with i3MS of Orissa, while Punjab and Bihar are also in contact with the state for development of a similar project.
The state government has launched i3MS in 2012 with a five-year road map. The mobile phone application has also been incorporated in the system and 306 mobile phones of the mining, police, forest officials, along with members of the state-level enforcement squad, have been integrated with the system to check illegal transportation of minerals.
Meanwhile, the system has been integrated with all weigh bridges for cross checking of the quantum of minerals being transported, official sources said.
A GPS tracking system of mineral-carrying vehicles has been developed in the software which enables the regulators to monitor an end-to-end mineral transaction. At present, the mineral transportation is allowed only through GPS-equipped vehicles.
The budget for the entire project of i3MS was estimated around `155 crore to be spent over five years from 2017 to 2021. The project was planned on a self-sustaining mode with introduction of only one rupee of user fee for one tonne of mineral. Considering the present trend of mineral transaction, `35 crore was expected to be collected as user fees each year, the sources said.
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