Beach sand valuable minerals
Wednesday, 23 December 2009
For last several years a multinational Australian-Singapore Premier Mineral Company has been carrying on exploration in Cox's Bazar-Teknaf sea beach and pressing our Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources for a mining licence and permission for export of beach sand valuable minerals ilmenite, rutile, garnet, monazite, zircon etc., on payments of some lump sum pittance amount of royalty to the government of Bangladesh.
We are happy to know and we welcome a news published in a national English daily on December 14, 2009, that our people's elected government had turned down the request of the multinational company.
Under any circumstances we cannot and we should not hand over our national wealth beach sand minerals to any foreign company or country. We congratulate our government on the right and bold decision.
Not only in Cox's Bazar-Teknaf but also in some other coastal areas like Qutubdia, Kuakata, Nijhumdip, Sonadia and Moheskhali vast deposits of above beach sand valuable minerals worth billions of dollars are found.
Over last three decades many news, reports, articles, letters and editorials have been published in our various national dailies and magazines on valuable beach sand minerals which I call 'Black-Gold' but all in vain.
It is true that exploration, extraction, collection, separation and purification of the minerals is a very tedious task and it involves heavy capital investment. This does not mean that we may abandon and throw away the valuable minerals to the Bay of Bengal.
The greatest problem with us is that 99.9 per cent people of our country know nothing and they are totally unaware and ignorant about the availability, importance and use of the valuable beach sand minerals.
Thousands of people visit Cox's Bazar every year but how many of them have ever seen or found the valuable minerals?
Believe it or not, in a particular season and time we may extract and collect some valuable minerals easily by indigenous means without any large capital investment. As a first step forward, we may impart some special training to our coastal people, start a cottage industry and export valuable minerals as a raw material and earn money. Then step by step, gradually and steadily we would be able to improve, develop and expand our beach sand mineral industry and earn more and more money for our people and country.
O. H. Kabir
6, Here Street
Wari, Dhaka-1203
We are happy to know and we welcome a news published in a national English daily on December 14, 2009, that our people's elected government had turned down the request of the multinational company.
Under any circumstances we cannot and we should not hand over our national wealth beach sand minerals to any foreign company or country. We congratulate our government on the right and bold decision.
Not only in Cox's Bazar-Teknaf but also in some other coastal areas like Qutubdia, Kuakata, Nijhumdip, Sonadia and Moheskhali vast deposits of above beach sand valuable minerals worth billions of dollars are found.
Over last three decades many news, reports, articles, letters and editorials have been published in our various national dailies and magazines on valuable beach sand minerals which I call 'Black-Gold' but all in vain.
It is true that exploration, extraction, collection, separation and purification of the minerals is a very tedious task and it involves heavy capital investment. This does not mean that we may abandon and throw away the valuable minerals to the Bay of Bengal.
The greatest problem with us is that 99.9 per cent people of our country know nothing and they are totally unaware and ignorant about the availability, importance and use of the valuable beach sand minerals.
Thousands of people visit Cox's Bazar every year but how many of them have ever seen or found the valuable minerals?
Believe it or not, in a particular season and time we may extract and collect some valuable minerals easily by indigenous means without any large capital investment. As a first step forward, we may impart some special training to our coastal people, start a cottage industry and export valuable minerals as a raw material and earn money. Then step by step, gradually and steadily we would be able to improve, develop and expand our beach sand mineral industry and earn more and more money for our people and country.
O. H. Kabir
6, Here Street
Wari, Dhaka-1203