1978 (8) TMI 224

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....inerals (Regulation and Development') Act. 1957. The definition is as follows: "Minor mineral' means building stones, gravel? ordinary clay, ordinary sand other than sand used for prescribed purposes, and any other mineral which the Central Government may, by Notification in the official Gazette declare to be minor mineral ;" In exercise of the power conferred by Section 3(e) of the Act, the Central Government declared the following minerals to be minor minerals "Boulder, Shingle, Chalcedony pebbles used for ball mill purposes only, limeshell kanker and limestone used for lime burning, murrum, brick-earth, fuller's earth, bentonite road metal, reh-matti, slate and shale when used for building material;" The submission of the ....

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....of the earth by digging or quarrying. But this is not always so as pointed out by Chandrachud, J (as he then was) in Bhagwan Dass v. State of Uttar Pradesh,( [1976] 3 S.C.R. 869.) where the learned judge said (at p. 874): It was urged that the sand and gravel are deposited on the surface of the land and not under the surface of the soil and therefore they cannot be called minerals and equally so, any operation by which they are collected or gathered cannot properly be called a minerals operation. It is in the first place wrong to assume that mines and minerals must always be sub-soil and that there can be no minerals on the surface of the earth. Such an assumption is contrary to informed experience. In any case, the definition of mining ....

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....ersive of the grant would be the definition of minerals found in the Century Dictionary: as "any constituent of the earth's crust" ; and that of Beinbridge on Mines: "All the Substances stances that now form, or which once formed, a part of the solid body of the earth". Nor do we approximate much more closely to the meaning of the word by treating minerals as substances which are ""mined"" as distinguished from those are "quarried", since many valuable deposits of gold, copper, iron, and coal lie upon or near the surface of the earth, and some of the most valuable building stone, such for instance, as the Caen stone in France, is excavated from mines running far beneath the surface. This distinction between under ground mines and open worki....