DEAC (DEAC)

DEAC stands for District Expert Appraisal Committee, the technical advisory body that supports the District Environment Impact Assessment Authority (DEIAA) in reviewing Category B2 minor-mineral mining proposals under India's EIA Notification, 2006 (as amended in 2016). The DEAC was created to bring technical scrutiny closer to small mining operations that were previously bottlenecked at the State Expert Appraisal Committee (SEAC) level.

Composition and jurisdiction: A DEAC is constituted by the state government for each district, with a chairperson holding subject expertise and members drawn from environmental science, hydrology, mining engineering, ecology, and air-pollution control. The committee is administratively supported by the office of the District Magistrate. Like SEAC, the DEAC is a recommendatory body — it scrutinises the EIA report and Environmental Management Plan submitted by the project proponent, conducts site visits, may require a local public hearing under the public consultation framework where applicable, and issues a recommendation to the DEIAA on whether to grant Environmental Clearance and on what terms.

Scope of projects: The DEAC handles only Category B2 minor-mineral mining with a lease area up to 5 hectares — sand mining from river beds, small stone quarries, ordinary earth and clay extraction, kankar and morrum extraction for road work, lime kankar for construction. Anything larger or involving major minerals (limestone, iron ore, bauxite, coal) bypasses the DEAC and goes to SEAC or the central Expert Appraisal Committee.

Relevance to the recycling sector: Recycling project proponents almost never appear before a DEAC directly, because recycling facilities are not minor-mineral mining. The relevance is indirect — recycling operations that procure raw aggregates, fill material, or process additives (e.g., construction-and-demolition waste recyclers, concrete-block manufacturers using crushed stone) should verify that upstream quarry suppliers hold DEAC-recommended, DEIAA-issued Environmental Clearance documents. Audit trails for input materials are increasingly demanded under construction-and-demolition waste recycling guidelines issued by CPCB. Failure modes include relying on quarries operating beyond their lease boundary or outside their cleared production capacity, which can become a downstream traceability problem during pollution-control inspections.