Sand: The Hardest Mineral to Police

In one line

The world uses more sand than any other solid material after water, a river makes it slowly and a truck removes it in minutes, and the law arrives after the lorry has gone.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: ordinary sand is a minor mineral under section 3(e) of the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957, so by section 14 the central grant machinery does not apply and the State makes the rules under section 15; since Deepak Kumar v. State of Haryana, AIR 2012 SC 1386, a lease of a minor mineral including a renewal, even below five hectares, requires environmental clearance; the Sustainable Sand Mining Management Guidelines require a district survey report and a replenishment study; and enforcement rests on section 4(1A), transport and storage, and on the rules a State makes under section 23C.

Why sand is different

It is the second most consumed material on earth after water, because concrete is two-thirds sand and gravel by volume, and every road, building, dam and canal in the country is made of it.

Desert sand will not do. Wind-blown grains are rounded and smooth and will not bind in concrete. What construction needs is angular grains, and those are made by water, in riverbeds and floodplains. So a country with a desert can still be short of sand.

It is made slowly and taken quickly. A river delivers sand to a reach over a season. A single tipper removes ten tonnes in twenty minutes.

And it is low-value and high-volume, so the economics reward taking it from the nearest reach at night rather than the licensed reach two districts away. That combination, high demand, slow supply, low value and easy access, is what makes sand the mineral illegal mining is really about.

What over-extraction does

It lowers the bed of the river, and with it the water table of the banks, which is why section 35 of the Maharashtra Groundwater (Development and Management) Act, 2009, allows sand mining to be regulated or prohibited. The sand in a bed is the aquifer's storage; remove it and the wells alongside fall.

It undermines structures. A lowered bed exposes the foundations of bridges, weirs and embankments, and bridge collapses attributable to sand extraction upstream and downstream are a recurring Indian event.

It destroys the riparian habitat and the fishery, because the bed material is where the invertebrates and the fish eggs are.

It increases salinity intrusion in a coastal reach, because a deepened channel lets the tide travel further inland.

And it changes the course of the river, which is a hazard to the fields and the villages on the bank.