Uncontrolled sand mining led to Kerala flood

“The sand and gravel are one of the most important construction materials. Ensuring their availability is vital for the development of the infrastructure in the country.” So says a 2016 report of the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. Unfortunately, sand is also essential for a river. Sand regulates a river’s flow, floodplains store water, recharge ground water, filter pollutants, allows aquatic life to thrive. When sand is taken out, water tables sink, rivers dry up, change course, banks collapse, floodplains get pitted with ponds, silt chokes rivers, vegetation and habitats get destroyed, dust pollution kicks in. India has no record of the status of sand sources in a district, says the Ministry of Environment report. No data, too, on the demand or consumption of sand in India (although going by the spiraling rise of cement use in the last 20 years — from 1.37 billion tonnes in 1994 to 4.8 billion tonnes in 2016, one can make a guess). There is no estimate of permissible volume that can be extracted from a river, upstream or downstream, or height of a riverbed below which mining cannot occur; no bar on harmful extraction methods, depth of mining or minimising harmful effects; no long-term monitoring programme or annual status reports; no mandate on reclamation of river banks and beds. And, more than anything, there is no effort to move towards sand substitutes: quarry dust, incinerator ash, desert sand, manufactured sand, waste from steel industry and thermal power plants etc. With skyrocketing demand, thanks to rapid urbanisation, the world is fast running out of sand. That makes its extraction extremely profitable. The real danger, however, is illegal mining, worked through the sand mafia, real estate gangs, fake land registration goons and operators who exploit sand and rock resources. Kerala's economy has been changing for a while, with share of the secondary sector increasing exponentially in the Gross State Domestic Product. The biggest driver of this change is an unprecedented construction boom. And this has led to rising demands for sand. Yet the state’s rivers are small in size: less than 150km in length, with a catchment area of not more than 6200km and limited sand reserve. This has led to intensive and indiscriminate mining from small deposits of sand, damaging river ecosystems — as the recent floods prove.