Where there is a river, there is sand. Called a minor mineral, it fulfils a major requirement of the booming construction industry. No wonder, many senior bureaucrats and politicians in power are hand-in-glove with local contractors to make huge gains from illegal sand mining. Even as the exchequer suffers, little attention is given to the long-lasting scars sand mining leaves on ecology. Communities fight on the river banks and in courts to keep sand reserves from getting exhausted. Kumar Sambhav Shrivastava travelled to Madhya Pradesh, Anupam Chakravartty to Punjab, M Suchitra to Andhra Pradesh and Ashwin Aghor to Karnataka to examine the murky business of sand mining