These satellite images of Indian rivers highlight environmental impacts of sand mining

Sand is the second most exploited resource after water and the most mined material globally, as per the UN Environment Programme. Its extraction from riverbeds is often done without regard to the adverse impact on natural river ecology.

In India, sand mining grew as a large and, in many cases, illegal industry after the rapid urbanisation brought on by the economic liberalisation in the 1990s. While the country has sand mining laws in place, a lack of proper implementation and monitoring means that the riverbeds are constantly threatened.

Pulaha Roy, along with Siddharth Agarwal and Kumar Anirvan, researchers with Kolkata-based non-profit Veditum India Foundation’s sand mining platform, analyses satellite images of rivers across India to highlight the massive scale of ecological degradation due to sand mining and the open violation of mining laws.

This first appeared in Down To Earth magazine (April16-30, 2023)

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