India’s sand mafia - update II

Two mafia groups in northeast India exchanged gunfire, and torched a half dozen machines of each other, in an increasingly violent war over a natural resource. They aren’t battling over diamonds or oil: they want sand and they will kill for it. Intense demand, coupled with weak regulation, has made sand mining an easy target for criminals, especially in Cambodia, Kenya, Nigeria, and India.

The Enforcement Directorate cracked down on illegal sand mining in the Southern state of Tamil Nadu. The agency raided more than 25 locations across the state over money laundering and tax evasion. Sand is illegally extracted from riverbeds, causing environmental damage. It is then sold with no taxes being paid to the state. Sand miners S Ramachandran and ‘Dindigul’ Rathinam are being probed, as are 10 locations owned by jailed minister V Senthil Balaji.The enforcement case was registered without informing the corrupt Tamil Nadu Police.

300 trucks a day take their fill of sand at a mine on the Sone River in Bihar state.

The driver of an illegal sand-laden truck tried to run over an inspector. In another incident a mining inspector and cops narrowly escaped an attack by a gang of sand mafia in Bihar's Buxar district. Prices are up sharply and sand mining is becoming ever more profitable. Sand is a lucrative commodity in India. It fuels a black market for the illegal strip-mining of waterways. India’s construction boom helps keep the sand mining frontier lawless. Sand miners kill those who oppose them. Our modern world is built on sand: concrete, paved roads, ceramics, metallurgy, petroleum fracking, even the glass on smart phones. River sand is best: desert sand is too rounded to serve as industrial binding agents, and marine sand is corrosive.

Sand has become so valuable that it is shipped huge distances. Australia sends sand to Arabia for land reclamation. China is a sand glutton. The world uses 50 billion tonnes of sand every year — more than any other natural resource, except water. India’s sand mafia is well established. It is said the police cut of royalties inflates the price of river sands from 15k rupees ($150) a truckload to between 40k and 80k rupees.

A scarcity of sand, and efforts to regulate sand mining, have spawned illegal trade and black markets. The demand for sand is so intense in some places that gangs have taken over the trade completely.