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Last week, two mafia teams in northeast India exchanged gunfire—and torched a half dozen earthmover machines—in a battle over a pure useful resource. They weren’t battling over diamonds or oil: The teams had been each making an attempt to get their palms on sand.
Generally referred to as “the brand new gold,” sand is the second most exploited pure useful resource on the earth after recent water. The world makes use of about 50 billion tons annually—twice the quantity created yearly in nature—and demand continues to develop. On the present charge, consultants say we are going to run out of sand by 2050.
That’s as a result of sand goes into practically all the pieces folks construct: cement, concrete, roads, glass, and even the silicon chips in our laptops and telephones. “With out sand, there’s no fashionable civilization,” says Vince Beiser, creator of The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Remodeled Civilization. “Our cities are actually constructed out of sand: Each house, each workplace tower, each shopping center, each street is made with sand.”
A whole bunch of individuals have reportedly died in conflicts over sand.
The depth of demand, coupled with weak regulation, has made sand mining a simple goal for mafias, particularly in Cambodia, Kenya, Nigeria, and India. Virtually all sand mining operations in these international locations are unlawful, says Arpita Bisht, a researcher at The Worldwide Institute of Social Research, in The Netherlands, the place she research useful resource extraction. India seemingly has the very best incidence of mafia violence and illegality associated to sand extraction, she says, although it’s difficult to quantify due to the dearth of presidency monitoring and reporting. Journalists who report on sand mafia exercise typically put their lives in danger: In one of the vital excessive circumstances, a journalist was burnt to demise in 2019 for his constant reporting on sand mafia exercise in northern India.
“There’s not practically sufficient company accountability round it,” says Bisht. The dearth of oversight is partly attributable to the truth that, not like different mining sources similar to oil or coal, sand is comparatively straightforward to entry, and since the most important customers are quickly growing international locations with weak environmental insurance policies and enforcement. For instance, lower than 4 p.c of the 80 million tons of sand that Singapore imported from Cambodia between 2009 and 2019 was documented.
Sand would possibly look like an inexhaustible useful resource—in any case, our deserts are filled with it. However desert sand is simply too high-quality for use in building supplies. Although a number of the sand utilized by business comes from oceans, estuaries, and seashores, most of it derives from riverbeds. Generally miners will merely park a barge in the course of a river and use a large tube to suck up the sand like a straw and deposit it on their boats. However these sand straws typically suck up vegetation and creatures residing within the river, as properly, and destroy their habitats. The churning of the river water can stop daylight from reaching aquatic vegetation that want it and even choke resident fish, and the despair of riverbeds may cause erosion and kill vegetation alongside riverbanks and floodplains.
On the present charge, consultants say we are going to run out of sand by 2050.
In India’s Kulsi river, the already-endangered Gangetic river dolphin is dropping habitat to broad scale sand mining. Comparable ecological injury has been reported within the Mekong River, a boundary river in East Asia and Southeast Asia, the place huge sand extraction operations have upended a biodiverse river ecosystem, Bisht says.
Unlawful sand extraction additionally has huge social impacts. Harm to riverbeds can imperil native infrastructure similar to bridges, and air pollution from gear gas spills can destroy fisheries and threaten water for ingesting and for agriculture. Alongside part of the shoreline of Tamil Nadu in India, total villages have been deserted as a result of risk of abrasion. Mafias additionally threaten, intimidate, and abuse folks residing within the communities the place they work—not simply journalists, however farmers, NGO employees, group leaders, and even some native cops. A whole bunch of individuals have reportedly died in conflicts over sand in India, Kenya, and Nigeria.
For sand mining laborers, working circumstances are harmful. Drowning is an enormous threat. “Within the case of Vasai Creek in Mumbai,” Bisht says, “miners report that their fellow miners have typically bought buried in underwater sand dunes and easily by no means returned from sub-creek mining operations.”
Beiser factors out that although sand has constructed nearly all the pieces in fashionable life, few folks notice the extent of its use—or the violence kicked up by its extraction. 
Lead picture: Jade ThaiCatwalk / Shutterstock
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