Editor’s note: This blog has been written by Aishani Goswami and Rhea Lopez, associates at Veditum India Foundation (with a focus on our India Sand Watch project), from their experience on a field visit to River Chambal and subsequently organising events in Delhi in March 2024. The team usually works remotely, so this was also an opportunity for us to get to know each other better.
The writing below is interspersed with quotes from Aishani & Rhea.
Cover image: Aishani and Rhea share a light moment on the banks of the Chambal
On the Mahakaushal Express (Delhi to Dhaulpur)
The Veditum team met at the Nizamuddin Railway Station – people who we ‘met’ over zoom calls nearly every weekday over the preceding few months. We got to know each other ‘in-person’ – our chai preferences and favourite train stations – on the train to Dhaulpur, Rajasthan, over the sounds of our co-passengers and persistent offers of ‘Agra ka mashoor petha.’
Dhaulpur was loud and chaotic, more so at night when wedding music blared from baraats outside our windows, and tractors and trucks rumbled down the highway. We spent the following days along the Chambal river, interacting with our partners from the Wildlife Conservation Trust (WCT), looking for crocodiles and birds and, of course, signs of sand-mining along the river. Our visit was part of Veditum’s project – India Sand Watch.
India Sand Watch has been designed to bring a stop to illegal and unsustainable sand mining in India’s rivers. The project has an open-data platform at its heart, enabling collection, annotation & archiving of data related to sand mining in India. Powered by our data platform, we’re working with collaborators and building capacity for different actors to bring accountability in this sector.
Checkout the platform here: India Sand Watch
Along the Chambal
The National Chambal Sanctuary (NCS) is a protected area that runs along the river Chambal for about 600kms, across the states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.
In December 2021, the Madhya Pradesh government proposed the denotification of parts of the sanctuary within the state, with the intention of legalizing sand mining on these stretches of the river. Although the stated objective is to reduce illegal mining by allowing controlled mining activity, not everyone is convinced. Conservation researchers working on the Chambal, including our partners at WCT, have expressed concern that the action would contrarily increase mining activity on the river, posing a significant risk to the nesting, breeding and basking sites of many of the riverine fauna.
In response to this proposed denotification, we collaborated with the WCT team to host a data sprint, – focused on the Chambal river, in January 2024. This sprint saw about 40 folks spending over 6 hours with us – mapping the river, digitising reports, and talking about the many lives intertwined with the river. It had left us curious about what to expect on our visit to the region.
At the Dhaulpur-Morena bridge, there was little to indicate that we were within a Protected Area, except for a few jetties on the Chambal offering boat safaris. Despite its critical position as a protected habitat for endangered gharial and river dolphins, and a host of resident and migratory birds, human activity along the river is extensive. Farms and settlements run along the river’s edge, bridges, irrigation systems and intake wells dot the riverscape, and the banks are mined heavily for sand.
Rhea | I think a lot of people, myself included, get into conservation because they love wild spaces and want to spend time in forests and along rivers that feel less impacted by human activity than the cities and towns that we’re used to. On the Chambal, it’s impossible to ignore human interference, and obvious ongoing damage to the river ecosystem – people are constantly using and interacting with the river and its wildlife. Tour boats disturb basking gharial, turtles surface amidst an island of trash, huge bee hives hanging under towering intake wells, the mechanical roaring and blaring autotune music from sand mining activity drowns out the calls of nesting birds. It isn’t really what I dreamt up as a field site for an ecologist, but it drove home the importance and urgency of working in less-appealing systems, and of finding a balance between human life and development, and the survival of wildlife and the natural world.
Aishani | The riverbank characteristics of River Chambal reminded me of River Sindh, from when I walked along the river during the Moving Upstream fellowship. Though River Chambal is wider than River Sindh, the alluvial ravines on the Chambal’s river bank were memory jogging, especially the ones with perpendicular edges that look like they have been sliced sharply.
Sand mining is not allowed within the National Chambal Sanctuary which is a protected area, and yet illegal sand mining takes place (View this report on India Sand Watch).
Tarun Nair from WCT showed us around, and we visited sites which had active mining and others heavily scarred by very recent mining activity, the river bed parched and cracked, criss-crossed by deep tyre tracks, and riddled with deep pits.
We sought permission to assist with fieldwork involving bathymetric measurements and nest site characteristics. While expertly spotting crocodiles where we only saw rocks, Tarun showed us a diversity of wildlife that lives and depends on the river and the sediment it carries – from muggers and turtles to birds and foxes. The ravines along the Chambal, he explained, are also home to hyena, caracals, pangolins, desert foxes, honey badgers, and the river is also the habitat of the Gangetic river dolphin. That said, he cautioned, spotting these animals in such human-disturbed areas, was unlikely.
List of wildlife sightings on the trip:
- Mugger Crocodile
- Gharial
- Indian Skimmer
- Desert Fox
- LOTS of mayflies (mayflies)
- Softshell turtles
- Three-striped roof turtle
- Bonelli’s Eagle + chicks
- Crag marten nests
- Pallas’ gull
- Egrets
- Black-winged stilt
- Nilgai
- Black-shouldered kite
- Little tern
- Ruddy shelducks
- Mullet
Rhea | Learning about the lives supported by the river was reminiscent of excursions I took during my Masters, especially familiar since Tarun was a resource person on our Freshwater Ecology field trip as well. With the added perspective from working on sand mining with Veditum, in particular the experience of the Chambal data sprint, Tarun’s amazing ability to spot crocodiles and identify birds is tainted with the knowledge he shares of how threatened this habitat is by human activity. It added a new depth to watching tractors laden with sand make their way through the ravaged riverbed, as Tarun pointed at entire sandbanks (formerly prime gharial nesting sites) disappearing because of the mining.
At one location, we crossed the river on a local ferry, from the Rajasthan side to Madhya Pradesh. As a river traversing three states – acting as the interstate border for large parts, the Chambal occupies a unique geographical and social space. The political and legal implications of this tri-state position are also complex – state laws and jurisdiction change across the river. If one state bans or allows sand mining activity, this decision may not apply to the opposite bank of the river, which might fall in the neighbouring state. The river, unaware of these boundaries, snakes through these parts, connecting the states far beyond its banks through its larger watershed.
While in Dhaulpur, we also met up with Suraj and Ando, our collaborators and friends from UC Berkley who have built Sand Mining Watch – a set of open-source tools which enables the production of high-resolution, real-time maps of sand mining activity.
Their model uses knowledge and data from the India Sand Watch project for training, and on this trip we even did ground truthing work of predictions made by their model. It’s exciting to watch the work in action, and know that the platform contributes to it; especially while witnessing the damage done by rampant sand mining and learning about the people, species and ecosystems that are affected by it.
Aishani | Learning from field visits: As an architect turned water researcher, I have very little understanding of wildlife. When we visited the Chambal, it was the first time I saw gharials. And without the company I had during the visit, I would have missed spotting and knowing about all the birds, turtles, gharials and crocodiles. During a conversation in the context of injuries caused to humans by crocodiles, Tarun mentioned that crocodiles rarely attack humans unless they or their habitat is disturbed. Something that I learnt from Rhea and take back is that human-wildlife conflicts are often in fact reflections of human-human conflicts.
A Sunday Sprint in Delhi
Back in Delhi, we set up for our first in-person data sprint! The Chambal Data Sprint in January was virtual, and we had a great time on Zoom collectively finding and digitising reports to the India Sand Watch platform. This time though, we were focussing on multiple states of North India.
The energy of the in-person sprint was incredible! The constant clatter of keyboards along with our playlist of songs collected from the participants was occasionally interrupted by people chatting about things they had found, as they connected over their mutual love and work for rivers in India.
We were initially concerned about, and then happily surprised by the number of people that showed up on a Sunday, bringing palpable enthusiasm to connect, learn and digitise data for a common cause! Participants stayed on, actively working till the end of the day, some even digitising reports well into the lunch and tea breaks.
The 150+ reports we ended the day with, the friends we made, and the feedback we got from the participants was a great reminder of how motivating it is for people to learn about sand mining and its impacts on river systems and communities close to home.
What also got reaffirmed was the importance of creating a space for experiential learning, collective action and citizen science around daunting ecological challenges like sand mining.
Conversations in classrooms
Talks at TERI SAS and IIT Delhi
We wrapped up the trip to Delhi with a series of interactions with faculty and students at the TERI School of Advanced Studies (TERI SAS) and the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT Delhi). This was the first time we were seeing some of Sid’s presentations about rivers and the inspiration behind Veditum. (Sid aka Siddharth is the founder of Veditum)
The talk at TERI SAS by Siddharth was an introduction to Veditum, with a focus on ‘Environmental accountability around sand mining’, discussing the environmental, social, financial and infrastructural losses due to unsustainable sand mining. We spoke about the role and possibilities of our open-data project India Sand Watch, in creating an evidence trail for accountability.
As part of the session, our collaborators Ando and Suraj from UC-Berkeley introduced their project Sand Mining Watch.
It was amazing to see students bursting with thoughts and curious questions at the end, and faculty enthusiastically expressing interest in continuing to work together.
Aishani | It was a delight and a rewarding experience to reconnect with Prof. Ranjana, Prof. Fawzia, and Prof. Kansal at TERI SAS who taught me when I was a student there, and to organize an interaction session at my alma mater. As a student, I remember a few talks I attended which left an imprint on me, on what a river is and the multitudes of ways to look at rivers and river flows. Now, coming back to the university as an alumnus and being a part of delivering a talk to the current students was a fulfilling experience. I hope that our talk and interaction left the students with some thoughts and questions to take back.
The School of Public Policy at IIT-Delhi, our partners on the most recent iteration of the Moving Upstream Fellowship, hosted us on their campus for a presentation about rivers and the links between evidence, policy and accountability. Although the students were initially quiet, the visuals of exploited riverbeds, and learning about the associated damage to livelihoods and ecosystems, sparked thoughts and deeper conversations among those in attendance.
We discussed the perils of river sand mining, alternatives to sand, myopic policymaking, and the role of India Sand Watch in creating accountability in an often illegal, unregulated and violent sector.
The team then returned back to their home bases, and we’re back to working online!
Hope you enjoyed reading through. You can find out more about the Chambal field visit, Delhi Data Sprint, our engagements at IIT-Delhi and TERI-SAS, and more, in the upcoming Veditum newsletter.
Subscribe to the newsletter at this link – veditum.substack.com, and stay tuned!
Rhea is an Associate with the Veditum India Foundation. She is a conservation ecologist, who works with river communities and wildlife – conducting research, contributing to policy work and outreach, and collecting stories of the many lives along the river. She can be reached at rhealopez@veditum.org
Aishani is an Associate at Veditum India Foundation. She is an architect and water researcher and has worked in the development sector for over 4 years. She was also one of the fellows of the Moving Upstream: Sindh fellowship project. She can be reached at aishani@veditum.org
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