What Sand mining and the Godfather have in common – a reflection from our Madhya Pradesh Data Sprint
The complexity of sand mining in India – its politics, secrecy and violence – almost reads like the script of The Godfather. This was a parallel drawn by one of our participants at the Madhya Pradesh Data Sprint held virtually on 17th May, 2025. This was part of a series of Data Sprints1 being conducted as part of the India Sand Watch project at Veditum.
India Sand Watch is an environmental accountability initiative that brings public data on river sand mining to the forefront, and creates a system of accountability related to sand mining in the country. The data sprints are open for all, bringing together students, experts and sand paglus2 to collate evidence from news reports, mining observations and court documents.
Numbers speak volumes
We did a deep-dive into data for the rivers of Madhya Pradesh, along with our friends from Awaaz Leadership Labs. They brought in their expertise on working with legal documents and an interest in environmental issues through their initiative – Vartavaran.
With over 25 attendees from different backgrounds, we looked at news reports from various news outlets from mainstream and regional media. The Sprint resulted in 76 new reports being archived on our India Sand Watch platform. We also identified 4 new rivers facing sand mining, and 1 new publication that is talking about the issue.
This means that our archive is getting bigger and stronger! We saw a total of 1,320 new data points from these uploads! We also turned the volume up, with a cool playlist curated by our participants! Our Report Card gives a peek into the Data Sprint. Read it here.
Storytelling with data
This time, we followed up the data sprint with a storytelling workshop, where participants played around with the data from the sprint to tell meaningful stories about sand mining, what they had learnt, and their experiences participating in the sprint.
Playing with visuals
Sankalp, founder at Schematise and coordinator at Varta Varan, created some insightful visualisations he had created with the data. He made an interesting observation about the fact that high density of data around incidents of sand mining were often found in boundary districts.
This observation matches something Siddharth, founder of Veditum and India Sand Watch, highlighted years ago in his talk – that language and borders, both have a capacity of obfuscating the truth.
Joseph, another participant from the session shared a story post about his learnings from the data sprint, highlighting how data can be interpreted to raise awareness.
Between mind and heart
Bharati, a 4th year law student and a participant of the data sprint, shared a deeply written piece of writing with us, reflecting on her experience at the data sprint. The team decided to give this writing a home on Veditum’s website: Where the footnotes are the story.
Bharati writes about the coming together of data and personal connection making at the sprint, which helped her challenge the notions of technocracy and legalese imposed by institutional mechanisms that she calls ‘The Academy’.
We invite you to read here piece, and reflect on your own relationship with data, technology, technicalities, and our relationships with people and the world around us.
Read her article here.
Framework for assessing District Survey Reports
The India Sand Watch recently released a report on the state of District Survey Reports (DSRs)3 from the state of Madhya Pradesh. Our assessment found that nearly 50% of districts from the state do not have an approved version of the DSR published on their respective district websites.
Read more at the link embedded here
This assessment was done through a framework created by the India Sand Watch team, and the data as well as methodology for the same was released by us at this link.
This DSR assessment framework is designed to help individuals who are interested in monitoring sand mining, assess the DSR for any state across three main components – availability, readability and status.
We will soon be releasing the DSR assessment framework template and a tutorial to use it. We hope this can create more accountability and transparency related to critical resources like sand.
A marathon after a sprint?
We love working with people and data, we hope to continue our series of Data Sprints across the country and co-build a robust archive with people that care about our rivers and the environment and lives they support.
If you enjoy working with data, want to contribute to monitoring sand mining and co-host data workshops or storytelling activities, drop us a mail at sandwatch@veditum.org and we can run together!
- Data Sprints are part of our efforts at our project India Sand Watch to expand the open database of information on sand mining in India’s rivers. These sprints focus on specific geographies and are day-long intense data digitisation efforts. ↩︎
- In GenZ language, a “paglu” is someone who is silly or crazy about something, in a passionate way. Hence, sand paglus, are crazy about sand. ↩︎
- The District Survey Report (DSR) is a key document that establishes availability of sand resources in a district, and serves as a foundational document in the framework of environmental governance. Read more here ↩︎