Reflections from ISW Convening on Rivers 2025, Bhopal

Varta Varan, which is the Climate Justice vertical of Awaaz Leadership Labs was a partner for the series of events at Bhopal on MP’s rivers, and was represented by its Programme Coordinator, Sankalp Srivastava. Organising the Legal Data Sprint for the curious bunch of students at Career College of Law, Bhopal was an experience that was unique in its own way, as Legal Data is coming up as a new area of legal studies. Collectively navigating a riverbed through the nuances of court data leads one to believe that there is a wealth of jurisprudence evolving that interacts with the real on-ground work done by state agencies and civil society.

The experience at the MP rivers convening was intriguing as participants gave a diverse set of responses when talking about their work done on MP’s rivers. This leads one to ask, “How many more experiences are there outside this room that we need to carefully represent in our work?” And perhaps this poses an opportunity for organizations looking to work further on the topic of MP’s rivers and its ecology. Their contextual engaging with the work done by the wonderful Team Veditum and the event’s flow into the Data Sprint on the second day gave us all the opportunity to be a part of the data driven action. The next day, the chance to brainstorm with an experienced group of journalists guided by the resource persons, Manish, Aditi, and Tarun at the Media Workshop was unforgettable and a demonstration of how dynamic a newsroom can look like, when dealing with the issue of illegal sand mining

Eklavya Foundation, which allowed us to host this event was a charming venue as it offered the space to mix around and explore. We look forward to more such events in the future!

The two days in Bhopal were truly a head, heart, and hands-on kind of experience. It’s always inspiring to be in a room with a vibrant mix of civil society members, especially the youth, who cared enough to show up for a conversation around the rivers of Madhya Pradesh or, at the very least, came with the openness of heart and mind to begin caring and engaging with them more meaningfully.

Thinking about resources such as water and sand, particularly in the context of mining and extractivism, has always been deeply complex and not so linear. Over the two days, this complexity slowly unfolded. The data sprint by the Veditum team on District Survey Reports (DSRs) on sand mining was particularly interesting. The exercise helped explore how DSRs can be used as an important tool not only to strengthen citizen awareness but also to understand what lies within legal bounds and to question what falls outside them.

On day two, the co-designed media workshop for journalists served as a starting point, bringing focus to their role as key stakeholders in shaping public understanding of these issues. Unfortunately, stories on rivers and mining do not always move beyond surface-level reporting to capture their complexity. The workshop surfaced the many challenges journalists face while reporting on such a subject. Despite their courage and appetite to tell these stories, many continue to struggle with safety concerns, lack of institutional support, limited tools, and few opportunities and support for structured reporting.

As one of the facilitators of the sessions, I could share some insights into what happens behind editorial desks when pitches from the ground are received, and what makes a pitch strong enough for structured reporting. Through a role-play exercise between “editor” and “journalist,” we explored the multiple lenses that can be applied when structuring or even just pitching stories on these issues. I hope that this small attempt evolves into something more empowering for reporters in the long run. It also helped me connect with many more grassroots reporters, understand their realities better, and strengthen some of our existing work with our fellow journalists at the India Water Portal Regional Storytelling Fellowship.

The gathering felt like a space for community, co-learning and many opportunities! 🙂

More power to the Veditum team for doing this in such a collaborative and engaging way. Looking forward to continuing to collaborate in meaningful ways ahead.

Just how do you find your way out of a multi-storey labyrinth with many diagonal pathways cutting across floors? How do you begin to solve a problem that’s simultaneously social, political, cultural, economic, and, most of all, ecological?

My experience at India Sand Watch’s convening gave me a glimpse of this. They’ve created a platform that allows anybody concerned about rivers to contribute in small ways to re-building our collective consciousness of sand mining. So many times I’ve seen overladen sand trucks huffing-&-puffing out of scarred river beds and attributed this to ‘the mafia’. Such nebulous categories provide no room for action: how do you counteract something you cannot define clearly.

India Sand Watch’s convening and data sprint showed us that recognizing and defining the problem are exactly what we need to start doing: compiling legal documents; building sand-mining observations; pulling together disparate news articles on the issue. Individually, each of these documents may not stand for much, but once collected and organized, they potentially hold the weight of strong legal evidence. Unregulated sand mining’s promoters are varied and many. India Sand Watch’s platform enables its detractors to become varied, many, and united as well. Building this granular archive is surely a step towards creating conditions under which sand mining occurs only within the ambit of law.

All of this might sound a bit heavy and legalese-ey — evidence building; collecting District Survey Reports etc. But the Veditum folks conducted this workshop with such warmth and creativity that it felt a bit like grown ups playing in a sandbox. I enjoyed the process and learnt a lot too. By creating this archive, India Sand Watch reminds us that sand and water are warp and weft of the same living riverine fabric. I really look forward to seeing where this goes.

It is estimated that 70% of India’s surface waters[1], and nearly 300 of its rivers are polluted[2] – some are critical – costing the economy approximately USD 8 billion[3].  I am often invited to participate and speak on the subject of rivers and wetlands. As an academic, researcher, restoration practitioner and activist, my interest is primarily in the ecological health, and ecosystem services, that are key to healthy communities and the landscapes within which they live; knowing that the difference between a healthy river and a dying one, is often just a matter of whether the floodplain and riverbed, and their natural communities have been left intact, or not. The impacts of sand mining are myriad and range from impaired aquifer recharge, to flood mitigation, as well as the critical loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning – affecting eventually safety for communities.

The Convening on Rivers  by Veditum and partners provided an opportunity to meet a diverse group comprising students, journalists, activists, policymakers, conservationists, planners, thinkers, writers, and artists engaged with the myriad challenges facing India’s rivers. Each brought with them unique perspectives honed in lived-experiences of working with communities in, and around rivers.

First-hand accounts of researchers and journalists revealed that sand mining in many of India’s rivers is pervasive and large-scale as to be easily visible on satellite images, and aerial photographs. It is thought that the miners are increasingly organized under political and criminal patronage and attempts to enforce laws have often been met with violence. Worryingly, attempts at law-enforcement have not been successful, and the activity carries on due to the enormous demand from markets; perhaps as a consequence, the perpetrators are seldom brought to book. The construction industry – real-estate and highways included, is the primary destination of most mined sand, several aspects of economics and trade ensure that the demand remains high. According to sources[4] the construction industry ranks third among the 14 major sectors in terms of direct, indirect and induced effects in all sectors of the economy (IBEF). The present real-estate sector is currently valued at USD 477 billion, contributing an estimated 7.3% to the economy[5]. This figure which translates to 40.5 lakh Crore INR, includes the pre-Covid peak of Rs 12,000 Crores in the markets which is expected to grow to Rs 65,000 crore By 2040. According to sources, the market size of the real-estate sector in India is expected to reach $1 trillion in by 2030, up from $200 billion in 2021, and likely to contribute 13% to the country’s GDP by 2025. Some projections[6] forecast the market to grow to USD 5.8 Trillion, or INR 500 Lakh Crore by 2047 which indicates a strong 15,5% growth rate. The contributing factors influencing the strong demand and corresponding growth of the realty sector in India are thought to be – strong economic trends and indicators; policies and regulatory reforms in the real-estate sector that aid business interests and investments; Lending Push – the availability of loans on attractive interest rates and Monetary Policies that promote investments; as well as demographic shifts and a strong trend towards urbanization. The Policy landscape and market incentives are thus strongly pro-growth.

The factors aiding real-estate markets are economic growth-oriented policies that are unlikely to change in the near-or-medium term, and we can expect that the market for sand, and the incidence of mining activity is likely to increase substantially in the future, with corresponding risks and uncertainties.

The sheer scale, and cost of environmental degradation have not yet entered this calculus.  Economic growth projections may be optimistic in the absence of considerations of impacts such as climate change, health and mortality, ecosystem shifts, and loss of key ecosystem services such as freshwater availability in the short-, medium-, and long-term. experts warn that the ‘how much’ and ‘where’ of Sand-mining is implicit in whether “growth” in real-estate markets can occur at all, for the simple reason that markets need other sectors of the economy to function, whilst  the resource base on which that function is based is rapidly diminishing due to mining and other causes.

[1]World Economic Forum; https://www.weforum.org/stories/2019/10/water-pollution-in-india-data-tech-solution/

[2]Government of india: https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetailm.aspx?PRID=1941065

[3] World Bank; available at https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/220721468268504319/pdf/700040v10ESW0P0box0374379B00PUBLIC0.pdf

[4] https://www.ibef.org/industry/real-estate-india

[5] https://www.icicidirect.com/research/equity/finace/role-of-the-realty-sector-in-the-gdp-of-india

[6] https://www.rprealtyplus.com/interviews/role-of-real-estate-in-indias-economic-growth-118904.html