Media landscape in Madhya Pradesh: Understanding patterns of reporting on sand mining | India Sand Watch
The analysis for this report was done by Raya Sarkar, an intern with India Sand Watch. Writing and editing is by Rhea Lopez and Aishani Goswami, with input from journalists and collaborators from the media.
Key highlights
- 295 media reports (2012-2026) on river sand mining in the state of Madhya Pradesh from India Sand Watch were analysed to understand broad themes and trends in environmental reporting in the state.
- The analysis sought to identify areas in which media coverage on sand mining could be improved and better supported to introduce accountability into the unregulated sand mining sector.
- The report found that more than half of the total coverage on sand mining (67.5%) did not consider the environmental impacts of sand mining, and reporting on clearance level violations was lacking.
- Reports rarely detailed the nature of illegalities, or named those responsible for illegal mining activities. Articles on violence and illegality were not followed up on to address actions taken, or the impact of law enforcement efforts or court action.
Introduction
The media plays an important role in introducing accountability in the sand mining sector, by investigating illegalities, violence and corruption, and documenting and reporting on these to the public. In some cases, impactful media reports can even result in government authorities taking action, or suo motu cognizance of illegal mining by the courts.
In Madhya Pradesh, this has previously happened in the case of the Chambal river – where the NGT took up the issue of illegal mining within the Chambal National Sanctuary based on a news report in the Hindu titled Digging up the Chambal.
However, there are many challenges associated with media reporting on sand mining, most notably the dangers of reporting on this violent and extremely corrupt sector. Journalists in MP are no strangers to extreme violence from sand miners, and intimidation by even government officials and law enforcement. Earlier this year, journalists in Bhind district were harassed by a senior police officer for their work reporting on illegal mining.
These challenges, coupled with a general lack of public understanding of sand mining law, policy and governance structures, result in reporting that does not reflect the true extent and severity of the problem of illegal sand mining.
There need to be concerted efforts towards enabling safer and more effective reporting to ensure this purpose is fulfilled. As a first step towards this, we need to understand the current media reporting landscape within its geographical context, and identify areas for deeper focus, data-deficiencies, and develop interventions and tools for more effective, holistic, and data-driven reporting on sand mining.
Methodology
A total of 295 media reports on river sand mining in the state of Madhya Pradesh, available on the India Sand Watch platform*, were downloaded for the timeframe 2012-2026. These reports** were then analysed using a framework designed by the India Sand Watch team, to understand broad themes as well as trends in environmental reporting across the data. The template for the analysis framework can be found at this link.
*India Sand Watch is an environmental accountability project, protecting India’s rivers from unsustainable and destructive sand mining through evidence collation that enables informed media reporting, research, policy making and collective action. At the heart of the project is an open data platform (sandwatch.in), collaboratively built with local communities, partners and active citizens.1
**Data uploaded to the India Sand Watch platform is not exhaustive, and will be biased due to language of reporting, accessibility of reports, and areas of interest of uploaders, partners, and the organisation. This could also reflect a bias in regional/local news reports archived on the platform and in the dataset analysed in this report.2
The data: Sand Mining reporting
in Madhya Pradesh
The distribution of reports over time and geographies, as well as certain characteristics, is shown below through a set of 5 charts.
Reporting on sand mining seems to have peaked in the year 2024. A majority of reports on the platform were for district Morena, followed by Bhind, Shahdol, Narmadapuram and Barwani. About 3% of the reports are on the entire state of Madhya Pradesh, while the remaining mention specific districts and locations in their reports.
Around 27% of the news reports do not mention any rivers, and from the remaining 73%, the most reported rivers were Chambal followed by Narmada.
National-level news agencies seemed to dominate the data (88.8%), with regional reporting only at 9.8% of the total reports. Times of India being the national news agency with most reports, and Dainik Bhaskar being the regional news agency with highest reports.
Major themes being reported on were ‘illegality’ in the mining sector, and ‘violence & intimidation’.
Most articles focussed on Market level violences (67.7%), with Clearance level violations the least reported on (5.7%), highlighting poor reporting on governance and clearance failures.
An analysis of court cases by the India Sand Watch team related to sand mining in Madhya Pradesh, highlighted that most cases have ‘Clearance level’ violations. This highlights the need to draw attention to the governance and clearance failures while reporting on sand mining.
Results
Environmental Reporting: An overview
We found that more than half of the total coverage on sand mining (67.5%) did not have any environmental angle. Less than a fifth of the reports even mentioned the environment, and only 8.5% of the reports were focused on the environmental impacts of sand mining.
These findings are startling because of the extent and severity of the damage sand mining has on the environment, despite national and state policies that are supposed to prevent this.
Some possible reasons for the lack of environment focused reporting:
/ Poor understanding or awareness of environmental impacts of sand mining
/ Environmental impacts can often be slow, and not ‘dramatic’ or ‘sensational’
/ Lack of access to experts to verify facts or provide information and quotes
Even in cases where the impacts of sand mining on the environment were mentioned (eg. naming the river from which sand is being mined), the nature of the impact is rarely examined or even mentioned (See img 1.)
However, there are notable exceptions. In a Ground Report article on sand mining on Rajgarh’s rivers, the author (Abdul Wasim Ansari) explains the impacts of river sand mining, as well as the consequences for river dependent species and communities. He does this by citing research, and providing numbers and data (See img 2.)
In Rohit Shivhare’s article on sand mining in the Narmada, he enumerates the impacts of mining on several fish species, and has gone on to explain how mining reduces ground water levels, through a quote from a social worker (See img 3.)
Inferences
According to a report (soon to be published by India Sand Watch) by Sunidhi Chettri on environmental jurisprudence in sand mining in Madhya Pradesh, the most cited site of violence in sand mining cases in the NGT was the ‘clearance level’ – indicating a significant number of clearance level violations serious enough to warrant legal action. However, we find that reporting on clearance level violences is the lowest of all the sites of violence.
This is possibly due to the ‘invisibility’ of the violence of poor policy-making and faulty governance, along with a poor understanding of policy or intimidation of those that critique policies. Additionally, we find that instances of physical violence, action by law enforcement (like seizures of tractors involved in mining), and financial irregularities, both at the ‘Market’ level, feature prominently in reporting – indicating a favouring of incident-driven journalism, responding to immediate, dramatic events.
The damage to the environment by sand mining is often a slow change, with impacts like loss of nesting sites, river bank erosion, or the gradual decline in groundwater are less obvious or feel less ‘urgent’ to report on.
Additionally, environmental reporting can require time and resources to examine past data, visit the field, talk to experts, fact-checking, and checking clearances. The lack of easily accessible scientific information or expertise on sand mining’s impacts can make research difficult.
“Most grassroots journalists are not trained to report on environmental aspects of sand mining. It is easier and safer to report on incidents – and they also lack both resources and platforms. Even in the climate space, rural journalists are not trained to report an event from a broader climate angle – but when trained to join the dots, they do excellent work. This is why training and investing in local reporters matters.”
– Nidhi Jamwal
Lack of accountability and environmental focus in reporting is more often reflective of the lack of interest from editors and media houses in publishing such reporting. Reporters who want to work on such pieces risk not getting paid or published, or being forced to edit their articles to dilute the accountability or make the news more sensational.
A lot of the reports on sand mining might be republished by the news desk or taken from other reports/press releases, rather than being reliant on field reporters to research and write nuanced reports.
As a result, many field reporters and local journalists are forced to resort to self-publishing this work on their personal social media accounts and pages. Reports like these get missed in public archives and discourse/analysis.
The nexus of law enforcement and the mining proponents resorts to intimidation to restrict reporting on illegal mining, and in multiple instances those who questioned mining faced physical violence as well. Journalists in MP face significant safety challenges when reporting on sand mining, particularly when this requires field visits.
Discussion
This report is an attempt at identifying gaps in reporting themes, data-driven journalism, following up on incidents, as well as safety concerns when reporting – to enable the media to play a powerful role in creating accountability in the sand mining sector. However, to support better environmental reporting on sand mining, it is therefore essential to address the concerns of data, safety, and awareness surrounding the issue – as well as create spaces and an imagination of reporting on deeper, slower, and often invisiblised issues, versus dramatic incidents.
This requires hands-on efforts, including accessible resources and interactive training sessions, for journalists and persons in the media on:
- The issue of sand mining, its many sites of violence, and the role of the media in creating accountability.
- River ecology and environmental impacts of sand mining, especially the drastic long term consequences of it on our river systems, and dependent biodiversity and people.
- Environmental law and policy around river sand mining, and how to identify, build evidence (using open-data tools and archives for fact-finding, checking clearance and governance documents), finding and following up on clearance documents, and NGT court cases.
- Archiving field reportage from ‘informal’ media sources such as social media and personal pages
- Data, expertise, knowledge, and tools openly available to aid better, safer reporting. Providing a visual repository, including images of impacts, riverine species, and satellite imagery, could reduce the risk of field visits for visual documentation.
- A collectively-built checklist of tips for staying safe when reporting on sand mining, and resources like legal advisors. This could include working in pairs or small teams, keeping your editor informed of your plans, and having a local emergency contact system. In particular trying to understand the safety concerns of female reporters to address the skew in reporting by women.
Conclusion
India Sand Watch is preparing a Media Toolkit for Reporting on Sand Mining, that attempts to address some of the issues and fill some of the gaps identified in this report. The toolkit also forms the base structure for awareness and skill-sharing workshops that are being planned with field reporters, journalists, and other people in the media.
Notes & Data:
- India Sand Watch, Veditum India Foundation. Accessed via sandwatch.envmonitoring.in on 18/01/2025 ↩︎
- Data sheet of all the news reports analysed in this report (link to the data-sheet) ↩︎
Additional notes:
This report has been published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA), and can be republished with a line mentioning ‘This was originally published on Veditum’ and a link back to this page. In case of re-publishing, please alert sandwatch@veditum.org
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