Introduction
A year after our first Convening on Rivers in Bhopal in August 2025, the India Sand Watch team kept its promise to reconvene again. We co-hosted the second Convening on Rivers – with our partners Wildlife Conservation Trust (WCT), on 22nd August 2026.
The intention of the first convening was to meet diverse people keen to work on protecting rivers, and set an intention to collectively work to address the grave ecological issue of river sand mining. At the second gathering, we aimed to co-build on current learnings, share actions & progress, and build action pathways to protect MP’s rivers from illegal sand mining.
The event was attended by around 25 participants including journalists, artists, architects, activists and students. This included some who had attended the previous convening and fresh faces attending for the first time. We gathered at the Gandhi Bhavan in Madhya Pradesh’s capital city.
What was discussed
After a round of introductions and recap from the last convening, we shared some of the outputs from the discussions and activities at the last convening – including the revised and translated Sites of Violence diagram and the Stakeholders Map.
The ISW team then explained how these frameworks have been helpful to visualise the extents of violences and violations in the sand mining sector and to reimagine these as Sites of Intervention where collective action can be taken to address this violence.
Along similar lines, the Stakeholders Map helps identify actors (both impacted and impactors) that must be engaged to ensure these interventions are feasible. Participants were encouraged to spend time looking through the charts and placing themselves within the stakeholders map.
Toolkits for Sediments
Over the past year, the India Sand Watch team has continued to build our understanding of the issue in MP. We have engaged with actors and stakeholders collectively through district-level convenings in Chhatarpur and Gwalior, workshops for different groups of actors, as well as working individually with people taking action on local issues pertaining to illegal and destructive sand mining in their areas.
To make these learnings share-able with and actionable by more interested actors, we have been developing open tools and toolkits for different groups of people wishing to take action in various ways.
We discussed our learnings from the past year and the support we have been able to provide for various interventions. We then shared the frameworks and tools developed through these discussions and activities. All of these tools are publicly available on our website. Some tools & analysis are highlighted below.
Evidence Building Flowchart
Participants were walked through the Evidence Building flowchart. This chart is part of our evidence building toolkit, and provides a step-by-step guide on finding, identifying, and collating evidence of violations in the sand mining process, including what critical governance documents to look for, and possible actions that can be taken with the gathered evidence.
Links: Evidence Building Toolkit | Evidence Building Flowchart
Media Reporting Analysis
The ISW team shared the results of the Media Report Analysis published by us earlier this year. This effort looks at trends of news reporting on river sand mining from the state of Madhya Pradesh, and identifies gaps and challenges to data-driven reporting for accountability.
Read the full Media Report Analysis here: Media Landscape in Madhya Pradesh
Collective Action Toolkit
The Collective Action Toolkit was also shared with the participants. This toolkit is designed for individuals, groups, and organisations that live or work near and on rivers, to empower them to safely and efficiently record and archive observations of sand mining to a shared, public evidence archive – the India Sand Watch platform.
Link: Collective Action Toolkit
Discussions
Tarun Nair from our partner organisation Wildlife Conservation Trust gave an insightful presentation on the ecological damage caused by unchecked sand mining on rivers, from his vast experience working with crocodilians on the Chambal.
He also provided useful resources, insights, and tips on innovative ways in which reporters and other actors can look at sand mining, and act to introduce accountability at multiple levels of the sand mining sector.
Through the convening, participants were encouraged and given time to note down their thoughts and suggestions on the tools being created and actions being undertaken by ISW and our collaborators. Attendees stuck these in the space provided, and we spent the second half of the convening discussing their ideas and co-imagining ways we could work together to tackle the problem at hand.
Despite the heavy nature of the subject of sand mining, the convening ended therefore on a hopeful note, with many participants staying back to excitedly discuss their ideas and thoughts with the team over chai, leaving us with many new action pathways to explore together.
Invitation to participate
Our work over the last year in Madhya Pradesh has been full of learning and co-creating processes and templates to understand sand mining governance, address gaps in policy and implementation, and imagine pathways for action.
If you work on rivers in MP, or just care a lot about them, and would like to be part of these efforts, please consider joining us for data sprint, workshop or convening, or email us at sandwatch@veditum.org with your ideas!
Coming up next: A recap of our additional activities in Madhya Pradesh on this trip.
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