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ABSTRACT
Like many other natural resources, sand has become integral to technologies that symbolize modernity and development, but that depend upon an imperative of low cost. In India, sand began to be commoditized in the early twentieth century as an input in a powerful new building technology, reinforced cement concrete (RCC). With the expansion of cities and major infrastructure projects since independence and especially since the 1990s, sand mining has nonetheless remained characterized by small-scale enterprises and small technologies; it is also controlled by regional powerholders who operate on the legal margins, widely referred to as ‘sand mafias’. This article draws upon archival and ethnographic research on sand mining for construction in the city region of Bombay/Mumbai to show that the sand mining industry there has effectively come to operate over time through various methods of drawing marginal value from devalued labour techniques and delegitimized or tactical modes of operation. These destructive-productive activities, at a broad level, constitute micro-practices of contemporary capitalism (modes of flexible accumulation) on a resource frontier. But equally, for many of the people involved in them, their value lies in their unpredictable excesses and terrains of resource-making that likewise buoy changes in the technological assemblage.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the many people who spoke with me and aided me with this research in Mumbai. I especially thank Sumaira Abdulali and Santosh Deodhar for their generous assistance and for sharing their expertise, as well as Amrute Paradkar, for help with logistics and some Marathi translations. Earlier versions of this article were presented at Dartmouth College, at a workshop at the University of Pennsylvania Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI), and at the UW-Madison Annual Conference on South Asia; I appreciate the feedback from participants and audiences in each of these contexts, and especially acknowledge Lisa Björkman and Nikhil Rao, who have provided generative comments and support for this work, as well as broader intellectual community, over many years. Finally, I am grateful to the journal’s reviewers and editors, whose incisive comments significantly strengthened this piece.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Ethics approval
Bowdoin College IRB-2015-26.
Notes
1. Sundar, “From Regulation to Management.”
2. Abdulali, Pers. Comm., March 23, 2017; awaaz.org; Hindu, “Changing Landscapes”; and Hindu, “Dredging up Trouble.” Awaaz has been involved in this campaign under the leadership of Sumaira Abdulali since 2004; the government took initial steps to enable regulation of minor minerals (including sand) under the Environmental Impact Assessment Notification of 2006; in 2009, the Government of India, Ministry of Environment and Forests, appointed a group on “Environmental Aspects of Quarrying of Minor Minerals”, which submitted its report in 2010. Various bans and partial bans have been instituted on and off since 2009, when Abdulali was able to get a ruling banning mining in Coastal Regulation Zones (CRZs).
3. Beiser, World in a Grain; Bendixen et al., “Time Is Running Out”; coastalcare.org; Hawley, Line in the Sand; Torres et al., “Looming Tragedy”; Srivastava, “Drowning for Sand”; and VICE, “Illegal Sand Mining.” Regular articles appear in the Times of India from 2011 and in other newspapers within the next year or two.
4. Abdulali March 23, 2017; awaaz.org/sandmining/; Banerjee et al., “People First”; Bhushan et al., “Regulating Small-Scale Mining”; Mahadevan, “Sand Mafias in India”; and UNDP, “Sand and Sustainability.”
5. Bakker and Bridge, “Material Worlds?”; Banoub et al., “Industrial Dynamics”; Bekasova, “From Common Rocks”; Bridge, “Contested Terrain”; Bridge, “Material Worlds”; Bridge, “Resource Geographies I”; Bridge, “Resource Geographies II”; Bridge and Frederiksen, “’Order out of Chaos’”; Li, “After the Land Grab”; Li, Land’s End; Li, “Rendering Land Investible”; Peluso and Lund, “New Frontiers”; Peluso, “Entangled Territories”; Tsing, Friction; and Veraart et al., “Creating, Capturing, and Circulating.”
6. Schneider and Schneider, “Mafia and Capitalism”; and Tilly, “War Making.”
7. Bisht, “Conceptualizing Sand Extractivism”; Bisht and Gerber, “Ecological Distribution Conflicts”; Da and Le Billon, “Sand Mining”; Franks, “Reclaiming the Neglected Minerals”; John, “Sand Geographies”; Kothari and Arnall, “Shifting Sands”; Lamb et al., “Trading Sand, Undermining Lives”; Rege and Lavorgna, “Organization, Operations, and Success”; Rousseau and Marschke, “(In)Visible Fluidities across Sandscapes”; and Shitima and Suykens, “Formalization of Sand Mining.”
8. Ameziane and Suykens, “Political Settlements”; Hatlebakk, “River Sand Mining”; Kothari and Arnall, “Shifting Sands”; Lai et al., “Rise and Fall”; Mushonga, “Dynamics of Zimbabwe’s Sand”; and Shitima and Suykens, “River Sand Commodity Chains.”
9. Moore, “The Capitalocene, Part I”; and Moore, “The Capitalocene Part II.”
10. Gidwani and Maringanti, “Waste-Value Dialectic”; and Tsing, Mushroom.
11. Li, Land’s End; Peluso, “Entangled Territories”; Peluso and Lund, “New Frontiers”; and Tsing, Friction.
12. Kamath, “Bunty Singh.”
13. Chhabria, “Aboriginal Alibi.”
14. Rijke-Epstein, “On Humble Technologies”; Subramanian, Shorelines; and Zaloom, “Productive Life of Risk.”
15. Bais, “Lime Practices in India”; Gambetta, “Urbanism of Mortar”; and Graham, “Account of the Inhabitants.”
16. London Times, “Notes and Clippings”; and Loudon, ed., “Art. II. Foreign Notices.”
17. Forty, Concrete and Culture; Iyer, Boombay; and Slaton, Reinforced Concrete.
18. Bombay Builder, “Action of Chunam.”
19. Bombay Acts and Regulations.
20. Björkman, “Engineer and the Plumber”; Björkman and Harris, “Engineering Cities”; Picon, “Engineers and Engineering History”; Picon, “French Engineers and Social Thought”; Slaton, “As near as Practicable”; and Slaton, Reinforced Concrete.
21. Abbate and Slaton, “Hidden Lives of Standards”; Forty, Concrete and Culture; Sibum, “Exploring the Margins”; and Slaton, “As near as Practicable.”
22. Gambetta, “Urbanism of Mortar”; Iyer, Boombay; and Rao, House but No Garden.
23. Buchanan, “Diaspora of British Engineering”; Chrimes, “Architectural Dilettantes, Part I”; Roux, “Networks of Tropical Architecture”; Tappin, “Early Use”; and Weiler, “Colonial Connections.”
24. Deshpande, Cheap and Healthy Homes; Deshpande, RCC Designing Made Easy; Deshpande, Residential Buildings Suitable; and Deshpande, Treatise on Building Construction.
25. Bendixen et al., “Time Is Running Out”; and Torres et al., “Looming Tragedy”. More recently, markets for high value or strategic value sands have emerged through differentiation according to their preponderance of elemental minerals, including rare earth elements (REE), pure silica sand, and the like. The differentiation of these more valuable (though actually not rare) sands can be viewed as an extension of the processes of commercially-driven experimentation and categorization that occurred earlier with construction sand.
26. Shutzer, “Subterranean Properties.” Both the British and the Indian agencies focused initially on coal.
27. Bhattacharyya, Empire and Ecology; Derrett, Law and the State; Guha, Rule of Property; Sturman, Government of Social Life; Travers, Ideology and Empire; and Washbrook, “Law, State and Agrarian.”
28. Shutzer, “Subterranean Properties.”
29. R. v. Earl of Northumberland. This case is known as “The Case of Mines.”
30. Heton, “Some Account of Mines.”
31. UK Parliamentary Debates, Commons (London, July 5, 1909); and Stone, Mining Laws.
32. Jain, Mineral Policy; and Grover and Mehta, New Look. A royalty system existed under the 18th century regional Peshwa regime for cutting timber, forest grass, wood, bamboo, and for extracting wild honey, and for private minting of coins by goldsmiths [sonar]. It is not clear if royalty fees also applied in the case of privately-held lands, or for mineral extraction. According to Jain, the colonial government first set rules for the granting of prospecting licenses and mining leases in 1894. These rules were revised in 1899 and 1913 before becoming a provincial subject under the 1935 Government of India Act. They have been revised further since independence.
33. Stone, Mining Laws.
34. Note the contrast with silver and gold, which were treated as Crown property no matter where they were found. For a discussion of the distinctions within the category of ‘sand’, and a quite different set of geopolitical entailments, by which some sand was made into a matter of sovereign state interest and national security see: Abraham, “Rare Earths.”
35. For additional examples, see: Tappin, “Early Use.”
36. Hazareesingh, “Colonial Modernism.”
37. For important scholarship on the BDD chawls, see: Hazareesingh, “Colonial Modernism”; Caru, “Making of a Working-Class”; and Rao, House but No Garden.
38. MSA, DD 1923: 20/SEIV Part III.
39. Dossal, Theatre of Conflict; and Rao, House but No Garden. The unstable relationship between government and private industry in this context perhaps partially reflected the volatility of the market in these post-war years as well as the shifting and insecure mandate of the BDD itself. The Department would ultimately wind up its operations after little more than a decade. Rao (Citation2013) in particular emphasizes the significance of market volatility in this era.
40. DD 1921: 89, 731, 1005; 1922: 29; 1925, 7/1.
41. DD 1923: 7/6.
42. DD 1922: 7.
43. DD 1920: 227.
44. Ibid. Ironically, while Watson’s letter suggested that these were unskilled and unspecialized manual laborers who were far from ideal workers for this task, Sheetal Chhabria’s recent work offers new support for the longstanding popular idea that the colonial term ‘coolie’ in fact referenced Kolis. Chhabria, ‘Aboriginal Alibi’.
45. DD 1924–5: 11/4.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid. With the winding down of the Development Department by the early 1930s, the colonial government’s direct – if small-scale – role in residential building construction and affordable housing in Bombay ended. Such an effort was not picked up again until after independence, first with the Bombay Housing Board Act of 1948 and eventually with the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA), launched in 1978. However, these government authorities did not (and MHADA currently does not) drive the market in building materials, although government agencies have recently been engaged in massive housing development projects. These include both MHADA projects in Greater Mumbai and projects by CIDCO (City & Industrial Corporation of Maharashtra, Ltd., formed in 1970), which is the town planning and development authority of Navi Mumbai (New Bombay) across the bay on the mainland.
50. Bijker, “How Is Technology Made?” Recent materials science shows possibilities for utilizing these other types of sand, as well as a variety of other substances, in the making of concrete. Nonetheless, the focus on sand, and specifically river-sand, in RCC development and among users, suggests a kind of closure and closed-in hardness.
51. Banoub et al., “Industrial Dynamics.”
52. Abbate and Slaton, “Hidden Lives of Standards.”
53. Devi Prasad v. State of Uttar Pradesh Criminal Appeal (Cr. A.) No. 1881 of 1961; Shew Shankar Singh v. State of West Bengal, Revision Application No. 803 of 1967; Rajagopal v. Inspector of Police Cr. A. No. 168 Madras High Court, 8 December 1988; State v. Natarajan Cr. Ap. No. 983 of 1986 Madras High Court.
54. Bombay Mineral Mineral Extraction Rules, 1955. Two other legal frameworks operate on areas that were added to form the state of Maharashtra in 1960: the Rules Regulating the Working of Minor Minerals, 1954 for the territories of Marathwada, added from the erstwhile Hyderabad State, and the Maharashtra Minor Mineral Extraction Rules, Vidarbha Region, 1966, for Vidarbha.
55. Bombay High Court Writ Petition No. 1408 of 2008, Promoters & Builders Assn. of Pune v. State of Maharashtra & Ors, 2010. These terms applied even to cases where there was no actual quarry, as in the removal of sand from streams or rivers. Leases and permits were distinguished by the basis for regulation, space (or quantity) vs. time: for a given area, a permit allowed extraction up to a particular depth, while a lease allowed extraction for a particular period of time. As this case suggests, the right of the state to royalties, as the ultimate owner of any extracted material, was confirmed as late as 2010.
56. Maharashtra Act XVI of 1966. The 1966 Maharashtra Land Revenue Code, Sec. 48 read: ‘Unless it is otherwise expressly provided by the terms of the grant made by the State Government, the right to all minerals at whatever place found, whether on surface or underground, including all derelict or working mines and quarries, old dumps, pits, fields, bandhas, nallas, creeks, river beds and such other places, is and is hereby declared to be expressly reserved and shall vest in the State Government which shall have all powers necessary for the proper enjoyment of such rights’. In 1985, Mah. 16 of 1985, s. 14(a), which aimed to more effectively curb the wealth of inamdars [landed grantees] and other sanad [title] holders, expunged the first phrase of this section so that it began simply, ‘The right to all minerals’.
57. Threesiamma Jacob, [2013] 7 SCR 863.
58. Mineral Area Development v. M/S Steel Authority of India & Ors.
59. Callon, “An Essay on Framing.”
60. Interview with Former District Collector, Mumbai, 23 March 2017.
61. This model was strengthened in the decades after independence as regionally-dominant agricultural castes benefited from post-colonial agricultural policies as well as from the organizational and distributive resources of the dominant political party, the Congress. But it also formed part of a broad popular idiom that describes potentially legitimate means of political control, and that plays a significant role in popular politics today. Witsoe, “Corruption as Power.”
62. See note 12 above.
63. Bombay High Court Writ Petition No. 379 of 2003, Mr. Rajendra Thakur v. MCGM; Bombay High Court Writ Petition No. 2822 of 2003, Bhrashtachar Nirmoolan Sanghatana Mumbai v. State of Maharashtra & Ors.
64. Slaton, “‘As near as Practicable.’”
65. Björkman, “‘You Can’t Buy a Vote’”; and Witsoe, “Corruption as Power.”
66. See note 13 above.
67. Enthoven, Tribes and Castes of Bombay.
68. Recent news reports suggest that even suction-pump mining has resumed to some extent in the region. Hindustan Times Correspondent, “Crackdown on Sand Mining,” January 1, 2023.
69. This is confirmed by the response to a 2006 RTI (Right To Information Act) petition from the residents of Belapur, Navi Mumbai, that intimates that the family of Ganesh Naik, their longtime Member of the state Legislative Assembly (MLA), and as well as then state Minister of Excise, Environment & Labour, was the owner and operator of dry docks in Belapur where massive amounts of illegal sand mining was taking place. Members of the local Agri community, Naik’s brothers and fathers were registered as the owners, while his two sons are also local and regional politicians. Naik was originally a member of the Shiv Sena, but he switched to the National Congress Party (NCP) in 1999. He announced his shift to the BJP on July 30, 2019. Times of India, “Maharashtra Minister’s Lie Nailed,” September 8, 2006; Mumbai Mirror, “In Another Setback,” July 30, 2019; and Cody, “Wave Theory.”
70. Deodhar, Pers. Comm, January 2, 2018.
71. Anonymous, Pers. Comm., Sewri, January 5, 2018.
72. Anonymous, Pers. Comm., Sewri, January 5, 2018. He used the English phrase.1 brass = 100 cubic ft. Trucks are supposed to carry 2.5 brass of sand, but they are sometimes overloaded to carry more.
73. Anonymous, Pers. Comm., Wagholi, December 20, 2017. Again, there are strong forms of caste-adjacency here, as a significant subset of these workers were members of the Patharvat community, a traveling community historically associated with stone work.
74. Bhattacharyya, Empire and Ecology.
75. Anonymous, Pers. Comm., Thane, December 15, 2017.