Sand miners, Mumbai.
“Sand is the second most consumed natural resource, after water. The construction-building industry is by far the largest consumer of this finite resource. The traditional building of one average-sized house requires 200 tons of sand; a hospital requires 3,000 tons of sand; each kilometer of highway built requires 30,000 tons of sand… A nuclear plant, a staggering 12 million tons of sand…” Captions and Photograph by © Denis Delestrac
Excerpts;
It’s business as usual for the sand dredging mafia in Thane district, in the absence of any auctioning of the 20-odd sand-rich spots here. Thane is located on Salsette Island, 30kms to the Northeast of Mumbai. According to a rough estimate by revenue officials, they have been plundering natural resources by extracting close to 600 trucks of sand a day…
