Mafia, Blood & Sand

In election season, the illegal sand trade continues to take a toll on West Bengal’s most volatile assembly constituency 

- Romita Datta

Even as the sun, hidden behind a curtain of trees, dips into the horizon, trucks and tractors, whirring in and out from dawn to dusk,still raise a sand storm on the vast banks of the river Ajay. Once the lifeline of towns, villages and farms in the laterite belt of Birbhum and Burdwan, two adjacent districts of West Bengal, the river has now been reduced to a network of barely knee-deep streams.

“Chhappanno (fifty-six), satanno (fifty-seven), atanno (fifty-eight),” an armed guard keeps count of the vehicles trundling down to scoop sand. Loaded trucks and tractors can only exit the trenches after paying him the ‘gate-pass’ money. For one truck load, or around 400 cubic feet of sand, the price is Rs 100. Once the sand reaches the market, a truckload sells for Rs 700—a seven-fold mark-up. The state government is supposed to get Rs 60 for every 100 cubic feet of sand lifted from the region. It is also supposed to earn revenue from the leasing out of the sand banks to the highest bidder through an open auction. But the guard at the banks is not a state government representative. He is muscle for one of the two local politicians who control the illegal sand economy, worth an estimated Rs 40 crore a year.

This may not sound like a large figure in comparison to the thousand-crore scams that rock the country routinely, but here in backward Birbhum, it’s a king’s ransom. An amount worth killing and dying for.