Up to 50 billion metric tons of sand and gravel are extracted every year worldwide. The inexhaustible need for sand in India is the breeding ground for illegal activities by what has come to be known as “sand mafias.” Forbidden Stories, an international consortium of 40 journalists publishing in 30 media organizations around the world, looked into the violent censorship and environmental damage left behind by these sand barons. This is part of the “Green Blood” series, a project pursuing stories of journalists who have been threatened, jailed or killed while investigating environmental issues.

SHAHJAHANPUR, INDIA—Indian reporter Jagendra Singh posted his last contribution to his Facebook page — where he regularly published his reporting — on June 1, 2015. He had been posting for over a month about local politician Rammurti Singh Verma and his alleged ties to illegal sand mining, which the United Nations has identified as a major environmental threat. That day, Singh was brought to the hospital with burns on over 50 per cent of his body.

“The motherf-----s poured petrol on me,” said Singh in a video before he died from his injuries. “They jumped over the wall and got in. If they wanted to, they could have arrested me instead. What was the need to kill me?”

With his eyes closed and unable even to look into the camera, he accused police officers and supporters of Verma of setting him on fire. In the video, one can see his devastating burns. He died from his injuries seven days later. He was 46.

Official reports claim that Singh killed himself. Yet, the day of his funeral, Singh’s son filed a complaint against Verma and five police officers for conspiracy to kill and immolation. He later withdrew his complaint after interactions between Verma and the family. Forbidden Stories met several members of the Singh family who — after being afraid of retaliation for years — now say they accepted money from Verma in exchange for their silence.

It takes nearly four hours by car from Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, to reach the deafening city of Shahjahanpur. It is difficult to move in its narrow streets, crowded with bikes and street vendors. A concert of horns is constantly playing.

Away from the main streets, a quiet two-room house is hidden from passersby by a green three-metre wall and blue iron doors. It was the home of Singh, an independent journalist whose mysterious death remains unsolved.

On that day in 2015, Singh was awaiting a visit from Verma, though he wasn’t sure what to expect. He had been writing for weeks about Verma’s alleged involvement in illegal sand mining. Now was the time for a meeting.

Yet, early in the afternoon, the police showed up at Singh’s house. Singh’s family said supporters of Verma also came along.

Beyond the dates and protagonists involved, facts are disputed. Singh’s family said he was attacked and set on fire. The police concluded he committed suicide. The only eyewitness to the incident, a friend of Singh’s who was in the house with him, initially supported his version of events but changed her story multiple times. Even in a recent interview, she nervously gave three completely different accounts of what happened that day.

Forbidden Stories, an international consortium of 40 journalists publishing in 30 media organizations around the world, collected testimonies that challenge the official version of suicide. We found that Singh’s death seems to be part of what is quickly becoming a pattern of repression and silencing of journalists by Indian sand tycoons.

“The moment he wrote against the minister (Verma), he was in trouble,” Singh’s widow said. “I scolded him. I said you should not be writing such stories, and he said he wanted to finish.”

Since the beginning of his journalistic career in 1999, Singh had changed employers multiple times because he regularly felt censored.

“Sometimes the bosses would be asked to drop a story or be paid money to ensure the news is never carried, and Dad would get angry,” remembers Rahul, Singh’s second son.

Singh published his first Facebook post accusing Verma — then a welfare minister in Uttar Pradesh — of running illegal operations on April 27, 2015. His journalism on Facebook was followed by thousands of people.

“There is hardly any illegal business left that is not being run by [Minister Rammurthi] Singh Verma,” he wrote. One of the minister’s businesses, he said, was illegal sand mining. Along with photos, Singh published a story accusing the minister’s workers of illegally mining sand in the Garra River. Singh asserted that Verma bribed the local police with 10,000 rupees ($150 U.S.) daily to allow mining.

A spokesperson for Verma said he was unable to respond because he was hospitalized.

Tensions between the two men had grown for weeks. Supporters of Verma had filed allegedly false complaints against the journalist. It only got worse as Singh kept writing about the minister. The threats were also physical: his ankle was broken in what he described as an attack from Verma’s henchmen.

Yet Singh persisted. His friends confess that at some point — in what they describe as an out-of-character act — Singh decided to play by the same rules as the minister. Desperate, he helped file an allegedly false complaint against Verma accusing him of raping a woman.

The complaint was withdrawn after Singh’s death.

The day of Singh’s funeral, June 9, 2015, his son filed a complaint against Verma and five police officers for conspiracy to commit murder and immolation. It was not long before the former minister got in touch with the family.

For the first time, members of Singh’s family told Forbidden Stories and a journalist from Le Monde that they dropped the case after reaching a compromise with Verma.

After Singh’s death, media attention had kept the family safe and hopeful for a few weeks.

But at some point journalists left. The family began to feel isolated and helpless in facing Verma. Relatives and friends started to push them to accept an agreement with the former minister. Singh’s widow said she was afraid for her children’s lives.

“Many of our relatives suddenly turned against us,” she recalls. “They told us there (was) a threat to the lives of my children.”

The family claims that Verma gave them the equivalent of three million rupees ($45,000 U.S.) in cash. They understood that this generous donation was conditioned on a declaration from the family saying Singh had killed himself. Eventually, on July 23, 2015, Singh’s son withdrew his complaint.

A month later, Verma made a deposition to the police in which he called the complaint filed against him by Singh’s son “bogus.” Verma also stated that nobody had harassed Singh, nor did anyone set him on fire. In this statement Verma does not talk about the agreement with the family or the money.

According to the family, Verma wanted the money to be spent on Singh’s daughter Diksha.

“Educate her and let her study until she wants to and then get her married, use that money for her marriage,” Singh’s son recalls Verma saying.

Today, the family is torn apart over this compromise. Singh’s daughter — determined to have her father acknowledged as having been murdered — refuses, against her family’s wishes, to touch the money as much as she refuses to get married.

“He wanted to fight to get justice, and he always wanted to do something good for Shahjahanpur,” she remembers today. “Very few people are so brave to take on such a powerful minister. My father was one such rare people who exposed the truth.”

In India, Singh was not the only journalist allegedly attacked for writing about the sand mafias. Sandeep Kothari, who died in February 2016, just a couple of weeks after Singh, and Karun Misra and Sandeep Sharma, who were killed in March 2018, were all investigating illegal sand mining when they were killed.

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“The ‘sand mafia’ is currently considered to be one of the most prominent, violent and impenetrable organized crime groups in India,” according to Aunshul Rege, an associate professor in the criminal justice department at Temple University in Philadelphia. And they are eager to keep their business secret.

On the ground, NGOs and journalists who tried to pull back the curtain on the workings of the sand mining industry have faced a battery of threats. As you get closer, warnings are prompt: when you waltz around the sand business, intimidation is frequent, corruption is systemic.

For despite being seemingly available to anyone, sand is a lucrative commodity. Beaches are the source of valuable minerals such as garnet, ilmenite and zircon — used, among other things, to cut and blast metals in aircraft manufacturing or the automotive industry.

Along the coast of Tamil Nadu, illegal sand mining has been rampant since 2000. In 2013, state authorities finally decided to take action. A ban on mining was declared while inspections into illegal activities of private miners were opened. Yet between 2013 and 2016, private miners continued to export more than two million metric tons of minerals internationally, according to an expert report submitted to the Madras High Court.

In a statement to Forbidden Stories, S. Vaikundarajan, the head of a large sand mining company, said that “stoppage of mining until the inspection is completed [did] not amount [to a] Ban of mining.”

Regarding the expert report filed in court, Vaikundarajan said that “all the allegations made were without any basis and not in accordance with the law.”

Sandhya Ravishankar, a Chennai-based journalist in Tamil Nadu, is one of the few journalists who has investigated this issue.

As soon as her first story appeared in 2013, she was reminded of the sensitivity of the subject: “The day we published it, within an hour or two, we had a defamation suit slapped on the newspaper, and I was included in the names of the accused.”

Ravishankar then wrote a series of six more articles. No one wanted to publish her reporting. Finally in January 2017, the Indian non-profit news website The Wire published the results of her investigation.

The journalist said she started receiving threatening phone calls, was followed, and had video surveillance footage of her meeting a source posted on the internet.

Following these threats, Ravishankar continued her investigation from a distance. For safety reasons, she has never gone back in person to this particular area. Forbidden Stories worked along Ravishankar to keep reporting on illegal beach sand mining in Tamil Nadu.

“Sandhya Ravishankar has personal enmity against our company,” said Vaikundarajan in a statement criticizing at length the journalist, whom he said works for one of his competitors.

In one of the districts where illegal extraction has been most aggressive, people are afraid to talk. The fear is such that some inhabitants do not dare to say the name of the local beach sand mining empire: V.V. Mineral.

The company is headed by S. Vaikundarajan, whose name appears more than once in state and court-appointed investigations.

“About, say, 85 to 90 per cent of beach sand mining, legal and illegal, is monopolized by this one family,” said Ravishankar.

In a statement to Forbidden Stories, Vaikundarajan’s spokesperson indicated that as far as those investigations were concerned “all the allegations made were without any basis and not in accordance with the law.”

There is a reminder of V.V. Mineral at every corner in Thisayanvilai, in the southern province of Tamil Nadu. Most notable is the V.V. College of Engineering, an imposing, brand-new building established in 2010 and protected by security guards. The immaculate pink and white facade stands out in the middle of this rural and poor village. A little further along, a health centre displays the name of the prominent sand business operator. Yet, the long-term environmental impact of sand mining tarnishes this record.

In a report published in May, the United Nations Environment Programme underlined the environmental and social impacts of sand extraction, saying it is an issue of global significance. “The increasing volume of aggregates extracted, often illegally, from riverine and marine ecosystems results in river and coastal erosion, threats to freshwater and marine fisheries and biodiversity,” it noted.

Using beach sand for construction requires lower quantities of sand than from other sources, like rivers, but it can still disrupt the ecosystem. “We are the only company operating with valid environmental clearance … so the environmental degradation is an imaginary story spread with ulterior motive,” said Vaikundarajan, who blamed erosion on global warming.

Up until now, little has been done by authorities, journalists and non-governmental organizations to measure the toll sand mining has taken on the environment in Tamil Nadu. Yet testimonies point in the same direction.

“One impact which is very clear is that the sand dunes have disappeared, and the sea is coming into the land,” said Ravishankar, the journalist.

Forbidden Stories journalists met a fisherman from Kovalam, a village in Tamil Nadu, who complained that the sea nibbles more and more on the beach every year, a phenomenon called erosion, which the fisherman blames on illegal mining in the area. Houses must retreat inland or are swallowed by the sea. “All the houses that were here, three or four years ago, like our house, have all gone for good,” he said. He claims around 300 persons lost their homes in the area.

Due to the loss of the natural sand barrier, salty water is suspected to have seeped into the groundwater. “The water turned salty,” said a local farmer from Kuttam. “The banana plants couldn’t adapt to the salty water. After a point, I had to sell the land.”

The impact could be long-lasting. “Coastal erosion can occur even decades after sand extraction has stopped,” said Pascal Peduzzi, head of the Global Change & Vulnerability Unit at the UN Environment Programme.

In the meantime, reporters trying to expose the sand mafias that devour the Indian coasts keep coming constantly under threat. In May 2019, the Committee to Protect Journalists noted a new attack in Odisha, a coastal state north of Tamil Nadu. “Six unidentified individuals wielding a machete and other sharp objects attacked journalist Pratap Patra,” who has said he believes this was related to an article he published alleging that a local sand mining operator was working illegally, according to CPJ.

“There used to be a few journalists before I started, but they were harassed and their families were frightened and threatened, and they just had to back off. They didn’t really have a choice,” Ravishankar said about reporting on illegal sand mining in Tamil Nadu.

“Today I’m probably the only one who is still poking my nose into this.”

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