Sumaira Abdulali and her NGO, Awaaz Foundation, are known for activism on noise pollution. In a noisy city, she has been the go-to person for information and reactions, and her work is cited by experts. But for almost as long, she has been fighting for another cause: the environmental damage of rampant sand mining.
Last week, Awaaz launched Save Our Sand, an awareness campaign. Not coincidentally, on Tuesday, the United Nations Environment Programme will launch a report, Sand and Sustainability: Finding new solutions for environmental governance of global sand resources .
An advance note on the event, the Geneva Environment Network says that due to urbanisation and other factors, the demand for sand and gravel has increased three-fold over the last two decades, with the global annual demand at around at 40-50 billion tonnes, making it the second-largest resource extracted and traded by volume after water. The note says: “The extraction of sand and gravel from the seabed has led to pollution, flooding, the lowering of water aquifers, beach erosion and more frequent droughts. Unsustainable sand extraction also has social consequences, as it can hamper tourism and other livelihoods.” The report will point to the need for action like regulation.
For Ms. Abdulali, this is a moment of quiet satisfaction. The UN first took note of the problem, she says, after she presented at the Conference of Parties 11, Convention of Biodiversity in Hyderabad in October 2012. She has also spoken at other fora, pointing out infringements and the dangers that the practice resulted in. Development, she has said, is not a bad thing, but the demand for sand is endangering the very cities that are being developed as the beaches around them are depleted, leaving them vulnerable. She has also spoken of the dangers that lower level government officials face while trying to stop the practice, as the miners are often connected to the construction industry and heavyweight politicians.
She herself has faced violence in 2004: she was beaten up and her car damaged; she had to be hospitalised with head injuries and broken teeth — though, she notes with quiet satisfaction, she kicked one of her attackers in the testicles — and a few years later, after she filed a PIL in the Bombay High Court, what she thinks is the first PIL on sand-mining in the country, another set of attackers tried to force her car off the road and then to edge it off a bridge.
“I’m very excited that the UN has taken it up,” she says, “because the fact that it is recognised as a huge problem by a body like the UN, is a huge step forward. They are going to put out there so that people internationally, nationally and locally will know about it as a problem, and find ways to address it. From 2003, all those years ago, when I stopped that truck, to here… it’s very exciting.”
The Save Our Sand campaign is designed to support the UN report. The international body, Ms. Abdulali says, is a great place to lay down policy and international protocols, but implementation needs awareness. “The government may make a policy,” she says, “but for that policy to be implemented, we need people. And that’s my role; putting it into the public domain, all that I have said, to the government, to international bodies. That’s where my current campaign comes in.”
