Sand and gravel are extracted from the beds of the Sutlej, Beas and Ravi and from the seasonal streams for construction. It is one of the most valuable and most contested resources in Punjab.
Legal extraction is licensed by the state through auctioned mining sites. Illegal extraction runs alongside it at a scale that every government has acknowledged and none has stopped.
The consequences are physical: riverbeds lowered, bridge and embankment foundations undermined, bank erosion, and changes to the water table where the extraction goes below it.
It is a standing political issue. Every Punjab government has accused its predecessor of running a sand mafia and has faced the same accusation in turn, and there have been killings connected to it.
It is also the clearest example in Punjab of a resource that belongs to nobody in particular being converted into private income at public cost, which is the same structure as the groundwater problem and is treated far less seriously.
Punjab has no rock and almost no hill. Every building in the state is concrete and concrete is sand, so the material for the whole construction economy comes out of four riverbeds and a set of seasonal drains. There is no substitute quarry anywhere in the state.
The auction of mining sites has been reorganised by every government that has come in, and the price at the site and the price at the building are always far apart.
A river lays down sand at a rate and it can be taken at that rate for ever. Taken faster, the bed drops, and the bed is what everything else is measured from: the bridge foundation, the embankment toe, the intake of a tubewell in the village alongside. The question was never whether to mine it, it is how fast.