Environmental effects of river sand mining: a case from the river catchments of Vembanad lake, Southwest coast of India

Rivers in the southwest coast of India are under immense pressure due to various kinds of human activities among which indiscriminate extraction of construction grade sand is the most disastrous one. The situation is rather alarming in the rivers draining the Vembanad lake catchments as the area hosts one of the fast developing urban-cum-industrial centre, the Kochi city, otherwise called the Queen of Arabian Sea. The Vembanad lake catchments are drained by seven rivers whose length varies between 78 and 244 km and catchment area between 847 and 5,398 km(2). On an average, 11.73 million ty(-1) of sand and gravel are being extracted from the active channels and 0.414 million ty(-1) of sand from the river floodplains. The quantity of instream mining is about 40 times the higher than the sand input estimated in the gauging stations. As a result of indiscriminate sand mining, the riverbed in the storage zone is getting lowered at a rate of 7-15 cm y(-1) over the past two decades. This, in turn, imposes severe damages to the physical and biological environments of these river systems. The present paper deals with the environmental effects of indiscriminate sand mining from the small catchment rivers in the southwest coast of India, taking the case of the rivers draining the Vembanad lake catchments as an example.