Sand Mining Equipment in India: Machines, Models, Tenders and News

Which machines are used in sand mining?

Sand mining runs on excavators and loaders. An excavator digs the sand at the reach (the marked stretch of river bed or field where a lease may dig) and loads it into tippers or tractor-trolleys. A wheel loader then stockpiles it at the stockyard and loads buyers’ trucks. On small reaches and on patta land (private farmland where floods have left sand), a backhoe loader often does both jobs. Tamil Nadu told the environment ministry, for its 2016 sand mining guidelines, that most of its Public Works Department sand quarries used two poclains each.

Sand does not only come from rivers. The ministry’s guidelines list six sources: river beds and flood plains, lakes and reservoirs, farm fields, the coast, palaeo-channels (old river courses now buried under the ground) and manufactured sand, or M-sand, which is crushed from rock. Each one changes the machine you need.

Tippers, tractor-trolleys, weighbridges, sand pumps, dredgers, crushers and sand washing or screening plants are not listed here. How a long reach excavator lifts silt from a canal or tank is set out in the dredging and desilting guide, and what M-sand is made from, with its sizes, in quarry dust and M-sand.

Whether a machine may work a block at all is written into that block’s approved mining plan and environmental clearance, and the 2016 guidelines prefer manual digging wherever it will do. What happens to a machine caught working outside those papers is covered in illegal mining penalty; what sand sells for, in river sand price; and whether a sand supply business pays, in sand business profit.

Where in India is sand mined, and how?

In 2017-18 a Ministry of Mines committee sent Indian Bureau of Mines officials and consultants to 14 states to see how sand was being mined. Its Sand Mining Framework of March 2018 put national demand at about 700 million tonnes in 2016-17, rising 6 to 7 percent a year. The framework, the environment ministry’s 2016 guidelines and its 2020 enforcement guidelines are reproduced together in a ministry affidavit filed before the National Green Tribunal. The states below show how differently the work runs.

For a machine owner, the useful pattern is the contract. Where a state agency holds the blocks, the work goes out as raising contracts for digging and loading, and the agency decides how many machines a reach may run. Where blocks are auctioned, the lessee runs the work and hires its own machines. On a river bed, the 2020 guidelines work out a lease’s reserve from a depth of no more than 3 metres and cap what one hectare may yield at 60,000 tonnes a year. That cap, more than the size of the river, decides how much excavator a reach can keep busy.

Who runs sand mining?

Most sand blocks are worked by small lessees and contractors, and in several states by a state agency, so there is no short list of large sand mining companies. These are the bodies a sand mining contractor deals with. The list is alphabetical, not a ranking.

The roles above come from the 2016 and 2020 guidelines, the 2018 framework and the environment ministry’s account of its 2022 notification, all in the affidavit linked above.