Green Blood Series (Part 3): Forbidden Stories: Sand mafias silence journalists in India

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Green Blood Series (Part 3): Forbidden Stories: Sand mafias silence journalists in India By Marion Guégan and Cécile Schilis-Gallego

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, there is a square surrounded by small houses. Among them, a quiet two-room house is hidden from passersby by a green 10-foot wall and blue iron doors.

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.

The day of Singh’s funeral, on 9 June 2015, his son filed a complaint against Verma and five policemen for conspiracy to commit murder and immolation. It was not long before the former minister got in touch with the family., that they dropped the case after reaching a compromise with Verma. 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.

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.

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.In one of the districts where illegal extraction has been most aggressive, people are afraid to talk.

 

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