The Supreme Court has made it clear—environmental clearances for sand mining projects cannot be issued if the District Survey Report (DSR) ignores the most crucial factor: whether the river can actually replenish the sand being taken away.
A bench of Justices PS Narasimha and AS Chandurkar stressed that replenishment studies are not optional add-ons but mandatory safeguards. Without them, the Court said, any DSR is “fundamentally defective” and therefore worthless in the eyes of law.
This ruling came while dismissing appeals filed by the National Highways Authority of India and the Union Territory of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh. The Court upheld the National Green Tribunal’s earlier decision striking down environmental clearances for sand mining in three blocks of J&K.
Drawing a parallel to forestry, the Court noted that just as tree harvesting requires knowledge of growth rates to prevent depletion, rivers too need a replenishment study before sand extraction is allowed. “It enables us to decide whether sand mining can be permitted without throwing the river off balance,” the bench observed.
The judgment also underlined the urgency: the construction industry’s demand for river sand is ballooning, and experts warn the world could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050. The Court flagged the ecological dangers of unchecked sand mining—from riverbed erosion and widening to biodiversity collapse across aquatic, shoreline, and floodplain ecosystems.
The bench held that a replenishment report must form the backbone of every DSR. Without it, environmental clearances are nothing but a threat to fragile river systems. In its scathing remarks, the Court criticized authorities in J&K for “compromising regulatory integrity” by pushing through approvals based on incomplete and unlawful reports.
The ruling serves as a warning to governments and agencies nationwide: scientific replenishment data is not a bureaucratic formality—it is the key to protecting rivers from being mined into extinction.
