Analysing The Impact Of Sand Mining On The Flow Of Tawi River, Jammu And Kashmir

Abstract

The river Tawi in Jammu and Kashmir faces indiscriminate sand mining practice where large amount of sand is being mined from the river bed between Nagrota and Sidhra area. The increasing pace of urbanization and associated developments in Jammu City and nearby areas are responsible for this practice. The mining activity in Tawi river involves massive digging of river bed materials upto 3-4 mts depth with the help of heavy duty excavators used by the mining contractors, whereas, the Geology and Mining Department gave the permission to extract the materials up to 3 mts depth. Moreover, the sand mining has impacted the flow of river Tawi particularly between Nagrota and Sidhra. In this study, the locations of sand mining sites in Tawi river between Nagrota and Sidhra are mapped from 2007 to 2018 and an attempt made to analyse the possible impact of sand mining on the flow of river. The mapping is done by using GIS technique and a field visit is also carried out for acquiring the coordinates and photographs of present sand mining sites in river Tawi