Line Production in Nepal | A nation built on sand

 Line Production in Nepal

As dusk falls hundreds of tipper trucks carrying sand, gravel and boulders travel together like a serpentine cargo train past Thankot, Sanga, Sankhu, and Chapagaun, the cardinal entry points to the Valley. They rumble on throughout the night, and as dawn breaks the trucks head back out empty.

Their cargo of gravel and sand are mined from the beds of rivers like the Trisuli, Indrawati, Rosi, or Sun Kosi. And when these rivers are  stripped clean, the extraction simply moves to other rivers further away.

Line Production in Nepal

The appropriately named ‘crusher’ industry is crushing Nepal’s natural environment with irreversible damage, scarring mountains and killing rivers.

Indeed, as Nepal’s wealthiest businessmen and politicians, contractors, and middlemen collude to reap rewards from sand mining and quarries, local communities are left to deal with floods, landslides, dust and smoke on their own.

“Although the scale of exploitation might not be large in Nepal, the effect to the environment and to Nepalis will be tenfold worse than elsewhere because of the fragile nature of the Himalaya,” explains Ramesh Bhushal, an environmental journalist with The Third Pole portal.

More than half of Nepal’s population now lives in the Tarai, which spans only one-fifth of the country’s area. Much of this population depends on the Chure Range watershed which has fragile geological structure with thin vegetation protecting the top soil.

Source : https://www.nepalitimes.com/here-now/a-nation-built-on-sand