Technologies of a humble natural resource: The sand mining industry and marginal value in Bombay/Mumbai, 1920-2020 (2023)
Like many other natural resources, sand has become integral to technologies that symbolize modernity and development, but that depend upon an imperative of low cost. In India, sand began to be commoditized in the early twentieth century as an input in a powerful new building technology, reinforced cement concrete (RCC). With the expansion of cities and major infrastructure projects since independence and especially since the 1990s, sand mining has nonetheless remained characterized by small-scale enterprises and small technologies; it is also controlled by regional powerholders who operate on the legal margins, widely referred to as ‘sand mafias’. This article draws upon archival and ethnographic research on sand mining for construction in the city region of Bombay/Mumbai to show that the sand mining industry there has effectively come to operate over time through various methods of drawing marginal value from devalued labour techniques and delegitimized or tactical modes of operation. These destructive-productive activities, at a broad level, constitute micro-practices of contemporary capitalism (modes of flexible accumulation) on a resource frontier. But equally, for many of the people involved in them, their value lies in their unpredictable excesses and terrains of resource-making that likewise buoy changes in the technological assemblage.
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