A ₹4,730-crore riverbed and a question of who blinked: sand-mining plea returns to Madras High Court

Two years after the Enforcement Directorate wrote to Tamil Nadu's police chief with what it called hard, machine-level proof of illegal sand mining, the fight has landed back in court, this time from the other side. A partner of a Chennai-based construction company at Naganallur has approached the Madras High Court seeking to prevent the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption from registering a first information report on the basis of the ED's 2024 communication.

The ED's dossier is not a small one. Investigators said they assessed all 28 river-sand mining sites in the state using scientific techniques developed with experts from an IIT-Kanpur-incubated firm, comparing GPS coordinates, geo-scanning and machine operating hours against the boundaries of permitted quarries. Their conclusion: sand had been excavated far beyond permissible limits, across some 987 hectares, and the value of the illegally mined sand, alleged to be proceeds of crime, was quantified at ₹4,730 crore.

The chronology is what makes the case uncomfortable for everyone in the chain. The ED first wrote to the Director-General of Police on 13 June 2024, and sent a reminder the following month. According to the agency, no case followed. That silence is now the heart of the matter: the contractor's plea asks the court to hold that a two-year-old dossier from a central agency cannot be the trigger for a state police case, while the ED's position is that the state simply sat on evidence of a riverbed being emptied.

The legal ground has shifted before. An earlier round of ED action in the sand-mining matter ran into a wall in the same High Court, which held that without a registered scheduled offence and identified proceeds of crime, the money-laundering investigation could not be sustained, and quashed provisional attachment orders against contractors. A bench has since asked a pointed procedural question: can one investigating agency itself approach the court to direct another agency to register a case?

For residents of the delta and the dry belts downstream, the legal duel can sound abstract. It is not. River sand is the skeleton of every house, bridge and culvert in the state; when it is taken beyond the permitted line, the river pays first, wells and groundwater pay next, and the honest builder pays last, in higher prices. A ₹4,730-crore hole in a riverbed is also a hole in public revenue.

The court will now decide whether the DVAC may proceed. Whatever the outcome, the two-year gap between a central agency's warning and any state action is a fact no ruling can erase, and it is the question the government will have to answer outside the courtroom as well.