Sessions | Talks
14:45 - 15:15 ⋅ Afternoon
Bangalore International Centre
Illegal sand mining is destroying India's rivers. This talk traces how India Sand Watch used open data, community building, and data visualization, from zines to court evidence to ML flipbooks, to build the intention needed to actually address it.
Siddharth Agarwal
Founder·Veditum India Foundation
Wicked problems do not yield to data alone. The data is missing, the sources do not exist, the structures for implementation are absent, and the will to collaborate has not yet been built. Identifying the problem is nowhere near enough.
When Veditum picked up the issue of illegal and destructive sand mining in India's rivers, they started with a reasonable assumption: use machine learning to identify illegal activity, and that would be enough to drive action. It was not.
What they needed to build first was intention. And that required reimagining the entire response, with collaborators across NGOs, academia, the judiciary, media, private citizens, and state actors all in mind.
This talk traces what followed. India Sand Watch is now an open-data archive with over 50,000 data points, built on a Sites of Violence framework that maps the sand mining sector as a series of interconnected violations rather than isolated incidents. Getting there required data pipelines built through scaled volunteering, data sprints, and partnerships, each with its own visualization component.
The artefacts that came out of this work are as varied as the audiences they serve. Zines and sprint report cards for community volunteers. GIS maps for researchers and journalists. Visual evidence packages for court cases. And a physical flipbook that translates a machine learning model detecting mining activity from satellite imagery into something a non-technical audience can follow and act on.
The talk is about what it actually takes to use open data and visualization on problems that resist easy solutions: building the dataset, building the coalition, and building the case in forms that reach people with the power to change something.
Siddharth Agarwal has been walking across India and along India's rivers, attempting to document and bring stories of marginalised communities and the environment into the mainstream.
Since 2014, he has walked 6000+ kms, including the lengths of the rivers Ganga and Ken. He is the founder of Veditum India Foundation where he is working to transform the environmental governance landscape in India.
The organisation - Veditum, has overseen long documentation and sensing expeditions of over 7000kms along 7 different rivers in India. These stories, captured as part of the Moving Upstream project and Fellowship have been distributed widely, and brought significant attention to the cause of these rivers.
Through the India Sand Watch project, Veditum is introducing accountability in the river sand mining sector in India. And through the Kolkata Change Makers initiative, they are creating a space for deep explorations in change making for and from the city.