Message from the mountains

Himachal, Uttarakhand must check construction projects

The rising death toll from rain and landslides in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand over the past week is yet another tragic reminder of how state administrations prioritise tourism income over basic safety standards. The latest disaster has exposed the wilful disregard for basic environmental norms by permitting uncontrolled and unplanned construction of roads and buildings in one of the world’s most ecologically fragile regions. Such tragedies recur with varying intensity each summer and monsoon season, yet no local administration appears to have absorbed the fundamental lessons from them. In Uttarakhand, for instance, flash floods killed more than 300 people in and around key pilgrimage points in 2013, and deaths have occurred in 2019, 2021 and 2022 for similar reasons. These serial disasters have only highlighted the multiple contributory acts of omission and commission.

In both states, the indiscriminate felling of forests, which play a critical role in binding the mountain terrain, has significantly enhanced the dangers of landslides. Compounding this issue are roads and tunnels built to ease tourist access; these are being bulldozed indiscriminately through the mountainsides at near right angles, severely destabilising the terrain that falls in a dangerous seismic zone for both states. This year, photographs of the long lines of tourist vehicles stuck in high-altitude traffic jams, as landslides blocked roads, presented a compelling image of the crisis. Worse, debris and construction waste are simply dumped in river beds, blocking the natural drainage systems and exacerbating the threat of floods during heavy rains — a predicament to which irate local residents of Kullu, Mandi and Shimla, the three worst-affected regions in Himachal, recently drew attention. Hydroelectric dams constructed on the upper reaches of rivers have added to the problem. Ironically, instead of controlling floods, they are now causing them for the most bureaucratic of reasons: Dam operators’ failure to adjust to climate change and recalibrate water release schedules to account for the increasingly erratic rainfall patterns or unseasonal glacial melt. Added to these problems is the congested and unplanned construction of buildings, carried out without regard to adequate and systematic drainage and waste management systems. This negligence is causing townships such as Joshimath and Karnaprayag in the upper reaches of Uttarakhand to sink.

The 2013 disasters and subsequent calamities should have served as wake-up calls to hilly state administration to pull back or modify building projects. But both the Centre and state administrations have doubled down on construction by yoking the “development” agenda to the promotion of tourism. The Centre’s Rs 12,000 crore Char Dham Yatra project to widen roads on the mountainous terrain leading to the four pilgrimage points of Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri and Yamunotri has long been red-flagged by ecologists. Equally, over 50,000 trees have been cut to build a new highway between Delhi and Dehradun, the jump-off point for the yatra, on a river bed that runs through the Rajaji elephant and tiger sanctuary, all in the interests of cutting travel time. No surprise, parts of these constructions have also collapsed during the latest bout of heavy rainfall. The irony is that both states draw considerable revenue from tourism, which is now facing cancelled hotel bookings and poor advance bookings. Both will have to spend crores in repairing the infrastructure damage. The real question is whether the lessons from the mountains will be learnt this time.