No let-up in Himalayan plunder

Shyam Saran

Former Foreign Secretary and Honorary Fellow, CPR

THE river has come down to cleanse Uttarakhand of its greed — this is how a venerable old villager reacted to the horrific disaster which engulfed Kedarnath and Badrinath in 2013. Heavy rain and the melting of the Chorabari glacier above Kedarnath unleashed an angry deluge of water, mud and boulders, which raced down from Kedarnath to Badrinath and beyond, destroying several guest houses which had cropped up over the years at both places of pilgrimage. There were 12,000 pilgrims at these places and at least 5,000 lost their lives.

We carry on as if the disasters we have experienced are isolated natural events, and not linked to our destructive activities.

The disaster brought home the fact that pilgrimage has been transformed into a profitable but risky tourist activity. Imagine that at such high altitudes, there were guest houses with generators providing 24x7 power. For cooking and heating, gas cylinders had been brought to these growing urban settlements, which also did not have any waste disposal arrangement. It has been made out that this was a totally unexpected natural disaster which caught the local administration and the people completely unawares. The culpability of humans was ignored.

At a post-mortem meeting in Dehradun later, I learnt that warnings about a disaster in the Kedarnath-Badrinath area had been shared with the state and local authorities. They were ignored because they were not ‘specific’ enough. Suggestions that people at these places of pilgrimage should be evacuated were ignored, the argument being that if the predictions did not come true, there would be heavy financial losses to a flourishing tourism industry, and also the state’s coffers. Greed, indeed, has been a handmaiden of ecological disasters in the fragile Himalayan mountain zone.

Despite the trauma of the 2013 disaster, preventive measures, which were announced thereafter, have been tossed aside. It had been stipulated that a strip of 200 metres from the riverbanks would be declared a ‘prohibited zone’, where no construction activity would be permitted and encroachments would be removed. A large number of dwelling places, hotels and guest houses, which had been built right at the edge of the riverbanks, had been washed away in the raging floods. Just a couple of years later, while travelling on the Gangotri highway, I found that new private houses, guest houses and hotels had come up right on the banks of the river in violation of the zoning law. Is it any surprise that we are once again being treated to images of floods engulfing and carrying away the second-generation buildings on their banks? Then there are entire hillsides, with multi-storeyed buildings, slipping down in massive landslides. And this time it is not just Uttarakhand. Himachal Pradesh has also become an ecological disaster-prone area.

Despite the tragic experience of the Kedarnath-Badrinath disaster, the ecological ravaging of the Himalayas continues unabated. In 2021, a flashflood on the Rishiganga river in Chamoli district washed away or damaged several hydroelectric projects downstream, apart from causing the loss of life and property in several villages in the valley. Temperatures are rising across the Himalayan region due to accelerating climate change, introducing a new source of instability. It was a chunk of the glacier in the Nanda Devi mountains which detached due to unseasonal melting, causing a massive surge of water. Human activity is exacerbating the effects of a warming climate.

It is a reasonable expectation among hill communities that they should have connectivity to major towns and markets downstream. The better connected they are, the greater the opportunities for marketing their products. Tourism is a source of additional income. But in my travels in the mountains, I have found that several of the roads built under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana had become impassable due to a slush of mud and debris because there were no arrangements for their maintenance and repair after the inevitable damage due to heavy rain. The communities expected the government to undertake this work because their own means were limited. The government at the local and state levels paid no attention to these roads once they had been built. Across the Himalayan landscape, you will find scarred and ravaged hillsides. And the villages are still cut off from the outside world.

The Char Dham highway project and the Rishikesh-Karnaprayag railway project are likely to become disaster zones of tomorrow. A young geological terrain, still shifting and increasingly unstable, is being unsettled by massive construction work all along the Alaknanda valley. Several tunnels are being gouged out of the young mountain adjacent to the Alaknanda. Should there be a massive flood like the 2013 disaster, imagine the scale of destruction that will follow. During the current rainy season, one has already witnessed several sections of the Char Dham highway being washed away by floods and landslides. More will follow.

There has been a tendency to depict a trade-off between environment and development; that some damage to the environment is the price we must pay for bringing development to communities in remote areas in the mountains. This is a false proposition. A burst of ephemeral prosperity quickly leads to the loss of livelihoods and the exposure to climate and environment risks. The danger is not only to the Himalayan states. After all, they are linked through the umbilical cords of all our major river systems with the vast and heavily populated Indo-Gangetic Plain. What happens in the far-off mountains affects the entire subcontinent. We know this and yet carry on as if the disasters we have experienced are isolated natural events, and not linked to our own destructive activities.

After the Kedarnath-Badrinath tragedy, one of the several activists working to safeguard the Himalayas had this to say, “It was a tragedy that had so many lessons for us to learn. But it seems that we have learnt nothing and we keep on repeating our old mistakes, respecting neither the fragile nature of the Himalayan ecosystem nor the floodplains requirement of the rivers. We don’t even realise that inappropriate developmental activities in the Himalayas are going to make us suffer history again.”

Will we ever learn?

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