Tackle climate risk firmly to minimise economic losses

Subir Roy

Senior Economic Analyst

THE country has being devastated by extreme weather events that have extracted a heavy price for unplanned development allowed over the years. From Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh in the north to India’s tech capital Bengaluru in the south, it is the same story. Since this can be described as a national phenomenon, it is imperative for the Central Government to call all states together and devise a plan which will be followed by all so as to prevent short-sighted development which leads to massive economic losses.

Exactly a year ago, extremely heavy rain flooded Bengaluru, giving rise to unbelievable scenes — high-end residences and posh cars partly swallowed up by water, leaving techies no choice but to go to work on tractor-trailers. Social media was flooded with comments: for instance, it took two hours to get to work to develop an app which would deliver groceries in 10 minutes! An association of major IT and banking companies located on the Outer Ring Road, which was severely affected, has estimated that the flood caused an immediate damage of Rs 225 crore.

How did this happen? The city is uniquely made up of interconnected lakes. After groundwater is recharged by rains and fills up a lake, the excess water flows down to the next lake. Intense rain and damaged interconnections, which were not properly dredged and were blocked by debris, plus mindless construction over the interconnections, caused the floods. The crisis had been building up for decades, with lakes slowly disappearing as they were drained and built over.

Neighbourhood-sized developments have been built on dried-up lakes, made possible by winning over officialdom. These have all come out of the 200-odd lakes that were once the city’s unique asset. Perhaps, the most startling piece of statistics is that the city’s population has more than tripled in the past three decades, even as in the last 50 years, the city’s tree cover has come down from 70 per cent to a bare 3 per cent!

Up north, the damage caused by water discharged early this year in Uttarakhand’s Joshimath, a prominent town on the Char Dham pilgrimage circuit, attracted national attention. A part of the town simply sank. As many as two-thirds of the houses in the town were damaged. A report by a panel put together by the National Disaster Management Authority, which UN agencies and the Central Building Research Institute have joined, has put the loss at Rs 565 crore.

How did the disaster happen? As the houses were built on steep slopes, even minor ground subsidence resulted in extensive damage. Worse, the buildings, which had structural deficiencies, were made out of weak material and with inadequate reinforcement.

The irony is that a denouement of this sort was neither unprecedented nor unforeseen. Landslides and land subsidence occurred in Joshimath in the 1970s. A panel set up thereafter recommended that major construction work should not be allowed in the town and the Niti and Mana valleys as they were situated on moraines — rocks, sediments and soil deposited by a glacier. It is located in seismic zone V and is prone to landslides and flashfloods. In September last year, the Uttarakhand Government noted that the town had been sinking.

Joshimath sank gradually; so, affected families were able to move out in time. Himachal Pradesh was not so lucky. Heavy rains over the last four months took many lives and destroyed countless homes. The only redeeming thing is that the state government appears to know the factors that led to the disaster. The government has blamed the disaster on faulty structural design of houses and indiscriminate construction. People built houses on nullahs, obstructing the natural drainage system and triggering the floods. It has been tellingly put: the river didn’t enter homes, the homes entered the river.

A key root cause is the road traffic from the plains. In the case of Himachal, it is the tourist seeking to spend the weekend in the hills, and in Uttarakhand’s case, it is the pilgrim following the Char Dham circuit. The resultant heavy traffic on the trunk roads has prompted the government to undertake the task of converting two-lane highways into four-lane ones. The landslides, which resulted from unscientifically cutting down hillsides and their tree cover, have blocked key highways to major centres like Manali and Shimla, dealing a blow to the growing tourist traffic.

Where does the solution lie so that the economy of the hill states and even the liveability of a city like Bengaluru are protected? The short answer is — build according to an appropriate design that will impose only as much load as a particular hillside can take. Treat as sacred the path that the water from the glaciers and streams will take. And most importantly, reduce the number of vehicles on the roads instead of trying to expand them. What the hills need is the introduction of electric buses of various sizes capable of traversing all types of hill roads. Equip them with GPS tags, track their locations on a website, and provide an appropriate app for smartphones to help everyone monitor when the next bus is arriving. Impose a hill tax on private vehicles, as Singapore does on the private cars of its residents.

A good plan of action is being implemented by the Integrated Development Project implemented by the Himachal Forest Department with the assistance of the World Bank. It seeks to improve upstream water management and water productivity of selected gram panchayats, consequently increasing the incomes of their farmers by enabling diversification. The overall aim is to raise the land area under sustainable landscape management, put more farmlands under efficient irrigation systems and increase the number of farmers adopting climate-smart agricultural practices.

The water management will be done by managing upstream catchments. Slope stability measures, drainage line treatments, reforestation, and enrichment plantations have the potential to enhance ecosystem management, increase forest cover, promote carbon sequestration, monitor sediment regulation, reduce erosion and control landslides. This will achieve the integrated objectives of soil and water conservation, enhanced availability of water, diversification in crop production, and better returns for the Himachali farmer.

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