Himachal’s disastrous slide man-made, not natural

Tarun Shridhar

If we don’t learn from the tragedies of the past, we are cursed to repeat them in the future,” loudly proclaims the home page of the Himachal Pradesh State Disaster Management Authority. To ensure that irony is not lost, just above this profound statement is a ticker flashing a sequence of major disasters that have afflicted the state, starting with the 1905 earthquake in Kangra. The ticking information has all the morbid details of a number of precious lives lost, property damaged. It is déjà vu over and over again.

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Perched on the Himalayas, the youngest and the most fragile mountain system in the world, Himachal is predisposed to hazards and calamities. This surely is no case to put the onus of earthquakes, cloudbursts, flash floods, landslides on nature; the anthropogenic activities would have to share a larger part of the blame.

Accept responsibility

Let us begin by dumping the phrase “natural disaster”, for it excludes us of any responsibility of risk reduction. Disasters are not natural; it is the phenomenon or, at the most, hazards that may be natural. Disasters are man-made, always. An eye-opening case study is the devastating earthquake in Port-Au-Prince, the capital city of Haiti, in 2016. The quake of 7.0 magnitude nearly wiped the city off the map, killing three lakh people. Around the same time, an earthquake of identical magnitude hit New Zealand, resulting in zero death and negligible loss to property. So it should be clearly understood that earthquakes do not kill people, buildings do.

Sooner we debunk the myth of natural disaster, we would assume greater responsibility and rationality in our interface with nature, rather than pushing development activities dictated by political populism. Unfortunately, of late, development  has become synonymous with civil construction.

Simple interventions

Tree plantation on the slopes, especially the soil-binding species, is the most effective method to check soil erosion and prevent landslides. But we seem to prefer the huge retaining wall model and are content with ‘growing more trees’ being no more than a laudable slogan. An elementary practice while undertaking construction activities, particular road construction, is to avoid cutting the toe of the mountain slope. Each and every civil engineer knows this. Yet, this is precisely how our hills are being cut for the construction of highways.

Even a layman is aghast at the sheer vertical elevation artificially given to the hill slopes. No wonder landslides have become a round-the-year phenomenon. Keeping the drains along the roads clean and unclogged would prevent and substantially reduce damage to roads. Here, too, precisely the opposite is the situation.

Unregulated, reckless and generally illegal mining over riverbeds poses the single biggest threat to the safety of bridges. No one disputes it, yet it goes on rampantly. Disasters in their aftermath generate hectic construction activity and money starts pouring in. Who benefits the most could be anyone’s guess.

General apathy

It challenges logic that simple, low or even zero-cost interventions and precautions that could go a long way in preventing loss to human lives and public property are ignored. Is it general apathy? Or vested interest in damage and reconstruction? Or perhaps political populism? It could well be a blend of all these and several more factors.

To illustrate, I am reminded of the calamity that befell Kotrupi village on the Mandi-Pathankot highway a few years back. The whole mountain snapped and in its wake buried to death nearly 50 people. Part of the highway was washed away and it was closed to pedestrians too on account of the danger posed by continuous slides and flooding. The very day next, a group of college boys and girls were insisting that they be allowed to walk across as the journey time would otherwise increase by a precious hour-and-a-half. Again, in Mandi district a few years back, several young engineering students from Telangana were washed away in the strong currents of the Beas while clicking pictures perched on rocks in the middle of the river. Two days later, I could witness groups of people, young and old, indulging in similar pastime. This indifference and apathy to disaster management pervades our society and lifestyles.

Disaster prevention

Political populism, irrespective of the dispensation, has severely compromised disaster prevention and management. Promises followed by schemes for regularisation of encroachment have ensured that safety of buildings is compromised. Having been an author of one such scheme, a provision was incorporated that no construction over public utilities, particularly drains, would be regularised. This condition invited hostile protests. Rain and storm water would surely find a way out and take you and your building along. Still we tend to be obstinate.

 As a system, we are wary of imposing any planning regulation in the rural areas, while in the urban belts we have the plans but are shy of enforcing them. In fact, the political class as a whole is a great supporter of “regularising” building law violations.

A cruel irony that despite a well-documented disaster management plan and a highly-responsive administration, Himachal Pradesh suffers untold misery over and over again. The famous lines from TS Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men sum it up:

“Between the idea
And the reality,
Between the motion
And the act,
Falls the shadow”.

— The writer is a retired IAS officer of HP cadre