Himalayan disasters result of large-scale ecological ruin justified as essential for progress

By Bharat Dogra 

I left Delhi recently amidst very worrying reports of the village of Dharali being wiped out in the state of Uttarakhand. As I reached the hill area of the neighboring state of Himachal Pradesh, I found a trail of destruction in this neighboring state as well, forcing me into heavy traffic jams and obstructions caused by landslides. Looking out into the dark amidst lashing rains, I could see that this heavy landslide was close to a village where I had come a few years back to report on a village ruined by heavy cutting of trees and a lack of adequate caution in highway widening.

I managed to reach my home late in the night, but news continued to pour in the next day about continuing problems on the Kalka-Shimla highway. From elsewhere, in Chamba, there was a report that six people (including four from a single family) had died when a boulder fell on a car. Newspapers reported that nearly 357 roads in Himachal Pradesh had been damaged or obstructed. Up to August 7 or so, the rainy season starting on June 20 had seen 58 flash floods, 30 cloudbursts, and 51 landslides in this small state. 108 people had died, and 37 were missing, while the economic loss was estimated at INR 19,520 million.

In recent years, very extensive harm from disasters has been reported from the Himalayan region, particularly Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. This is increasingly linked to very large-scale cutting of trees caused in the process of taking up various questionable ‘development projects.’ Recently, for a stretch of a highway, I asked local people how many trees had been cut, and I was told “at least ten thousand.” I was very distressed. When I was reporting on the famous Chipko or ‘hug the trees’ movement during the late 1970s in Uttarakhand, there used to be prolonged mobilizations of people against the commercial felling of even a few hundred trees (or even fewer), but here ten thousand trees had been cut without any trace of a mobilization to prevent this.

One reason for this is that a mistaken discourse on development has been created which justifies large-scale ecological ruin as being essential for progress. Based on this, the authorities and big businesspersons have gone ahead with a development model based on too many excesses—excessive widening of highways, an excess of dam and hydropower projects, an excess of mining, an excess of heavy building construction, and even an excess of the kind of tourism that does not go well with the protection of the environment.

Firstly, there is too much of all this beyond the carrying capacity of the fragile hill environment, and secondly, on top of this, several powerful companies and businesses try to cut costs by neglecting important environmental safeguards and precautions.

All this ignores the well-established geological reality that the Himalayas, being one of the youngest mountain chains still in the process of formation, must be handled very carefully in terms of not disrupting them by the use of explosives (for heavy construction or mining work), heavy construction work, or indiscriminate mining, deforestation, tunneling, and impounding of huge quantities of water in highly risky ways. All these have destabilized the massive but fragile and vulnerable hills, and what is worse, this has happened in a time of climate change when there is a greater tendency for rain to be highly concentrated in big downpours.

This is not at all to say that dam and highway construction should stop, or that tourism should not be encouraged. However, what can definitely be stated is that the kind of reckless development seen in recent times must be checked seriously, as the Supreme Court of India has also emphasized in a recent verdict. Instead, there should be a very cautious pursuit of development activities based on sustainability and safety.

While the recent pattern has enriched a few, the number of people either displaced or ruined by the resulting disasters and instability is very high. What is more, the Himalayas being a high seismicity belt, the disruption of slopes has led to the possibility of any future earthquakes becoming much more destructive due to the various ecologically destructive activities.

Hence, several concerned people as well as experts have been raising their voice to oppose the ecologically destructive development model for the Himalayan region and replace this with an ecologically protective model. This is a call that should not be neglected any longer.

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The writer is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Guardians of the Himalaya—Vimla and Sunderlal Bahuguna, Planet in Peril, Protecting Earth for Children, and A Day in 2071