Himalayan plunder: World’s tallest mountain range on the brink of disaster

In November last year, 41 labourers were trapped inside an under-construction tunnel in the north Indian Himalayan state of Uttarakhand after parts of its roof caved in. It took 17 days to rescue them.

This was the third major disaster in the Indian Himalayas in 2023.

In January, an entire town, Joshimath in Uttarakhand, started sinking, displacing hundreds of residents. In October, a cloudburst swept away a major hydropower project in the eastern Indian Himalayan state of Sikkim, claiming nearly 100 lives.

There are other tell-tale signs that all is not well in the Himalayas, one of the youngest mountain ranges and home to 14 of the world’s highest peaks, including Mt Everest. However, only Kanchenjunga is located in India.

In the Indian-administered part of Kashmir, the popular tourist destination Gulmarg – known as the Switzerland of the East – is reeling under unusually warm weather, which has left the skiing hotspot without any snow this year.

The culprit for this is said to be the weather phenomenon, El Nino, besides a growing climate crisis exacerbated by the fast depredation of the Himalayan ecology.

Spread across 1o Indian states and two federally-administered Union Territories, the Indian Himalayan region is home to over 50 million people.

The collapsed, 4.5 km-long tunnel in Uttarakhand is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet project connecting the Char Dham – the four prominent Hindu pilgrimage sites of Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath, and Badrinath.

The government showcased it as an 889 km-long all-weather road project that would increase tourist flow and bring economic growth. As per existing law, such a massive project in a geologically fragile region would have required an environment impact assessment (EIA).

But to bypass such a mandatory assessment and speed up the execution, the government divided the scheme into 53 smaller projects, each less than 100 km long, the threshold beyond which EIAs are mandatory.

Based on the report of a high-powered committee (HPC), in 2020, the Supreme Court of India refused permission for the road widening work. However, in 2020, when the government sought modification of the top court’s order, it argued that the road widening was necessary from a defence and national security perspective. The apex court gave its go-ahead in December 2021.

The security aspect assumes significance because India’s 3,488 km-long border with China has emerged as a sensitive region during the past few years over a series of clashes and skirmishes – starting from Doklam in eastern Indian Himalayas in 2017 to Galwan in north Indian Himalayas in 2020 and Tawang in India’s northeast in 2022. The Galwan clash resulted in casualties on both sides.

India’s focus on building wide, all-weather roads along the China border is partly a response to the rapid increase in Chinese infrastructure along the border, commonly called the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

Among other things, the HPC report noted that the Himalayan ranges were “still evolving”, a reference to the relatively young age of the mountains.

The frustration of Indian environmentalists is perhaps best exemplified by the case of Ravi Chopra, director of People’s Science Institute (PSI), a non-profit research and development organisation.

One of India’s foremost environmentalists, Chopra headed the supreme court-appointed HPC formed in 2013 in the aftermath of a disaster to reassess major hydropower projects under construction and in the pipeline in Uttarakhand. The HPC report also halted work on several hydel projects.

In 2019, after the Char Dham project was challenged in the Supreme Court, it formed another HPC, again with Chopra as its head. Its report led to the court decision in 2020. But after the court gave the government the go-ahead in December 2021, Chopra resigned from the HPC. Chopra wrote in his resignation letter that he “saw at close quarters the desecration of the once impregnable Himalayas” and warned that nature “neither forgets nor forgives such willful wrongs inflicted on her treasures”.

Chopra says that the Himalayas are being overburdened.

“The attempt is to replicate the economic growth model followed in the rest of the country, and it has been accelerated in the last ten years without any concern for the nature of the local environment and geology. This kind of short-sighted thinking and planning is going to be harmful in the Himalayas,” he tells TRT World.

Slew of infrastructure projects

The Char Dham project is unlikely to remain an exceptional case, as India recently made two key changes in laws that reduce the importance of clearances for large projects in forested areas.

These changes are expected to facilitate a slew of major infrastructure projects, including expanding railways and highways and setting up large hydroelectric dams.

India has an installed capacity of 42 gigawatts (GW) from large hydropower projects, of which 22GW (roughly 1.5 percent of the global share) are in the Himalayan states.

Besides, there is a series of railway expansion projects involving hundreds of kilometres to connect various remote corners in the Himalayan region with the Indian railway network.

According to geologist Yashpal Sundriyal, a professor at the HNB Garhwal University in Uttarakhand, defence requirements make roadway expansion agreeable to a certain extent, but ignoring repeated scientific warnings about the fragility of the region and other ecological impacts would be counterproductive.

He says the quality of work and the careless implementation are bigger concerns than the project plans. “The government has funds for building and repair of roads. How could they not have any budget for stabilising the slopes they created during construction?” Sundriyal asks.

According to Chopra, the scientific understanding of the adverse impacts of large hydro projects has grown enormously since the time 70 percent of India’s hydropower potential was identified in the Himalayas.

“We have seen that dams cause a lot of impacts – starting from the initiation of the project to commissioning and decommissioning, the entire lifespan,” he says, adding that the potential estimated earlier needs to be revisited in the light of the new understanding.

Warnings abound

True to repeated scientific warnings, major construction projects in the Himalayas keep getting hit by natural disasters, including flash floods, landslides, and land subsidence.

In June, a landslide damaged an under-construction tunnel in Jammu and Kashmir. In August, a landslide washed away a 40-metre-long stretch of a national highway in Himachal Pradesh. Landslides have halted many of the Himalayan hydropower projects for months to years.

Besides, people living near large projects complain of increased landslides and subsidence.

Residents in India-administered Kashmir’s Pir Panjal area blame construction work of the Katra-Banihal railway line and the Ratle hydel project for land subsidence in their villages, while residents of Sikkim’s Dikchu have blamed the Teesta Stage V dam for repeated cracks in their houses.

A landslide in Manipur that killed 61 in 2022 was not unexpected. In 2019, a Geological Survey of India report pointed out that some bigger landslides were mainly caused by “anthropogenic activities triggered by extensive slope cut during construction of road and railway line”.

The Tupul station, eventually hit by the landslide, was situated along the river bank. The October 2023 Sikkim disaster was warned of multiple times in the past.

Chopra cites the example of how the government in 2012 mandated a tarred surface of 10m width for every national highway. Such roads also require space for crash barriers and drainage, which would take another 3m. Therefore, roads with 10m surfaces eventually require 13m.

In 2018, this was changed for the mountain regions, where a width of 5.5 m became the new standard. It was because government engineers pointed out that cutting the hills for 13 m led to the loss of green cover, destabilisation of slopes, and pollution of rivers.

“Despite this knowledge of 2018, the government is going ahead with wide road projects. It’s evident that they don’t want to change their thinking,” he says.

According to Sundriyal, an increase in the height of Mt. Everest shows active tectonic movements. Apart from being prone to landslides and slope destabilisation, there are risks of major earthquakes, while climatic changes also intensify extreme weather events. Depletion of forest cover is exacerbating the crisis.

Indeed, on December 4, 2023, the government informed the Parliament that the forest cover in the northeast region of the country has decreased by 3,698 square kilometres during the last ten years, which “may be attributed mainly to natural calamities, anthropogenic pressure, and developmental activities”.

Sundriyal says that patience is the key to development in the Himalayas. A massive and sudden increase in tourist footfall may have more adverse impacts than the benefits of economic growth.

“Unsustainable use of resources is leading to resource depletion, including bringing the prospect of acute water scarcity in the coming years,” Sundriyal says, adding that building infrastructure without heeding scientific warnings could lead to catastrophe.

A December 2017 report by Niti Ayog, India’s highest policy advisory body, said there is increasing evidence of springs drying up or their discharge reducing throughout the Indian Himalayan region.

“The erratic rainfall pattern, seismic activity and ecological degradation associated with land use change for infrastructural development is putting huge pressures on mountain aquifer systems,” it said.