Top ecologist urges creation of central ministry for hill states

A small statistic about flash floods in Uttarakhand’s Uttarkashi district tells a big story of how unplanned development creates unprecedented havoc. In seven years since 2005, Uttarkashi had three major flash floods. In 27 years before 2005, it had one — in 1978. Chetan Chauhan reports. Man-made calamity

Updated on: Jun 22, 2013, 02:20:12 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

A small statistic about flash floods in Uttarakhand’s Uttarkashi district tells a big story of how unplanned development creates unprecedented havoc.

In seven years since 2005, Uttarkashi had three major flash floods. In 27 years before 2005, it had one — in 1978.

What happened after 2005 was wanton development — hydroelectric (hydel) power projects, roads, hotels — triggered by the creation of Uttarakhand state in 2000, which weakened the foundation of an already fragile mountain system.

Hydel projects require constant blasting of hills to build dams and tunnels, disturbing the rock structure, which starts rolling down once the top soil is uprooted by rains. The muck fills the rivers and flows down with the water, intensifying the river’s rage. Huge diversion of forest cover for these dams also reduces the capability of the local ecology to retain rainwater. And when bumper-to-bumper dams are built, the impact multiplies manifold.

Adding to the misery of the eco-system, seven new dams were built, work started on another nine and 19 more were proposed in the biggest district of the young state. More than 100 new roads were built in an unscientific manner and hundreds of tourist spots mushroomed, resulting in a four-fold hike in the inflow of tourists into the region.

That was just the tip of the iceberg. As many as 31 more dams were added in the upper reaches of Uttarakhand and rampant mining of rivers was allowed and hundreds of kilometres of new roads were added.

“When you change the course of a river by mining, cut trees indiscriminately and build roads in a haphazard manner, such a calamity is bound to take place,” said PP Dayani, director of the Almora-based GB Pant Institute of Himalayan Environment and Development.

“A lesson to be learnt for policymakers from the biggest human tragedy in Garhwal’s history since the 1805 earthquake is to not to disturb nature. “Nature has capacity to recover and rejuvenate,” said Ravi Chopra, director of the Dehradun-based People Science Institute and IIT-Bombay alumnus.
Because preventing cloudbursts and resultant flash floods are not possible, experts emphasise two important aspects.

First, mapping of all disaster-prone areas in the upper reaches of Uttarakhand and linking them with an alarm system for bad weather should be done, like in some parts of Himachal Pradesh. Second, proper and scientific construction of roads linking remote parts of the state to the mainstream should be undertaken, considering that washing away of roads hampered rescue work this time.

“You cannot build ramshackle roads on hills and think they will work. The concept of all-weather green roads in hills needs to be instilled in the local public works department,” said Vinod Tare of IIT-Kanpur, who has worked extensively in the Ganga river basin.

Dayani said the pivotal issue was that India did not have any national policy to preserve and conserve the bio-diversity-rich mountain areas and management during natural calamities. “We should have a central ministry for all mountain states as their needs and problems are different from the rest of the country,” he said.

What these measures could do is reduce human casualties in such situations, which according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will increase in the coming years because of global warming. Or else, repeats of Uttarakhand-like disasters, maybe of lower intensity, will become a regular affair.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

Get the latest India News, breaking headlines and real-time updates from across the country. Stay informed about politics, government policies, crime, weather and major national developments.