Around the seventh century, Adi Shankaracharya is said to have established several settlements in the Himalayas. The intention was to promote Sanatan Dharma, the eternal way of life. And that is likely why he brought people from different parts of the country to develop a socio-cultural fabric. This fabric, based on values and principles, seems to have broken, mainly because commerce has become the driving force, as though money can magically solve all problems. The unprecedented economic growth is often misunderstood as development. Hydro power projects, road construction projects or other massive infrastructure projects have taken a deadly toll, much greater than what has been given to this region.
Most of these projects are propagated as being for social good. Who doesn’t like to drive on good quality roads? Who doesn’t like 24x7 electricity? But at what cost? Over the years, this region, once pristine and beautiful, has come to ruins, thanks to inequitable nonsustainable “development”. Uttarakhand is preparing for around 70 hydropower projects. These HPPs are either already ongoing, under construction or proposed. These HPPs have been one of the major reasons for the drying up of springs (Niti Ayog, 2018), geological instability of the region, increase in area that is sinking. Currently, 484 villages in Uttarakhand are under threat of disaster and around 450 villages are awaiting relocation. These HPPs do not merely cause physical damage but cause close-knit communities to be deprived of their social and cultural connections, way of life and identity. These projects push people away from their forests, their lands and their gods, which hold a society together, creating cohesion within communities, a sense of cultural and personal identity and meaning in life.
The HPPs have also been a major reason for releasing methane in the atmosphere, due to the large reservoirs, which are at least 21 times more dangerous than CO2 as a green house gas and contributes more towards global warming. This also results in damaging aquatic ecosystems and thus the over all agricultural system downstream.
HPPs have long been considered a renewable source of energy. The current pace of glacial retreat, large scale damage to river recharge systems and increase in the impervious surface area of the region causing risk to the amount of nutrition and minerals available downstream impacting the water and food security of 600 million people of our country. This region is suffering from the consequences of unmitigated road construction. In the past 20 years of existence, Uttarakhand has lost more than 50,000 ha of forest cover, majorly to road construction and mining. Environmental safeguards have been swept aside in the interests of road construction. Despite having a “Hill Road Manual”, our engineers depend on the driver of the bulldozer to define the alignment of the road, and slopes have been cut at 90° angle with muck-dumping straight into the rivers or choking drains, which would have otherwise fed the rivers.
In last two decades, Uttarakhand has developed close to 60,000km of road networks which connect almost every village. These roads are invariably through areas of thick old trees and contractors gain from timber sale. This is one of the reasons why 51 per cent of the state is under high and very high landslide susceptibility and there is increased fragility of the already fragile Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. In the past two decades of the state`s existence, the anthropogenic impact has been manifold, because of bypassing existing environmental laws.
The overall condition could have been better with sustainable and judicious approach to development. We have engineering expertise, scientific knowledge, that should be used to safeguard environmental interests. We have more than 300 days of active bright sun, solar energy would have been an appropriate solution to generate decentralised electricity, which was never promoted. Damage due to natural disasters has been gravely aggravated by direct or indirect human influence. It is time to pause and look at the current situation and design activities in a more meaningful manner. On an average, we are losing 200 lives every year due to disasters, and with the impact of climate change and global warming leading to more intense events, flooding, glacial melt etc., these numbers will increase unless hugely, there is policy change, political will and a change in mindset. It is important to leave the areas north of MCT (main central thrust) untouched. We need thoughtful and judicious planning before constructing large infrastructure projects.
Joshi is an environmental technologist and a climate change researcher.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author's and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.