An ‘ecocide’ in Uttarakhand.
By Rajiv Theodore
Dehradun, Uttarakhand: It was an agony of the worst kind, has scarred his psyche forever.
Surender Negi was caught in the grip of the recent flash floods last month on the Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand. The 40-year-old hung on for life after tons of water fell on him on June 16th, as it ripped through the much ancient revered Kedarnath Temple. He stood hanging with lacerated hands from a temple bell for nearly nine hours, perched precariously, balanced upon floating corpses below his feet. Negi survived to tell the tale.
“The divine and the dead saved me,’’ he said in an interview to The American Bazaar.
Another victim, Anjul Tomar, 65, however, has been left emotionally devastated. The pilgrimage she took with her family has turned into the biggest tragedy of her life.
At Rudraprayag, another epicenter where the disaster struck, the raging waters that swelled dramatically from a cloud burst, engulfed her two sons, Ashwin, 18, and Sanjay 16, along with her husband Ajay. Her husband’s body was found a couple of days later. But for the clothes she could not have identified the decomposed corpse. The sons are still on the missing list. She says she doesn’t know how she survived.
‘’The thunder of the noise was followed by columns of water that tore down the lodge and pulled away my sons and husband,’’ Tomar said. “I know my sons will return one day. They are safe somewhere in the hills.”
Thousands of others met their watery graves as the wrath of nature descended on these hills, mostly frequented by pilgrim-tourists. It transformed these picture-postcard scenic Himalayan hills into a ghastly graveyard. Many corpses are still strewn around. Many of the victims were seasonal pilgrims and tourists who flock to the hills every year. Many others were local villagers who have lost their centuries old livelihood.
“’The ferocity of the flash floods and the death toll has been unparalleled in recent memory of this place,’’ Dr. Subhash Pandey, an environmental activist, says.
Pandey, who works in the remote Srinagar area of the state, says the areas around Srinagar, Kedarnath and Rudraprayag just cannot sustain tourists.
‘’Their ecology is too fragile for the onslaught of visitors who bring with them plastics and other debris,’’ he said.
Counting the dead itself and rescue missions has become an onerous task with incessant rains continuing to play havoc. The death toll has become a matter of dispute as the state government of Uttarakhand pegged it at 5,360; many of those missing and presumed dead have yet to be included. Unofficial figures claim the death toll has crossed 10,000. That could make the Uttarakhand tragedy the worst natural disaster in India, more than the death toll from the havoc wrought by a tsunami in 2004.
‘’Official estimates indicate that 1,227 children are still missing in Uttarakhand post the flashfloods in June and nearly 2.5 lakh children are currently out of school because while many schools have been entirely washed away, others have been transformed into shelters,’’ Dinesh Joshi who heads the FORRCE – Foundation for Rural Reconstruction and Community Empowerment, serving the vulnerable sections of the community in these hills – said.
According to Joshi, the river bed has risen due to the huge amount of debris strewn by those living on the edges of the rivers flowing in these areas, especially near the Mandakini River, which played havoc with life and property.
Mushrooming of structures like dams, hydroelectric projects, buildings, roads and the pressure of tourism pushed this fragile Himalayan ecosystem towards the brink of a disaster where only a trigger was needed for its ultimate collapse. Then there are the illegal mining activity going on in several pockets.
There are jaws dropping footages of the disaster, capturing multi-story buildings collapsing into the river like a pack of cards. Apart from those, videos and photographs of cars, bridges and shops being swept away are a display of man’s vulnerability to the force of nature.
‘’Nature has its own ways. It can tolerate to an extent the havoc that is being played around. But when you stretch the extremes, it has its ways of striking back. Uttarakhand just witnessed nature’s backlash,” Devender Sharma of the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security, said. “What we are witnessing is an ecocide,’’ he added.
It’s not as if warnings were not sounded before the disaster struck. A well-publicized report in April had been sent to Parliament, one month before the calamity hit the hill state. The report prepared by India’s top audit body said the state of Uttarakhand was badly unprepared for disasters.
“In this audit we have found that despite considerable progress in setting up of institutions and creating funding arrangements, there are critical gaps in the preparedness levels for various disasters,’’ the Comptroller and Auditor General report had stated.
Himanshu Thakkar, Coordinator for the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People said: “While rainfall is natural, the root causes which increased this great human tragedy include unregulated, unsafe and unplanned infrastructure development along the rivers and development of a large number of hydel projects in the fragile zone without proper checks and balances, lack of transparent studies and democratic decision-making processes. Flouting of rules is rampant in Uttarakhand, but the tragedy has shown that nature does not take bribes.’’
Thakkar said that roads come up overnight as the pressure of traffic increases. The age-old way of walking or using a pony has given way to motor vehicles, be it trucks to maintain supplies or passenger vehicles to ferry the ever increasing number of tourists, or even the local population.
Data with the Uttarakhand State Transport Department confirms this. In 2005-06, 83,000-odd vehicles were registered in the state. The figure rose to 400,000 in 2012-13. It is an established fact that there is a straight co-relation between tourism increase and higher incidence of landslides.
According to Thakkar, there are over 200 hydropower projects of various sizes are in various levels of implementation, some operating, some under construction, others in clearance and planning stage.
With climate change widely acknowledged to be the result of the burning of fossil fuels and emission of excessive carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it is clear that the ongoing tragedy is human-induced, Thakkar adds.
While income from “religious and cultural tourism is a lifeline for many, it will not be sustainable, (unless) all development activities take into account the vulnerability of the area,” Thakkar said.
Sharma opines that “once the relief operations are over, the rains and the floods recede, this huge tragedy of the Himalayas will be all but forgotten. We will once again begin exploiting the hills, make our money and leave the poor hapless millions to face the fury of nature whenever it decides to strike back.”