Editorial: Recipe for Disaster

By any reckoning, the monsoon season this year has been calamitous for Himachal Pradesh. Starting with a record downpour in July, the state has witnessed relentless destruction by multiple inter-linked nature events: cloudbursts, flash floods and landslides. More than 300 people have lost their lives, thousands of riverside houses, hundreds of mountainside roads and dozens of bridges have been swept away, and rescue teams are struggling to find survivors at multiple locations even as rains are continuing to lash the mountain state.

CM Sukhwinder Singh Sukhu has pegged the loss to physical infrastructure at Rs 10,000 crore and counting. The Centre has announced an advanced disbursal of Rs 200 crore from the state’s share of the National Disaster Relief Fund. It should have done more to meet the contingency and even more in the months ahead. Much of the development achieved by the state in the past 50 years in agriculture, tourism, power generation and public utilities has been laid waste. It will take more than handouts to help the state get back to its feet.

Since such extreme weather events have occurred in other Himalayan countries as well (Pakistan and Nepal), it’s fair to say these are the wages of climate change. Studies indicate the higher Himalayan regions are seeing less snowfall and more rainfall than normal. Precipitation in the higher altitudes is occurring more as rain than snow. This has grave consequences for towns and villages lower down. Streams and rivers are brought to torrent much faster by rain than snowfall. The warmer rain accelerates snow melt and loosens the soil, triggering floods and landslides.

Data from the weather station at the Mount Everest base camp gives credence to this possibility. Between June 1 and August 10, 75% of the precipitation on the mountain fell as rain, much higher proportion than recorded in the previous three years. While the evidence for climate change is compelling, there is an equally convincing case to be made that local man-made factors are exacerbating the situation. Statewide reports from Himachal show much of the destruction has occurred in areas where mega infra projects were undertaken in recent years.

Building infrastructure in HP centres around three mainstays: hydel power, horticulture and tourism. Over the past 50 years, the state sought to make good on its rapid rivers and scenic beauty by building hundreds of hydel power stations and carving up mountainsides to build roads to facilitate tourism, transport of cash-crop produce.

This entailed committing the three cardinal sins of man-made climate change: Its adoption of cash-seeking horticulture triggered massive land-use changes in the mountains. It constricted the rivers to suit its power turbines, and carved up hillsides to build roads to welcome tourists and transport apples. The debris all this produced was dumped on mountainsides or riverbeds, which washed into the rivers as silt and raised water levels. Soil vulnerabilities were disregarded, natural drainage systems were not respected, and illegal mining of river beds went unchecked.

The deluges of this monsoon have laid bare wrongdoings of 50 years. Himachal’s Directorate of Energy has revealed that 21 of the 23 hydel projects in the state are guilty of non-compliance with dam safety norms. This resulted in the inundation of thousands of houses downstream due to the sudden release of water from the dams.

This is criminal negligence that should not be brushed under the carpet of climate change. It helps little to clothe climate change in fatalism and pretend that the devastation being seen in Himachal now was somehow divinely ordained.