With forests covering 65 per cent of its land area and many high Himalayan peaks and glaciers adding to its breath-taking beauty, Uttarakhand is probably the most beautiful state of India. Fed by myriad lakes, glacial melts and streams, both the Ganga and Yamuna originate in the glaciers of Uttarakhand. Many rare varieties of flowers and plants thrive in the Valley of Flowers National Park. Home to the Bengal tiger, Jim Corbett National Park is the oldest national park in India. Two of the holiest Hindu shrines, Badrinath and Kedarnath, lie in Uttarakhand.

Till recently, Uttarakhand was known for its gentle people, beautiful hill stations, and the brave soldiers of Garhwal and Kumaon regiments. Crime was practically non-existent, people led simple, uncomplicated lives; movie-makers flocked to Uttarakhand to capture its beauty on celluloid.

Almost imperceptibly, a sea-change has come over Uttarakhand. The unpolluted atmosphere, the gentle cool breezes are a thing of the past. Dust clouds from tunnelling work for the myriad railway tunnels and hydropower projects, and the ubiquitously dug-up roads for road widening projects, assail one’s senses the moment one enters Uttarakhand. Scores of heavy trucks clog its narrow hill roads, releasing unbearably toxic fumes in the clean mountain air. The quaintness of small hill towns of Uttarakhand is long gone; Dehradun and Nainital resemble the more populated parts of Delhi, while other hill towns are not very different from their neighbours in Uttar Pradesh.

Uttarakhand is no stranger to environmental degradation, at the hands of humans. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, expansion of roads and railways to the foothills of the Himalayas resulted in indiscriminate logging in Garhwal and Kumaon. Alarmed by large-scale degradation of natural forests, the British Governor-General prohibited cutting of trees in Garhwal and Kumaon forests. Later on, a visiting botanist pointed out the plunder of rare species of flora from the Valley of Flowers to the Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, who issued the Indian Forest Charter 1855, reversing the earlier laissezfaire policy of forest exploitation.

After Independence, a coterie of politicians and contractors started large-scale treefelling in Uttarakhand (which was part of UP then), that led to the Chipko environmental protection movement in the 1970s. Uttarakhand witnessed two environmental tragedies in the last decade, the massive floods of 2013 and 2021, that were directly relatable to ruthless exploitation of natural resources. Environmentalists termed the floods as “disasters waiting to happen” because tunnelling and blasting for the 70 hydro-electric projects had fractured many aquifers and restricted river flows, upsetting the fragile ecological balance of the area. The tragedy of Joshimath hardly needs reiteration; most residents have become homeless as their houses have developed huge cracks, making them uninhabitable; land is sinking fast; before the Government of India issued a gag order, ISRO reported a subsidence of 5.4 centimetres in just 12 days. The townspeople’s woes are magnified manifold by harsh winter rains and snowfall, as also a perpetually leaking aquifer.

Currently, the Railways are constructing the ambitious Char Dham Railway Project, a 125-kilometre railway line between Rishikesh and Karanprayag, with 105 kilometres of the rail line running through tunnels, including India’s longest railway tunnel of 15.1 kilometres. The large-scale road widening projects launched recently, new resorts and hotels built on and near riverbeds, have aggravated the environmental degradation of Uttarakhand; after Joshimath, cracks and land subsidence have been reported in nearby places like Karnaprayag, Chamoli, Mussoorie, and Tehri Garhwal, with maximum damage near tunnel areas of the Rishikesh-Karnprayag Rail Line, tunnel areas of All-Weather Char Dham Road, and tunnel areas of hydroelectric projects.

To a casual observer, there could appear to be a close relation between land subsidence and tunnelling and boring activities, yet all official agencies have consistently denied any such cause-and-effect relationship. Right since 2010, when an aquifer had burst during tunnelling activities in Joshimath, causing a massive outflow of subsurface water, NTPC has consistently said that there was no evidence linking land subsidence in Rishikesh to tunnel drilling for NTPC’s 520 MW Tapovan Vishnugad hydel project. Such instances were repeated in 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2022.

It would appear that draining of underground water had created a void below the earth’s surface leading to the land giving way. However, less than a fortnight ago, the Power Minister, in a press conference, unambiguously reiterated NTPCs stance. In fact, official reports in 1976, 2010, and August 2022 have put the blame elsewhere ~ with the 1976 MC Mishra Report categorically stating that Joshimath was prone to land subsidence because it was “situated on weathered, landslide mass of big unsettled boulders in the loose matrix of fence micaceous sandy and clayey material.” No one has bothered to ask why civic bodies or the Government had permitted construction activities in Joshimath after publication of the MC Mishra Report.

Be that is may, widespread land subsidence at Joshimath and the beginning of similar phenomenon at nearby places have made official denials sound hollow. Still, the official response, till date, is that land subsidence at Joshimath is a hyper-local phenomenon, with the Government reaching out to persons whose houses had become uninhabitable, but without initiating any long-term corrective measures or undertaking a review of ongoing projects.

In fact, after a recent meeting with the Union Home Minister, the Uttarakhand Chief Minister informed media persons that: “People sitting at different places in the country are talking about Uttarakhand, which is not right because 65 to 70 per cent of the people living there are leading their lives normally. In nearby Auli, which is a tourist attraction, everything is going on normally… Char Dham Yatra will start in the next four months.”

This callous approach is not a recent development; after the horrendous floods of 2013, that had caused more than 6,000 deaths, the then Uttarakhand Chief Minister had responded in a similar vein. After denying that human factors like indiscriminate construction of hotels and houses were responsible for the tragedy, the Chief Minister had gone on to say: “This is a very childish argument ~ that cloudbursts, earthquakes and tsunamis are caused by human factors. In the history of hundreds of years of Kedarnath, no such incident has taken place…My people are going to suffer because tourism is going to be affected. We have to put the infrastructure back on the rails.”

Almost identical statements, a decade apart, by Chief Ministers of different political parties, indicate the real cause of the problem ~ a flawed development model imagined and implemented for Uttarakhand through the years. In essence, successive Governments have tried to stimulate economic activity through tourism and massive infrastructure projects ~ that have been given a huge push by the current dispensation. Such misplaced zeal for development has made the Government brush aside environmental concerns. Pliant environmental regulatory bodies, have unquestioningly towed the Government line, readily granting clearance to environmentally dangerous projects.

Public spirited citizens have moved Public Interest Litigations (PILs) against the desecration of Himalayas but with minimal results, because of the persistent pro-development stance of the Government and the Courts’ tendency to accept Government submissions at face value. For example, after the 2013 floods, the Supreme Court constituted an Expert Committee to study the environmental impact of the 24 proposed hydroelectric projects in Uttarakhand. The Committee recommended cancellation of 23 of the 24 hydro-electric projects, but six of the cancelled projects were reinstated, after a second environmental clearance was granted by the Government.

Similarly, a petition against double-laning of the Chardhaam project failed when the Government changed its stance, pleading that road widening was required for defence purposes, not for tourism, which was its initial purpose. After the Rishi Ganga floods of 2021, a PIL for cancellation of Rishi Ganga and Tapovan Vishnugad Hydropower Projects was rejected because the Uttarakhand High Court was persuaded to hold that the petitioners were non-genuine people, mere puppets in the hands of some unseen puppeteer. Probably, we need to discard the present model of development for Uttarakhand and implement a model based on limited tourism, horticulture, traditional crafts, with knowledge industry hubs in Dehradun and Nainital. Right thinking people are never against development, but like Lord Byron, they love nature more:

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.”  

(The writers are respectively, a former principal Chief Commissioner of Income Tax and a retired Air Commander of the Metrological Department of the Indian Air Force)