Joshimath

Civil Society News, Gurugram

Published: Jan. 14, 2023

Prescient votaries of careful development in the fragile ecology of the Himalayas have been cautioning against the building of wide roads and hydropowerdam projects. But both have been happening on a scale that mountains can’t cope with. https://www.civilsocietyonline.com/interviews/all-good-advice-on-joshimath-was-ignored-says-ravi-chopra/ 

Ravi Chopra’s has been one such voice over the past 34 years.An engineer with an IIT degree, he set up the People’s Science Institute in Dehradun in1988. More recently, he was on an expert committee appointed by the Supreme Court to study the impact of hydropower dam projects in the Himalayas. He finally chose to resign from the committee in 2021 because he felt the government was impervious to scientific advice. 

After the state of Uttarakhand was formed, to boost tourism, infrastructure wasenhanced, and the population of the town increased to

around 20,000-25,000. The care that mountain towns and cities require was not given. The Mishra Committee’s recommendation not to deforest was forgotten.

To make the slopes attractive to skiers in Auli, which lies above Joshimath, the slope was ‘designed’ and a ropeway was built. In 2009, I think, the first signs of a major disaster occurred— the sudden leakage of water from the hillside which is traced to the tunnel boring machine of the Tapovan-Vishnugad project that seems to have punctured an aquifer.

We said that at roughly 2,200 m elevation, dams should not be built. Later we revised it to beyond the main central thrust. That means beyond Helang in this valley, dam construction should not take place.

Of course, the government does not listen to all this.

The crisis could have been averted. Several experts in the past had warned of the risks of subsidence in Joshimath, particularly if heavy construction was not controlled. Despite that, the region became an epicentre of numerous large infrastructural projects, especially contentious amongst which is the NTPC’s (formerly the National Thermal Power Corporation) Tapovan Vishnugad project, which has a planned capacity of 520 MW – that is, it is expected to generate 520 megawatts of power.

https://scroll.in/article/1042961/greed-sank-joshimath-i-saw-it-happen 

by Shruti Jain 

01/02/2023

In a span of a few days, the land subsidence triggered by unknown reasons has put the entire village of Nai Basti in Thathri town of Jammu’s Doda district on the verge of destruction. https://thewire.in/environment/land-subsidence-jammu-doda-19-houses 

On the evening of Friday, February 3, Ahmad, a head constable in J&K Police who shifted to his brother’s house, was having tea. A phone call broke the tragic news – his home, the result of years of savings and hard work, had been reduced to a huge mound of debris.

Deputy Commissioner of Doda, V.P. Mahajan, said that the Nai Basti village was affected by massive land subsidence on Friday, prompting the district administration to shift 19 families to safe locations. He said that three houses have collapsed so far, while many others have developed cracks. The administration has also declared a religious school and a mosque in the area as unsafe.

Some 30 kilometres from Doda town, Nai Basti is a standalone village located on a hillock in Thathri town overseeing the Doda-Jammu highway and the Chenab river. A Srinagar-based environmentalist said that the Pir Panjal mountains, which separate Doda and other districts in the Jammu region from the Kashmir Valley, have become highly unstable due to dynamite blasts and hill cutting for building roads and power projects.

An official in the Doda administration claimed that the affected area in Thathri was prone to land subsidence when it was uninhabited before the eruption of insurgency in J&K in the early 1990s, “Most of the residents have built their houses on the hillock in recent years because they fled from their native places in Pir Panjal region due to militancy. This may have caused land subsidence,” he said.