The melting of the Chorabari Glacier and the overflowing of the Mandakini river led to heavy floods in the Garwhal region. More recently, the June 2013 cloudburst led to the biggest natural disaster in the country after the 2004 tsunami. The Chamoli earthquake of 1999 killed over 100 people and there were reports of severe damage. In 1998, a landslide in Malpa near the Nepal border in Pithoragarh district killed 255 people – including a number of Kailash-Mansarovar pilgrims. In 1991, the Uttarkashi earthquake killed at least 768 people and destroyed thousands of homes. We don’t have to go too far back to see how nature can create disasters here. A smaller lake lasted till 1970 when it burst, causing flooding downstream. But the British had set up a telegraph system that warned of the disaster and just a handful of people were lost. The lake was formed in 1893 through a massive landslide, and the large lake burst the next year, wiping out Srinagar township and every bridge downriver to Haridwar. This was the formation of the Gohna Lake, when a landslide blocked the Birahi Ganga, a tributary of the Alaknanda.
In the Garhwal area itself, there has been a similar issue on a smaller scale. The Pakistani government was compelled to get the Chinese to build around the lake with five new tunnels and two new bridges. It has displaced thousands and the 27 km lake is unlikely to drain. This is a lesson which Pakistan and China learnt in January 2010 when the Karakoram Highway collapsed due to a landslide and created the huge Attabad lake 15 km from Hunza’s capital, Karimabad. This has to do with the specificities of the terrain and there is little that science and technology can do to overcome it. Photo: lensnmatter/Flickr CC BY NC 2.0Įven in the lower reaches near Almora and Nainital, motor traffic has been a familiar sight since the 1940s and 1950s, but locals know that there are stretches prone to landslides which recur every now and then. The Himalayan Queen on the Shimla-Kalka railway track that was built by the British in 1903. Note that in Himachal, the British were able to build a railway to Simla, a feat they did not attempt in either Kumaon or Garhwal. There were roads, too, to Dharchula from Tanaakpur and other parts of the Central Himalaya, including Himachal Pradesh where Project Beacon had cut a highway to Kaurik.Īnyone familiar with the central Himalayan range will know that the Garhwal Himalayas are perhaps the most fragile. This writer trekked along a well built road back in 1968 to Malari, short of the Barahoti, and the road to Munsyari came up by 1970. The road infrastructure on the Indian side has come up slower than that of the Chinese but it has been there for a while as well. For that reason, India has always maintained a more forward posture than the Chinese. The Chinese can move quickly forward, while the difficult Himalayas make the going tough for the Indian side. Because the terrain of the Tibetan plateau, across the high Himalayas, is largely flat, the Chinese have built up an impressive logistical network of roads.īut as far as deployments go, India is well served and probably has more forward deployments than the Chinese precisely because of the terrain. In other words, the government is invoking the holy mantra of “national security” to overcome the apex court’s September 2020 order limiting the width of the carriageway to 5.5 metres.Īlso Read: Chardham Project: SC Wonders if Court Can Put Environmental Concerns Over Defence NeedsĪs for the Chinese infrastructure in Tibet, its road systems have been around for more than 40 years. The argument made in the Supreme Court this week is not really about the defence of India’s borders, but the government’s ability to score political points by enlarging the existing roads to the four holy towns of the region – Yamnotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath, all in Uttarakhand. The Union of India’s argument that there is a huge Chinese build up in Tibet and that the Army needs broader roads in Uttarakhand to fend off another 1962 disaster is disingenuous to say the least.
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