Editorial: Man-made disasters of Himalayan scale

Since 2010, almost every year, this young mountain range has revolted against unscientific development, yet the warnings have fallen on deaf ears

Be it Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, or Jammu & Kashmir, landslides, cloudbursts, and flash floods have been wreaking havoc with unfailing regularity, leaving a trail of death and destruction. Mountains are caving in, rivers are in a spate, villages are getting buried under a torrent of debris, and lives are lost in dozens. Among the dead are pilgrims bound for holy shrines like Vaishno Devi. All these avoidable tragedies are a direct result of tinkering with the fragile Himalayan ecology and unbridled construction activity in the name of development and promoting tourism. The Himalayas have been warning us for decades. The alerts of the 1970s were ignored. Since 2010, almost every year, this young mountain range has revolted against unscientific development. The 2013 Kedarnath disaster was the loudest warning yet. In 2021, 2022, and now 2025, the Himalayas are rebelling again. Himachal and Uttarakhand have seen the worst destruction. They have also witnessed the worst of this uncontrolled development. When the Beas swept away hotels in Kullu, the river was not at fault. Nor the KheerGanga when it swallowed new Dharali. All this was because the governments have been on a development overdrive. Areas marked as eco-sensitive zones are being overrun with impunity. There is no count of how many trees have been cut, how many mountains blasted and carved. No lessons have been learnt from past tragedies. All norms and sober warnings have been tossed aside. Landslides in India are no longer driven by nature alone but by a perilous mix of climate change, shifting rainfall, deforestation, and unplanned construction in fragile terrains.

While India has always been prone to landslides — especially in the Himalayas and Western Ghats — recent years have seen a sharp surge in both their scale and destructiveness. Heavy monsoon rains, cloudbursts, and flash floods now routinely trigger slope failures, often worsened by deforestation, road building, and construction on unstable terrains. In the mad rush to turn Uttarakhand into a dream tourist destination, hotels, homestays, and guest houses have been allowed to mushroom all over the flood zones of rivers. In the past, the Supreme Court appointed high-powered expert committees, comprising geologists and environmentalists, that raised red flags over the current model of development and suggested alternative methods that would spare ecologically sensitive zones from construction activity. Several experts have consistently warned that development must heed the unique fragility of the Himalayan ecosystems. Yet, the recent floods, which razed countless businesses, homes, and livelihoods, showed how these warnings have fallen on deaf ears. The perils of interfering with the fragile Himalayan ecology have repeatedly manifested themselves in the most brutal of ways in India’s hill States. But, no lessons are learnt and no course corrections are made. Hill-cutting, deforestation, poor drainage systems, and riverbed encroachments have all contributed to the collapse of natural buffers that once protected the region from such frequent calamities.

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