Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.

Sixteen people, including a sub-inspector and three home guards, died when they were electrocuted on the morning of Wednesday, July 19 at the site of a sewage treatment plant in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district. 

Eleven others were seriously injured and hospitalised. The district magistrate told the media that a magisterial probe has been ordered to ascertain the exact nature of the tragedy in the premises of the plant. It now turns out there had been an earlier power leakage that was repaired by the local power department, but this did not prevent the two subsequent leakages that took place soon after.

The joint venture plant was part of the Union government’s much publicised Namami Gange project – for cleaning the polluted Ganges – and was located on the banks of a major tributary of the Ganges, the Alaknanda. The sewage treatment job had been outsourced to private companies named Jai Bhushan Malik Contractors and Confident Engineering India. A safety audit of the plant has now been ordered.

Kipling had once asked an interesting question: “And what should they know of England who only England know?” 

Today, after watching repeated tragedies striking power plants in this eco-fragile zone, as well as large chunks of forests, entire hillsides, vital bridges and national highways being swept away in the monsoons by raging rivers, if we ask how much our engineers and terrain experts know the Himalayas that they are hell-bent on ‘developing’ as tourist areas, the likely answer would be: “Maybe not nearly enough. Maybe not at all.”

Up until the 1850s, the Uttarakhand hills were pristine hunting grounds for British officials craving cool vacations after spending time in the hot and dusty plains handing unequal laws to those they considered were the savage races.

After 1857, when the Crown took over, civil engineering works by British engineers first began on a planned scale. Nainital had already been built and rebuilt after a quake. In 1887, they built the town of Lansdowne to house the Garhwal Rifles, who guarded the difficult terrain along the Indo-Tibet border. 

The first motor road in Uttarakhand was built from Kotdwar to Dugadda in Garhwal. So far, mules had been transporting goods and people slowly and painfully along dangerous paths. Often, both the mules and rations ended up in the ravines below. 

The bus seemed a miracle to the locals – 15,000 of whom, according to old papers, gathered to see the first bus carrying a precious cargo of jaggery, grams and salt. 

By 1909, the motor road had been extended to Lansdowne at a height of 1,780 metres, and thence to Satpuli in 1925. By 1932, the engineers gave the area its first firm wooden bridge.

Initially, the motor road (gadi sadak) was available only to vehicles carrying the British and a few Indian VIPs. But by the ‘30s, one Motiram of Dugadda and Surajmal of Kotdwar bought the first public transport buses that travelled via Pauri to Almora.

It is said a simple Pahari woman came and put a bundle of grass and leaves before the stationary bus. Aha, like her cow, the bus must be hungry and thirsty after such a long run, she said. 

Centuries before the British engineers, the locals and itinerant pilgrims had built their own routes that led to the holy shrines and glaciers in the area. These were tedious treks that took days and had to be covered on foot with a little bundle of essentials and nothing more.

But the new chaudikaran (widening) of old roads and the building of tunnels aims at a different species of humans. Most of them are well-heeled and love brief vacations all year round. Of them, a large number try to relive ‘the Raj experience’, growing all dewy-eyed over the great legacy of sprawling bungalows, churches and other stately buildings the British left behind for us in 1947.

The epistemological stance of the natives yields a vast and rare treasure of a different kind, laced with tales of forced unpaid labour (kulli begar) and the sawing down of precious forests. The tales have mostly oral sources and are told in local languages that few Raj lovers and increasingly fewer local people speak.

The planners, to be sure, are not a monolithic category. There are still several of them who care deeply about the flora, fauna and human beings who had lived in harmony with each other for centuries.

But with the present political emphasis on treating the state as a major post of the Hindutva empire, and the big push for religious tourism for Hindus, a complex matrix has been created. It is ruled not by ecological concerns but largely by vote bank politics and the money ethic, in that order.

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Local papers and digital sites regularly carry articles questioning the exceedingly questionable steps being taken in the name of development, and the banning of local protests by conservationists. The overarching ambition of the ‘double-engine sarkar’ remains unwaveringly majoritarian.

Capitalism meshes well with a segregationist mindset. The hills – cool, scenically soothing and picturesque spaces that they were – are now gradually turning into gated communities for the rich Indians who buy second or third homes here for vacations and partying. 

Like the British before them, the hills are a place where they shed their fatigue and enjoy a bit of fishing, and taste a bit of water sports, horse riding and paragliding before they go back.

The clever builders’ lobby has spotted a golden chance here to develop clever strategies to help outsiders buy local land and sell it to their clients as a wise investment for their future generations in the era of global warming.

There is still a direct connection between the earlier rapid urbanisation under the colonial government through “creative destruction” and the new capital accumulation (through rents, taxes, private property development, and the manipulative political, bureaucratic and real estate lobbies).

This deeply flawed development paradigm of various governments who encourage the extensive use of local material like stone and timber for infrastructure development in reserved forests and along river beds leads to the eventual destruction of the land, forests and rivers. 

Chamoli is an example, Joshimath another. Neglecting seemingly less important issues like providing proper healthcare and sanitation for the inhabitants, along well-designed SOPs and safety audits for the new power plants, have major consequences when natural disaster strikes. And it is becoming more frequent with ecological changes.

The core of the learnings from the 2013 Kedar Valley disaster and now the Himachal and Uttarakhand tragedies is that the government bulldozing its way into the hill areas without much terrain information and domain knowledge is for it to court disaster.

Turning away from available data and expert advice has reconstituted and reorganised both the topography and the lives of the original inhabitants in ways that are anything but sustainable in the long run. The new planning is still ejecting locals from the ownership of land and forests, and is replacing their humble dwellings with structures that are ill-suited to the terrain.

To ease travel for tourists, an ecologically sensitive region is being overburdened by widening motorable roads that deliver the outsiders to a life brimming with sports and leisure institutions, health resorts and large bungalows. The new empire in the hills which the governments have been creating is a sombre chronicle of the despoliation and degradation of an immense habitat.

They would do well to remember that our hills, forests and rivers are neither infinite nor eternal, and colonising them in the name of development, urbanisation or tourism is killing them with fake kindness.

Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.

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