Such has been the unrelenting and widespread nature of Himalayan disasters in this monsoon of 2025 that it made the Supreme Court of India proclaim, “If things proceed the way they are as on date, then the day is not far when the entire state of HP may vanish into thin air.”

Scientists, politicians and even the Supreme Court have suddenly held up the red flags that environmentalists and activists had long been waving – that climate risks had been overlooked in the development trajectories driven by mindless economic growth. Now the Supreme Court, taking serious cognisance of this in a case from Himachal Pradesh, even said that “revenue cannot be earned at the cost of ecology”. The court went a step further last week  and appointed an amicus curiae to advise it on Himachal’s ‘ecological imbalance’.

At first glance, this appears to be a long-overdue concern from the highest judicial body of the land. Yet, it is imperative to critically examine the court’s statements, which seem problematic at more than one level.

A grand sermon, but no acknowledgment of complicity

The immediate context was the case of Pristine Resorts Pvt. Ltd. vs State of Himachal Pradesh, where the business enterprise had challenged the government’s decision to classify Shri Tara Mata Hill in Shimla as a “Green Area”, thus barring new construction and tightly restricting alterations. Both the high court and the Supreme Court dismissed the petition in the interest of protecting the ecology. The Supreme Court’s accompanying comments in its order of July 28, 2025 referred to disaster drivers in the form of the destructive footprint of hydropower projects, unscientific road construction, deforestation and unregulated tourism in Himachal Pradesh.

While the court’s concerns are not unfounded, the dramatic picture it paints is ironic. Especially because it was the Supreme Court that in 2024 quashed multiple orders of the National Green Tribunal (NGT) on the Shimla Development Plan issued from 2017 to 2022. The NGT had prohibited construction activity in Shimla’s green belts, core and forest areas. The Supreme Court ruled that the NGT exceeded its jurisdiction and infringed upon delegated legislative powers by directing how the state should frame its development plan. In doing so, the court sidelined environmental concerns raised by the petitioners.

Now, the July 28 order, for all its righteous text, ends with no substantive directive that interrupts or even interrogates the ongoing infrastructural assault on the region. It doesn’t halt any projects. It doesn’t question the environmental clearances routinely issued by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC). It doesn’t demand accountability from the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), the numerous private hydropower corporations who have violated dam safety laws, or the central and state agencies complicit in ignoring geological warnings. Instead, it offers a candid acknowledgment of the disaster but refuses to name the beneficiaries, the defaulters or the (lack of) regulatory processes by which it was produced, particularly the precedents set in the judicial realm.

What remains conspicuously absent is any attempt to hold accountable authorities who promoted the fragmentation of Himalayan ecosystems through categorisation of roads, railways and transmission lines as linear and thus exempt from certain environmental norms. By allowing piecemeal assessments and unnecessary widening for projects like the Char Dham, that are inherently interconnected, the environment ministry enabled compounding disasters. When activists and affected communities have brought matters of hydropower dams’ negative impacts to courts, they have even had costs imposed on them, and their locus standi questioned.

India’s higher judiciary has performed environmental concern, but not acted when and where it matters most. When real opportunities arise, the courts often defer to ‘national security and developmental imperatives’ or procedural technicalities.

But it's not too late. There are many court decisions pending, many suo-moto interventions to prevent disasters still in the making as far as the Himalaya are concerned. Consider, for instance, the proposed 11000 MW Siang Multipurpose Project which threatens to displace indigenous communities and alter the ecology, geology and hydrology of a still-living river system in Arunachal Pradesh in the North-Eastern Himalaya. The destruction has not yet begun here, but local resistance on the ground is facing repression. The projects that the court order decries are the same ones that may be ‘strategic projects’ within 100 km of international borders, thus exempt from seeking forest clearance under the new Forest Conservation Act Amendment 2023, which also stands challenged in the court. This is a moment for the court to act – not after the blasting starts, not once the river is dammed, the valleys are flooded and laws that protect indigenous rights flouted, but now.

Political economy of Himalayan disasters

The Supreme Court has called upon the State of Himachal Pradesh to file an “action plan” urgently, but singling out Himachal Pradesh makes little sense when the extreme monsoon’s adverse impact is widespread. Those at the helm of power must have not missed the bone-chilling and viral visuals of flash floods wiping out Uttarkashi’s Dharali or Jammu’s Chisoti. While preparedness and long-term thinking is imperative, this will have to be done region wide, addressing the specificities of each mountain state. Not just across the Himalayan terrain but the plains, urban centres and ‘smart cities’ too are begging for similar attention to disaster planning and governance.

Even if we even take Himachal’s predicament, as a mountain state, it is not just hazard vulnerability that should be seen in isolation. The state of Himachal Pradesh is currently in fiscal debt of over Rs one lakh crore, making it the third most debt-stressed state in India. The Himachal Pradesh assembly’s monsoon session last week witnessed an unprecedented 12-hour debate on disasters and the losses that people have borne. Across party lines, legislators demanded that the state be recognised as a national disaster-affected region. This was not the first time such a demand has been made. After the catastrophic 2023 monsoon, when losses of nearly Rs 10,000 crore were recorded, the assembly made a similar plea. The Centre eventually released less than half that amount (Rs 2,200 crore), after two years of delay — by which time, fresh disasters had struck again and again.

Three consecutive years of calamities have left little recovery time. Reconstruction needs for basic infrastructure like bridges, schools, water supply schemes, livelihoods are unmet as the National Disaster Response Fund (NDRF) remains modest in size, with allocations that are often opaque and delayed. The amendments introduced by the Union government in the National Disaster Management Act 2005 last year have diluted loan relief measures - potentially breaking the back of horticulturists and commercial vegetable farmers whose produce, if not washed out, cannot even make it to the market on time.

A woman MLA from the tribal constituency of Lahaul-Spiti, Anuradha Rana, voiced this in the assembly last week as she drew attention to adverse impacts of climate disasters: “Jangal hamara, zameen hamari, par kanoon humara nahi” — our forests are ours, our land is ours, but the law is not for us. She pointed not only to compensation delays but violations of environmental norms and governance structures that disenfranchise mountain communities. The question of lack of availability of land for rehabilitation of disaster displaced people – given that 70% of the state’s geographic area is under centralised forest conservation laws – was the key issue she raised. The transcript of the assembly debate indicates that local political actors are forced to grapple with the issues thrown up by the disasters, fiscal squeeze, environmental policy and governance lapses. This does not absolve the state government of its failures or ignore the role of the local political elite and petty contractors in selling out for revenue and profit, but it underscores that on the ground these disasters are political issues.

The current Congress-led Himachal Pradesh government has repeatedly highlighted the partisan treatment by the BJP-led Union government as far as fiscal support goes. While this may be accurate, there is also a need to engage with the resource politics of the classical core-periphery dynamic of India’s federalism which marginalises Adivasi territories, mountain and coastal regions in the name of national interest. The Himalaya are expected to supply “green” energy, maintain a third of their geographical area under forest cover for carbon sinks and aesthetic value, and provide strategic services to the nation, but when disaster strikes, support is fragmented and delayed. The media’s overwhelming, albeit ephemeral, focus on the landscape of environmental degradation and climate risks leaves out of vision the grief of those living with the aftermath of each disaster.

Beyond victimhood: community resilience and knowledge democracy

Historically, the absence of long-term planning, regulatory accountability and judicial foresight has allowed short-term, plains-centric models to dominate the region. The response to this crisis will have to go beyond techno-managerial, knee-jerk solutions and address development policies, complex topographical conditions, and above all the current socioeconomic vulnerabilities. Recent data shows that Himachal had the highest youth unemployment rate in India — 29% for those aged 15 to 29 in mid-2025, in the first quarter of the year. To single out tourism, which provides the youth work, as the villain, without acknowledging the larger neoliberal political economy that forces mountain states (the country and the entire Global South in fact) into extractive dependence, is to miss the point entirely.

There is another danger in the way these disasters are framed: communities risk being cast only as vulnerable victims in an ecosystem hit by global climate change which can only be addressed by scientists and experts. Yet year after year, the first responders in Himachal’s landslides and floods are local people themselves — villagers jumping to the rescue, building bridges, sharing food, transporting women and children on their backs, removing muck from community buildings, schools, colleges and shelters. Recovery is driven not only by government relief but also by collective community action. To recognise this resilience, however, is not to leave citizens to fend for themselves. Romanticising resilience while denying resources or maintaining non-transparency around their disbursal is its own form of injustice.

India’s first geographic site-based climate action mission, the National Mission for Sustaining the Himalayan Ecosystem (NMSHE) which is in its second phase now, flush with task forces and data, is shrouded in opacity. Progress reports, state allocations, and even an RTI request we filed about the funds spent are denied on account of ‘confidentiality’. Despite a surge in scientific studies, much of this research is centred on hazard prediction and biophysical models, with little application for those living amid landslides and floods. What is the meaning of knowledge production and data generation if it is not shared with the actors on the ground, and if it does not feed into policy change? In a region where risks are micro and unpredictable, the way forward is not just robust data collection, but co-produced knowledge, democratic monitoring and community-led decision-making. If environmental and climate justice is to have meaning in the Himalaya, we must demand accountability and transparency from institutions that are the nodal agencies in national climate missions and disaster management.

The Himalaya are not just a scenic backdrop or a strategic frontier. They are home to millions of people who live with the consequences of policies made in the corridors of power. If Himachal or any Himalayan state vanishes, what will be the fate of the downstream states? To preach environmentalism to the dispossessed and distressed, while sparing those who profited from destructive development or those who remain apathetic to the crisis, is what makes these disasters bigger and worse.

Manshi Asher is a researcher-activist associated with Himdhara Collective based in Himachal Pradesh.

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