The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: Disasters such as yesterday’s landslide that damaged a hydro-power project in Sikkim and floods in the state last year that killed around 40 people have become common “due to ecological destruction and unplanned constructions”, the Congress has said.
A statement issued on Wednesday (August 21) by party MP Jairam Ramesh said that dams on the Teesta river, along which the hydropower project that was damaged yesterday is located, were the “prime example” of how the region’s ecology was being altered for the worse.
Parts of the Teesta-V hydro-power project were damaged yesterday morning by debris from an adjacent hill sent tumbling down by a landslide.
Six homes as well as a building of the power project site were damaged, news reports said.
Teesta-V became inoperational in October last year after suffering damages caused by a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) that devastated the region.
The Telegraph reported that Teesta-V was undergoing reconstruction when Tuesday’s landslide hit. “The overground set-up [of the project] has suffered extensive damage,” a source told the newspaper.
Ramesh claimed in his statement that hydel projects in Sikkim and in West Bengal’s mountainous region had been “undertaken without local communities in mind” and that authorities “dismissed” locals’ concerns around Teesta-V’s environmental clearance.
“… The authorities had dismissed members of the local Lepcha community when they challenged the Teesta-V project’s environment clearance in 2014, including on the grounds of the absence of studies on the potential impact of GLOFs on the project,” Ramesh alleged.
He added: “True to their warnings, the GLOF overtopped the Teesta-V dam as well, causing damage to the project back in October. A few months later, landslides have now struck the same dam.”
The senior Congress leader said that “a spate of hydro projects” on the Teesta river had made it more flood-prone and that as per the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC), 47 such projects were at different stages of development along the Teesta.
“Amidst these hydel projects, IRCON [an engineering company] has also undertaken tunnelling of this sensitive region for the Sivok-Rangpo railway line (14 tunnels), contributing to the region’s increased vulnerability,” Ramesh said, adding that mismanagement of how debris was disposed during tunnelling also contributed to the Teesta’s proneness to floods.
“Hydel projects in ecologically fragile regions have been coming up over the past few years without giving adequate thought to their cumulative environmental impacts,” he also said.
The New Indian Express reported on Wednesday that some experts it spoke to said weather conditions were not immediately responsible for Tuesday’s landslide.
“Except on August 19, the area received deficient rainfall in the past two weeks … Currently, we do not find any role of extreme weather incidents in this landslide,” G.N. Raha, a scientist at Gangtok’s meteorological centre, told the newspaper.
It also cited Nagaland University scientist Manasi Debnath as saying that satellite images suggested the role of human-made reasons behind the incidents.
Debnath pointed to the possibility that the slope of the hill adjacent to Teesta-V had become eroded due to human-made activities, including construction work undertaken by the NHPC.
In his statement, Ramesh also blamed the budget announcement of being vague when it came to offering assistance for Sikkim in light of the floods and landslides that occurred last year.
“In a classic case of the government’s confrontational federalism, the budget was indifferent to the areas in West Bengal [that] were equally affected,” he wrote.