Joshimath Sinking: Chronicle Of A Disaster Foretold

On a chilly January morning, a mist of gloom enveloped 47-year-old Neelam Bhujwan as she stared at her crumbling house in Joshimath. She is forced to live in rented accommodation for her home may collapse anytime. “My husband and I built this home with lot of dreams. He died a few years back and I have two young kids to support. I earn my livelihood by working in an Anganwadi. How long can I live in a rented house?” asks Bhujwan.

She is not alone. In Joshimath, a hilly town in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand, several roads and buildings have developed cracks. The local administration has marked around 700 houses and evacuated scores of families to temporary shelters and prefabricated houses being built to deal with the impending disaster. Amid this, thousands of people, shopkeepers, hoteliers and businessmen of the town stare at a bleak future. The Centre has declared Joshimath a “landslide subsidence zone”.

However, the crisis did not emerge overnight. It has been a disaster in the making for many decades. With Joshi­math’s population having risen by nearly 50 times in the last 100 years, to 61, 699 at present, the pressure on land has inc­reased, leading to haphazard civil and commercial construction in the sensitive area. In addition, successive governments ignored warnings by experts and continued to push big ‘development’ projects like road construction and hydro-power dams, without taking any measures for planned and sustainable development.

Geography and Strategic Location: Situated at a height of 6,200 ft above sea level, Joshimath borders Tibet and has a strong presence of the Indian Army and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, a specialised para-military force deployed along the Indo-Tibet border. After the 1962 attack by China, security forces have strengthened infrastructure in areas close to the border in Uttarakhand. Joshimath is also an entry point for pilgrims to Badrinath and Hemkund Sahib. Besides, it falls on the way to the Valley of Flowers—a UNESCO world heritage site—and is situated close to Auli, a popular skiing destination. The town offered good employment opportunities as many hotels and multistorey buildings have come up there.

Moreover, due to the presence of several rivers, big hydro projects by private and public sector companies also came up in this region. Geologists and earth scientists say that since Joshimath is situated on a very unstable and loose moraine, unplanned construction has played a role in the subsidence of the landmass around the town. In the 1930s, two Swish geologists Arnold Heim and August Gansser had written about it in their book, Central Himalaya.

Navin Juyal, a geologist who has often surveyed this region, says, “Joshimath is situated in a paraglacial zone. It contains loose moraine left by the receding glaciers, making the land unstable, with a very limited soil retention capacity.” Since the area falls in a high seismic zone, heavy construction, tunnelling and blasting should not be allowed here, Juyal adds.

Warnings Go Unheard: In 1976, a committee headed by the then Garhwal Commissioner M.C. Mishra prepared a detailed report which recommended that no construction in the area should be allowed without examining the stability of the site and restrictions should be placed on excavation on slopes. The committee also recommended boulders should not be removed either by digging or by blasting. It said there should be plantations in vulnerable stretches and emphasised a blanket ban on collecting construction material within a 5-km radius of the township.

This was a time when the Chipko Movement was in full swing and Reni village near Joshimath was making headlines for the spirit and tenacity of its women activists. Tragically, Reni is also crumbling today and several people have fled their homes to safety.

In 2006, Uttarakhand’s Disaster Mitigation and Management Centre (DMMC) in its report flagged the iss­ues of subsidence and active erosion of a local stream and clearly said, that Joshimath lies on solifluction (moving soil) deposit.  The report warned against blasting for heavy construction such as road-widening and hydro power projects, saying, “Blasting-induced rock fall and slides have been restored by more blasting.” As the impending disaster jerked the state government out of its torpor, it has ordered all private and public construction in the town to stop.

On January 5, residents protested against the ongoing 520 MW hydro power project of the National Thermal Power Corporation Ltd. (NTPC), which had started in 2006. In February 2021, floods in Rishi Ganga devastated the project area, killing around 200 people. According to the locals, the NTPC broke and cut into mountains to build a 12-km long tunnel, which has led to the recent burst of aquifers from the ground. They see it as the cause of water sources dying up and cracks surfacing in their houses and roads.

Thakur Singh Rana, a hotel owner in Joshimath, claims that he has incurred a loss of Rs. 7 crore as his hotel is crumbling. Speaking to Outlook, he says, “We heard the sound (of blasting) on the night of 3rd January. That scared us. The work in the project continues day and night. In 2010, we had complained to the NTPC that their project was behind the water problem we were facing. The NTPC provided Rs.16 crore to municipal authorities to restore water supply.”

However, the NTPC issued a statement saying that the tunnel has nothing to do with the subsidence of land in Joshimath. It further said that the tunnel being constructed is not running under the township and at present no blasting is being done. The state’s disaster management secretary Ranjit Sinha, too, told media that until now there is no “correlation” established between the tunnel construction and recent aquifer bursts seen in Joshimath.

A report published in 2009 in Current Science, a multidisciplinary scientific journal published since 1932 by the Indian Academy of Sciences, had seen the construction of the NTPC tunnel as a problem. The report was prepared by Professor M.P.S. Bisht of H.N. Bahuguna University and Piyush Rautela of DMMC. Several other big hydro and road construction projects have been questioned both by experts and by local residents.

Where to rehabilitate?: Experts aver that the damage to Joshimath and the surrounding areas is irreversible and that locals have to be relocated to safer areas. Saraswati Prakash Sati, a geologist who was part of the expert team that prepared a report on this region after the Rishi Ganga floods of 2021, says, “It is a bitter reality. All the earlier warnings were ignored by the government and now there is no other way but to relocate all the people living in Joshimath.”

But the problem is not limited to Joshimath. Hundreds of villages in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli, Uttarkashi, Rudraprayag, Tehri, Pithoragarh, Bageshwar, Almora and Nainital are disaster-prone. More than 60 percent of the area in the state is forest land, so the question is: where should the people of disaster-prone or subsidence-prone areas be relocated?

According to Kalachand Sain, director of Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Dehradun, the crisis in Joshimath is the result of many natural and anthropogenic factors coupled with flawed development activities. “It is not about one city or one town in the sensitive Himalayan region witnessing such havoc. We should learn lessons from Joshimath. How are developmental and anthropogenic activities affecting the hills or can the rock formation of a particular area take the pressure of such activities? If it is destroying one place, it will affect others also,” says Sain.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Wages of Greed")

(Hridayesh Joshi is an independent journalist)

Hridayesh Joshi in Joshimath