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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

The agonising cost of ham-handed development -Nachiket Chanchani

-The Hindu

India’s leaders must recommit themselves to the ideas and activism of environmentalists involved with Uttarakhand

Following flash floods at Chamoli in Uttarakhand, defence personnel are looking for missing persons in a mélange of rock, mud, water, and debris, airlifting rations to inaccessible villages, and repairing bridges and telecommunication networks. Social scientists are assessing the disaster’s impact on the region’s economy. Scientists and policy makers are debating whether climate change or unchecked development in an ecologically fragile region was primarily responsible for the disaster and the death toll. News reports of ancient temples having been swept away in the Alakananda’s raging waters are bringing back traumatic memories of the Kedarnath floods in 2013. All these developments show the profound significance attached to this region and they prompt a historian to ask two fundamental and interrelated questions: How did the Uttarakhand Himalayas emerge as a deva bhumi and how did it develop into a focus of Hindu pilgrimage?

Borderland to sacred place

A study of the archaeological record and inscriptional evidence suggests that many and varied agents and processes played important roles in gradually transforming this borderland into a sacred landscape. Artefacts found in the Himalayan foothills that are datable to the period extending from 300 BCE and 600 CE include an Ashokan rock edict, brick altars for conducting ashvamedha yagnas, coin hoards, and sculptures.

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