-RuralIndiaOnline.org With no industrial activity and low wages in agriculture, men from Bhagabanpur in Maldah district go to work in faraway places like Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, just to survive and send money home Rehna Bibi didn’t think much when her phone call to her husband, Anas Shaikh, failed to connect at 10.30 a.m.on February 7, 2021. They had spoken less than two hours ago. “His grandmother had died that morning,” says...

-The Hindu An avalanche in Chamoli district of Uttarakhand early this month claimed at least 62 lives, destroyed two hydropower projects and ravaged the region. Jacob Koshy reports on how development projects are endangering the lives of people in the young and fragile Himalayas The Rishiganga river looks like an idyllic brook from the balcony of Gyan Singh Rana’s two-storey house. The former headman of the village of Raini, who is in...

-The Hindu The need of the hour is to invest in long-term crisis response mechanisms and resilience solutions Days after a Glacier burst in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand caused flash floods, the scientific community is still struggling to understand what triggered the disaster. At the time of writing this article, the death toll was 34 with more than 170 people missing. The floods have also caused heavy damage to public and...

-The Indian Express “Imagine the odds of a single, dislodged boulder killing him while nobody standing around received a scratch. In hindsight, was it just a freak incident or an early warning? Today, so many are feared dead and everything has been washed away,” says Kolkata-based realtor Kamal Surana. On Independence Day in 2011, Rakesh Mehra, the owner of Ludhiana-based Rajit Paints Group, drove up to Chamoli in Uttarakhand to inaugurate the...

-Down to Earth The issue is about carrying capacity of the fragile region, which is even more at risk because of climate change The flash flood in high Himalayas, which has claimed lives and wiped out two hydroelectric plants on the Ganga, should be a grim reminder of the mistakes we continue to make. There is no rocket science here about why this devastation happened. The Himalayas are the world’s youngest mountain...