-TheThirdPole.net Climate change made the Uttarakhand flash flood possible, and poor development policies made it disastrous The February 7 flash flood in the Rishi Ganga river in the Himalayas has shone a spotlight on the deadly combination of climate change and ill-planned roads and dams. The latest death count is 68; bodies are still being taken out of the hydropower project tunnels next to the destroyed Tapovan dam; and after two weeks...

-Scroll.in The 126-year-old barrage has dangerously outlived its 50 years of life. Perched high up in the Western Ghats, adjacent to Kerala’s famed Periyar wildlife sanctuary, is a 126-year-old dam that has dangerously outlived the 50 years of life intended for it by colonial British engineers. NK Premachandran, a member of parliament from Kerala, describes the 53.6 metre-high Mullaperiyar dam on the Periyar river as “a ticking timebomb waiting to explode, not only...

-TheNewsMinute.com Experts say that the narrative that a country must choose between environment and development itself is wrong. Merely days after the fatal landslide in Kerala’s Pettimudi in Idukki district in August last year, the spotlight was back on the Gadgil report on the Western Ghats. The report, submitted to the government of India in 2011, had designated the Pettimudi region among the most sensitive ecological zones in the Western Ghats and...

-The Hindu The Uttarakhand government continues to ignore evidence that hydropower projects in the fragile region exacerbate disasters In 2018, while travelling through the villages near the India-China border in Niti Valley in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district, I stopped at Reni village, the birthplace of the iconic Chipko movement. The way to Reni was dotted with hydropower projects that were marred by controversy. The villagers complained about the rampant flouting of norms by...

-TheThirdPole.net As the world warms and glaciers retreat faster, the need is to brace for more disasters and minimise impacts by reviewing ill-planned dams and roads Under the weight of a suspected avalanche, a massive chunk of ice and frozen mud broke away from a glacier in the high Himalayas and fell into a lake that had formed at its snout due to climate change. The moraine around the lake collapsed and...