-The Telegraph The scientist, Madhav Gadgil, turns 80 this month I come from a family of scientists, but I shied away from studying science myself. Yet, in a happy irony, it turned out that the most important intellectual collaboration of my life was with a scientist, Madhav Gadgil, whose eightieth birthday falls later this month. Born in Pune, Gadgil studied in Bombay, and at Harvard, where he took a PhD in ecology and...
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Mindless ‘development’ could bring more calamities like Chamoli and Kedarnath floods -Shekhar Pathak
-The Indian Express People do not want to risk their homes, fields, pastures, forests and rivers in the name of development. Most of such development work in the Himalayas is being carried out without an understanding of its fragility, seismicity, glacial behaviour, climatic changes and their collective destructive power. The flash floods due to the burst of an artificial lake created by a huge landslide (rock, frozen mud and ice) in Rishi...
More »Dams and damages -Kavita Upadhyay
-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...
More »6 Lessons From A Himalayan Tragedy -Ramachandra Guha
-NDTV.com On Sunday, a few hours after the news about the flash floods in Chamoli District hit our screens, I phoned a man who should be a household name but sadly is not. A leader of the Chipko Movement, a thinker of originality and insight, a social reformer of courage and vision, he may be both our country's greatest environmentalist as well as the greatest living resident of Uttarakhand. Back in...
More »Why We Already Know the Rishi Ganga Flood Was a ‘Sooner or Later’ Event -CP Rajendran
-TheWire.in There should be no doubt that the Chamoli disaster is a sign of our misguided developmental priorities and proves our inability to sustainably develop ecologically sensitive zones. In 2019, a petitioner from a village named Reni, in Chamoli, Uttarakhand, had filed a public interest petition at the Uttarakhand high court. Kundan Singh’s charge was that the Rishi Ganga Power Project, set up near the village in 2005, was resorting to environmentally...
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