-Down to Earth Sumna is an uninhabited place, with only border roads personnel working there; no word yet on casualties A glacier burst at a remote place on the Indo-China border in Uttarkhand on the afternoon of April 23, 2021, according to a senior official. There is no word yet of any casualties. “A glacier has burst near Uttarakhand’s Joshimath on the India-China border,” Colonel Manish Kapil, commander, Border Road Task Force, was...
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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 »Chamoli glacier burst: Himalayan blunders compounded -Sunita Narain
-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...
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 »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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