Over 40 labourers stuck for over two weeks as Silkyara tunnel in Uttarakhand collapsed is a news that receives little traction. It is about 40 lives – lives of poor labourers – who matter little to the elite urban centric media. It will be lesser told. If told, it would be about the massive rescue operations afoot and the who’s who making a beeline to the site for a photo opportunity. Buried under the tunnel is a larger story – a larger disaster. But it will not be told for other reasons.
Is the rescue work tardy? Was its engineering marked by flaws? Why was there no escape route planned while constructing the tunnel? These are questions that have been buried in the tunnel collapse. Far deeper buried are questions related to ill-planned projects conceived not on basis of scientific assessment but on the promise of vote banks, and perhaps greased pockets.
The Silkyara tunnel is a part of the 900-kilometre-long all-weather Char Dham highway which promises to bring in hordes tourists and pilgrims to Uttarakhand. A part of the highway collapsed during rains about a year ago. Ecological concerns were already raised by a Supreme Court appointed high-powered committee on the project. Repeated disasters are further indicators of the many ways in which issues of safety, structural stability and sustainability are forgotten.
The tunnel collapse and the ordeal of the 40 men highlights these issues and much more. Most importantly, it is an explication of the flawed development models thrust on the Himalayas.
The Himalayan region has been under severe ecological stress for years amidst the unending crisis of global climate change and the fallout has been an exacerbation of disasters in the Himalayan region – melting glaciers, massive flooding, collapsing bridges, washed out roads, and landslides. Climate change needs to be juxtaposed with the increased human activity in the region and violent development feats that devours forests for the sake of roads, economic projects, hydroelectric projects, mining, tourism and militarization.
Experts have warned about reckless spate in development projects that are not based on geological and geotechnical surveys or are rushed through without taking the particularities of the Himalayas into account. The net result is not just ill-planned projects but also an aggressive multiplicity of projects that are unsustainable, particularly landslides and floods that have increasingly become common in recent years.
Increased human activity and aggressive construction beyond the capacity of the Himalayan region is a force multiplier of disasters. The brunt of disasters is borne by the locals but the benefits of development are reaped by those distantly located in the far away plains. Despite the risks of landslides and floods, big hydroelectric projects continue to be built so that the urban elite sitting in distant cities can get round the clock electric supply.
The Himalayan region will grapple with the challenges of sinking villages, submerged villages and dislocated local populations, who pay a huge price so that somebody can get a peaceful sleep in his or her air-conditioned home far away. Forests will be denuded to provide wood for construction activity in faraway places. Riverbeds will be mined for minerals till the rivers shrink to a polluted trickle. Roads, highways, hotels and much more will be built so that tourists from the plains can enjoy their luxury holidays in the mountains.
Though the development projects do not fully by-pass the locals and do provide them some benefits in terms of jobs and connectivity, the price at which they come is exacting on them, endangering their lives and the ecosystems they live in. Development cannot come at the cost of peoples bodies and the loss to the rich flora and fauna. Keeping in view the fragility of the Himalayan region, there is need to go beyond the paradigm of striking balance between development and ecological preservation. Sustainable development in the Himalayas needs to be envisioned differently in accordance with the peculiarities of its geography and its socio-cultural realities.
The recent tunnel disaster once again underscores the need for discarding a tunneled view and thinking afresh. To quote from Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Great Derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable’, “And to imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis: for if there is one thing that global warming has made perfectly clear it is that to think about the world only as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide. We need, rather, to envision what it might be.” This is even more relevant with respect to the Himalayan region.
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