The images coming out of Nepal should unsettle anyone who lives in, governs, builds upon, travels through, or sends hundreds of thousands of pilgrims into the Himalayas.
Entire settlements have disappeared beneath mud and debris. Rivers have become corridors of destruction. Roads and bridges have been swept away. Bodies are still being recovered, while thousands remain missing. By August 30, the scale of the disaster had become staggering, with Reuters reporting about 750 deaths and more than 3,000 people missing.
Yet perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Nepal catastrophe is that the broad nature of the danger was never unknown.
Scientists, environmentalists and mountain communities have been warning for years that the Himalayas are not an ordinary mountain system upon which roads, tunnels, hotels, hydropower projects, military installations, pilgrimage facilities and expanding settlements can be imposed indefinitely without consequences.
The Himalayas are young mountains. They are geologically active, steep, fractured and extraordinarily sensitive to disturbances. Climate change is now adding another layer of instability through extreme rainfall, rapidly changing glaciers, glacial lakes and thawing high-altitude terrain.
What happened in Nepal should therefore be understood not simply as another "natural disaster", but as another warning from a mountain system whose warnings we repeatedly acknowledge after catastrophes and forget once the debris has been cleared.
For Jammu and Kashmir, that warning has acquired particular urgency.
A major scientific study published on August 28 in Scientific Reports, the Nature portfolio journal, has produced perhaps one of the clearest recent assessments of landslide vulnerability across Jammu and Kashmir.
Its findings should be required reading for policymakers.
Researchers led by Avtar Singh Jasrotia of the University of Jammu examined nearly 43,000 square kilometres and constructed an inventory of 669 landslide events using satellite imagery, remote sensing, field observations and geographical information system techniques.
About 24.43 per cent of the territory studied falls in the "high" landslide susceptibility category and another 3.65 per cent in the "very high" category. Put together, more than 28 per cent of the landscape examined is highly or very highly susceptible.
Another 51.56 per cent falls in the medium susceptibility category. Only 1.54 per cent was classified as having very low susceptibility. In other words, vulnerability is not an exception in Jammu and Kashmir's landscape. It is embedded in it.
The significance of the study lies not merely in the percentages. It lies in where the dangers are concentrated and, even more importantly, in what appears to be contributing to them.
Serious Clusters
The researchers identified particularly serious clusters in Ramban, Doda, Kishtwar, Poonch and Rajouri. Several of the most vulnerable areas lie along major transport corridors: National Highway 44, National Highway 244, NH-144A, the Mughal Road and the Kishtwar-Keylong Road.
These are not obscure mountain tracks. They are arteries through which people, goods, tourists, pilgrims and security personnel move. Some have been widened or upgraded substantially in recent years.
And therein lies an uncomfortable finding. The researchers examined eight major factors: slope, aspect, elevation, geology, geomorphology, land use and land cover, proximity to streams and proximity to roads.
Their modelling repeatedly identifies road proximity, slope and proximity to streams among the strongest predictors of landslides.
Road construction in the mountains is therefore not simply occurring in a landslide-prone environment. Under certain conditions it can contribute to creating or intensifying that vulnerability.
The study notes that the upgrading of highways disrupts natural slopes. Cutting hillsides, excavating mountains and altering drainage can destabilise terrain. Road embankments can change the direction of water flow, increasing erosion and runoff. The researchers assigned slope the highest importance in one component of their assessment, while road proximity was also given substantial weight.
The relationship became even clearer when researchers tested their model against actual landslide locations. An extraordinary 87 per cent of the mapped landslides corresponded to areas classified as having high or very high susceptibility.
That should end any argument that such susceptibility maps are merely academic exercises. They tell planners where the mountain is already signalling danger.
The study's district-level observations make sobering reading. At Pernote in Ramban, a major landslide damaged houses and roads and disrupted connectivity towards Reasi. At Thathri Nai Basti in Doda, landslides destroyed homes and infrastructure.
Numerous landslides were documented along NH-44 between Udhampur and Banihal, the principal road connecting Jammu with the Kashmir Valley. Kishtwar recorded landslides along NH-244 and the Kishtwar-Keylong Road.
In Poonch, landslides along the Mughal Road repeatedly affected connectivity with Shopian. Baramulla recorded landslides along the Uri-Kaman Post Road and other routes, while Anantnag saw slope failures along NH-244 towards Sinthan Top.
The scientists conclude that the clustering of landslide-prone areas near roads highlights the role of human activity in destabilising slopes through excavation, slope cutting and removal of vegetation. Infrastructure expansion in mountainous terrain, they caution, can significantly increase vulnerability unless accompanied by careful planning and mitigation.
This does not mean that roads should not be built in the Himalayas. Mountain communities need connectivity. Remote districts need hospitals, schools, markets and reliable transport. Strategic requirements also exist. But there is an enormous difference between building infrastructure in the mountains and attempting to overpower the mountain.
Amarnath Pilgrimage
For Kashmir, there is another reason why Nepal should provoke uncomfortable reflection.
Thirty years ago this month, the Amarnath pilgrimage suffered one of the worst disasters in its history.
In August 1996, severe unseasonal weather, heavy snowfall and blizzards trapped tens of thousands of pilgrims in the high mountains.
Official and contemporary accounts vary slightly on the final toll. Around 242 pilgrims were reported killed, while more than 260 bodies were eventually recovered in and around the pilgrimage route. Contemporary reporting described exhaustion, exposure, hypothermia, and falls into ravines as contributing to the deaths. The disaster occurred between August 21 and 26.
It was not merely the severity of the weather that killed. It was also congestion, inadequate regulation, insufficient shelter, poor communications, inadequate forecasting and the sheer number of people exposed simultaneously to extreme conditions.
The inquiry headed by former civil servant Nitish Sengupta subsequently recorded the frightening circumstances along the route.
At one stage, roughly 70,000 pilgrims were stranded or moving through an extremely narrow and hazardous mountain corridor during heavy snowfall and high winds. Sengupta described how exhausted pilgrims sat down and froze, while others fell into ravines amid congestion and the movement of ponies.
The committee's recommendations recognised a concept described as carrying capacity.
The committee recommended that no more than roughly 10,000 pilgrims should be allowed beyond Chandanwari on any given day, with the movement divided between different sections of the route.
The capacity of a landscape to absorb roads, buildings, vehicles, waste and human beings is not infinitely expandable simply because technology makes expansion possible.
And yet consider where we are thirty years later.
The 2026 Amarnath Yatra began on July 3 and was scheduled to continue for 57 days until August 28. By the time the authorities suspended the pilgrimage on August 9 because rains had damaged vulnerable stretches of both the Pahalgam-Chandanwari and Baltal routes, more than 480,000 pilgrims had already visited the cave shrine.
There is nothing objectionable about facilitating a religious pilgrimage. The right of believers to visit a sacred place deserves protection. But protecting a pilgrimage is not the same thing as maximising its numbers.
Indeed, the greatest service governments can render to pilgrims is to ensure that political prestige, tourism targets or records of attendance never supersede safety and ecology.
The Himalayas cannot be treated as a stadium where success is measured by footfall. That lesson should have been permanently engraved into policy after 1996.
Glaciers and Glacial Lakes
Landslides are only one part of Kashmir's Himalayan vulnerability. The region also contains glaciers and glacial lakes whose behaviour is changing as temperatures rise.
The Central Water Commission has dramatically expanded its monitoring programme across the Indian Himalayan region. Since June 2025, it has been monitoring 2,843 glacial lakes and water bodies larger than 10 hectares, compared with 902 previously.
That inventory includes 76 glacial lakes and 16 other water bodies in Jammu and Kashmir. But satellite observation alone cannot constitute a complete early-warning system.
A warning is meaningful only if it reaches the shepherd, pilgrim, driver, tourist, villager and construction worker standing in the path of the disaster.
It also requires something governments often find more difficult: the willingness to say no.
No to construction in certain zones. No to unlimited tourist numbers. No to another hotel on an unstable slope. No to blasting where geology cannot safely sustain it. No to widening a mountain road without adequate slope stabilisation. And, when necessary, no to additional pilgrims once the safe carrying capacity has been reached.
The new Jammu and Kashmir study explicitly recommends immediate attention to high and very high susceptibility areas through slope protection, controlled road construction and continuous monitoring. It says moderate-susceptibility areas require careful planning and environmental assessment before development.
Its warning about roads deserves special attention because infrastructure policy throughout the Himalayas is moving in the opposite direction.
It is tempting after every Himalayan catastrophe to blame climate change.
Climate change is unquestionably altering the risk. But climate change should not become an alibi for bad planning. If rainfall is becoming more intense, cutting unstable slopes becomes more dangerous, not less.
The University of Jammu researchers acknowledge that landslides are complex phenomena involving geology, geomorphology, hydrology and human intervention. Their model also has limitations. High-resolution rainfall and seismic data remain inadequate, and smaller landslides can escape satellite inventories.
The Nepal disaster provides the grim answer to what happens when multiple Himalayan hazards combine.
The August 26 flash flood in the Bhote Koshi system appears to have followed a massive collapse of glacier ice and rock in Tibet. The debris temporarily obstructed the river before releasing a devastating surge downstream. What began high in the mountains crossed an international boundary and became a catastrophe far below.
The disaster therefore carries a political lesson alongside its environmental one.
Himalayan hazards do not recognise national borders. A glacial lake in Tibet can threaten Nepal. A flood originating in one country can devastate communities in another. The Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra systems connect glaciers, rivers and hundreds of millions of people across political frontiers. No country can construct an adequate Himalayan warning system entirely on its own.
Himalayan Early Warning System
Therefore, there is a need for a shared Himalayan early-warning system. The cooperation between upstream and downstream countries cannot begin only after catastrophe, when helicopters, rescue teams and relief supplies are required. China, India, Nepal, Bhutan and Pakistan inhabit different political worlds. Their rivers do not.
Imagine instead a Himalayan monitoring grid stretching from the Karakoram and Kashmir through Himachal, Uttarakhand, Nepal and Bhutan to the eastern Himalayas. High-risk glaciers would carry automated sensors. Glacial lakes would be continuously monitored through satellites and ground instruments.
Susceptibility maps such as the one just produced for Jammu and Kashmir would be integrated into road planning, tourism policy, pilgrimage management and construction permits.
Most importantly, warnings generated upstream would automatically reach communities downstream, regardless of the international border between them.
There is a haunting continuity between the Amarnath tragedy of August 1996 and the catastrophe unfolding in Nepal in August 2026.
In 1996, pilgrims were caught by extreme weather in a fragile high-altitude landscape overwhelmed by numbers and inadequate preparedness. In 2026, scientists can map almost every vulnerable slope, watch glaciers from space and monitor lakes hundreds of kilometres away.
The Nepal tragedy should not become another sequence of horrifying images that disappears from public memory when the news cycle moves on. It should instead push South Asia to revive SAARC as an effective platform for regional disaster preparedness.
Political disputes may divide the region, but glaciers, cloudbursts, landslides and rivers recognise no national boundaries. A disaster originating in one part of the Himalayas can threaten communities hundreds of kilometres downstream in another country.
SAARC should therefore establish a permanent regional mechanism for the real-time exchange of meteorological, hydrological, seismic and satellite information. Weather stations, river gauges, glacial-lake monitoring systems and other sensors across member countries could feed into a common Himalayan early warning network, allowing alerts to reach governments and vulnerable communities before disaster strikes.
Such cooperation must also extend beyond SAARC. China is indispensable because much of the Himalayan and Tibetan headwaters lie within its territory. SAARC could develop structured data-sharing arrangements with China and international agencies.
If South Asian governments cannot overcome political differences to exchange information that could save thousands of lives, future Himalayan catastrophes will expose not only the fragility of the mountains, but also the failure of regional politics.
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