AN AUDIO-TEXT MULTLILINGUAL MAGAZINE
HIMALAYAN WARNING
LET ALONE TIME!
VAANAVIL/Papri Sen Sri Raman
fnbworld.com/Guest Columnist
DISTURBING IMAGES/Videos BELOW
When a rivulet turns into a frothing furious river rushing downstream, sweeping all on its way, Climate Change can be blamed. It is the easy way out. History, politics, mindlessness and human proclivity are not fashionable talking points. Yet, let me briefly recount what is believed to have happened on the Tibet -Nepal border on 26 August. A huge glacier, high up in the northern side of the Langtang-Lirung peak, collapsed, the melting ice and the debris racing down the Lhende Khola and Bhote Kosi river valleys, killing a few thousand people, with about five thousand still missing, destroying settlements, the losses still being counted.
Nature quotes Manoochehr Shirzaei, a geophysicist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, to say that satellite images from just days before the disaster suggest that ‘a section of the glacier and the rocks it sat on top of were accelerating in the weeks before the collapse’. Shirzaei says, ‘most existing monitoring systems are not designed to routinely examine thousands of glaciers and unstable mountain slopes for subtle changes in deformation’. Nature also examined radar data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellites; analysts opined, ‘the region where the cascade originated is close to, or across, the Nepal–Tibet border, so effective warning alerts also depend on the rapid sharing of observations and hazard information between countries’, opinions that nail the problem.
In disaster management parlance, a week is long enough to evacuate a specific population from a specific area – satellite data is for just this purpose. However, technology has its own politics. Neither China nor India, two big neighbours of Nepal-Tibet, share relevant data and warnings, nor does big brother America. Confrontational history has landed this region vulnerable to such an extent that even relief is politicised here.
The popular idea is climate change and increasing temperatures in this part of the Himalayas caused the glacier to melt, making it shift position and eventually topple. The glacier sat at about 17,100 to 17,700 feet above sea level, and the river valleys are at about 12,467 feet above sea level… high speed descent to 5,000 ft below. The Nepali rivers meet and merge naturally downward.
Now comes the crucial question, what were thousands of pilgrims doing in this secluded region of the Himalayas? This is the transit point for Mount Kailash (about 22,000 ft) and Mansarover lake (about 15,000 ft above sea level) and no one tells pilgrims, your very breaths heat up the air and contributes to the rapid climate change in this fragile ecosystem. Associated is the infrastructure building, roads, helipads, dams, concrete housing activity – basically human activity in huge scale.
This is ‘Devobhoomi’ and aren’t the gods telling us, they don’t need man-made temples and worships and rituals on their land?
Mother nature is telling us, leave the Himalayas alone, no need for the Yarlung Tsangpo mega dam project, no need for the ₹12,000 crore Char Dham highway drilling into the heart of the Himalayas; no need for five-star travel for pilgrims be they Indian or Chinese, Hindus or Buddhists or Jains. Keep the development bug away; a pilgrimage is supposed to be a journey of hardships, no matter what the human faith, the journey itself is the pilgrimage.
Mountains and rivers are victims of this Development Bug. In the Indian subcontinent, it was a colonial entreprise, the brainchild of Arthur Cotton (1850s), a British irrigation engineer dreaming of a vast network of interlinked navigable canals across India. His goal was to improve inland navigation for the rapid import and export of commercial goods for the British, and to some extent mitigate severe droughts in southeastern India. He proposed linking the Krishna and Godavari rivers, both in the Deccan system, when India was a colony country; this did not happen, investment went to the Great Indian Railways.
After independence, Kanuri Lakshmana Rao, a dam designer and India’s former Union Minister for Power and Irrigation, in 1972 proposed a 2,640 km-long canal linking the Ganga to the Kaveri (Cauvery) river to transfer water from surplus basins to deficit zones. A Central Water Commission was set up to look at river linking possibilities throughout the country.
The idea of river linking came from the Colorado River Diversion Networks, created in 1933 in the USA. The Australians devised the Snowy Mountains Scheme, a large irrigation project in 1949 and advanced it in 1974. Mao Zedong in 1952 had the idea to link the Yangtze river in the south to the 3-H river basin in the north, drained by the Yellow, Hai and the Huai rivers. In 2002, the Chinese began working on linking the Yangtze and the Yellow rivers through 100 km tunnels. They began construction on the massive Three Gorges New Waterway Project in May-June 2026. From Mao to Xi has taken 70 years in the making. As many as 846,200 people were resettled in the Three Gorges reservoir area; displacement, compensation and resettlement have been some of the issues. India too has a long history of displacement. There is no doubt dams and river linking are bad ideas, as are too much construction and human activity in the Himalayas. What Kanak Mani Dixit calls the ‘death wish’. Perhaps the 26 August tragedy will make us humans think of some ‘let alone’ time for the hills and rivers.
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Papri Sen Sri Raman is a journalist-writer and translator. She is the winner of the third UNHCR C-NES Media Fellowship, 2008; Interpress Media Fellowship in 2008-09; The Kaiser Media Fellowship in 2007-08. She has worked with several Indian newspapers like The Statesman, The Indian Express and the IANS news agency; contributed to Womens Feature Service.
