In July 2025, the Supreme Court of India delivered an extraordinary indictment. “If things continue as they are,” declared a bench of Justices J B Pardiwala and R Mahadevan, “the day is not far when the entire state of Himachal Pradesh will disappear from the map of the country.” The state government responded with an affidavit. Nothing changed on the ground.
That gap — between judicial alarm and administrative inaction — captures everything that is broken about India’s governance of its Himalayan states. Himachal Pradesh did not inherit its current crisis from climate change alone. It built it — permit by permit, tunnel by tunnel, monsoon by monsoon — while mountain communities absorbed the losses and asked the same unanswered question: does the state intend to help us stay?
In 2021, natural disasters killed 476 people and caused losses of Rs 1,151 crore in Himachal Pradesh. In 2022, 276 people died. In 2023, 441 people died and economic losses reached Rs 12,000 crore. In 2024, another 174 deaths and Rs 1,613 crore in damage. By August 2025, losses crossed Rs 13,000 crore — the highest figure since the 2013 Kedarnath catastrophe.
These numbers represent accumulated governance debt — the compounding cost of approving roads, dams, and tunnels through one of the world’s most seismically and hydrologically fragile mountain systems without climate risk assessments, without community compensation, and without any framework that treats mountain populations as stakeholders with rights.
India’s official framing attributes these disasters to climate change. Climate change is real, and it demands urgent action. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report confirms that Himalayan regions are warming at roughly twice the global average rate, with regional temperatures already rising approximately 1.2°C over the past century against a global mean of around 0.7°C. This intensifies rainfall, destabilises slopes, and accelerates glacial melt. The science is not in dispute.
But climate change cannot explain why destruction consistently concentrates around infrastructure sites. Of the seven cloudburst events recorded in Himachal between January and July 2024, active power or highway projects existed at four of the seven locations. The Malana, Sainj, Parvati, and Larji projects directly amplified the scale of 2023 losses. The state currently operates 174 small and large hydropower projects generating 11,209 MW — and plans to reach 30,000 MW. Every tunnel drilled into glacially-deposited slopes weakens the terrain above the next downstream village.
Geologist S P Sati puts it plainly: “The devastation caused by the combination of road widening, hydropower, and railway projects in the Himalayan region is evident today.” Environmentalist Ravi Chopra, who chaired the Supreme Court’s High Powered Committee for the Char Dham project, recommended capping road widths at 5.5 metres to protect the fragile terrain. The government overruled him. That overruling carries a body count.
India has no mountain-specific Environmental Impact Assessment protocol. The Himalayas receive the same regulatory treatment as the plains. This is not an oversight. It is a structural choice that subordinates protection to extraction.
Mountain communities are not passive victims. They actively sustain ecosystems that supply water to hundreds of millions downstream, generate the electricity that powers northern India, and maintain biodiversity reserves that no ex-situ programme can replicate. Their labour is invisible in national accounting. Their losses are invisible in displacement policy.
The Gaddi pastoralists of Kangra — a 200,000-strong nomadic community — have altered centuries-old transhumance routes as Kangra failed to receive its average annual rainfall of 2,020 mm for over a decade, shrinking grazing land and pushing livestock populations into decline. Erratic climate patterns across the region drive climate-forced migration towards the plains, according to a 2024 study in Theoretical and Applied Climatology.
The apple economy — which supports over 1.34 lakh families and generates Rs 4,000-5,500 crore annually — absorbed back-to-back shocks from infrastructure-amplified floods in 2023 and 2024. India’s Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare records a fall in apple production from 672,343 to 580,296 metric tons over those two years alone. No compensation mechanism addresses climate-amplified crop losses. No policy names what is happening to these communities as displacement.
The Supreme Court has named this an existential crisis. Policy must now follow the verdict.
India needs a statutory Himalayan Development Authority — a cross-ministry body with binding jurisdiction over infrastructure approvals, climate risk assessments, and community compensation across all Himalayan states. No single ministry currently owns the compound problem of unchecked development pressure compounding climate vulnerability in mountain zones. Without an institutional anchor, the affidavits will keep coming and the slopes will keep failing.
All infrastructure projects in ecologically sensitive Himalayan districts must undergo mandatory Climate Risk and Vulnerability Assessments before environmental clearances are granted — not after disasters, as post-mortems. The HP government must answer the Supreme Court’s pending questionnaire on forest cover, mining, and construction with specificity. Affidavits are not governance.
India must enact a Climate-Forced Displacement Policy that recognises mountain communities as a distinct category of climate-vulnerable persons with rights to compensation, livelihood restoration, and relocation support. The National Disaster Management Act does not cover slow-onset displacement. It must be amended to do so.
The mountains do not need more infrastructure approvals. They need governance that makes staying in them possible. The people who live there are not asking to be rescued. They are asking to be governed.
Ankit Mishra is a research scholar and ICSSR Doctoral Fellow at Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute, Prayagraj, where his work focuses on environmental politics and governance in the Indian Himalayan states, climate change, public policy and governance.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth