Development and disasters in Uttarakhand: Walking on the fault lines, a decade after Kedarnath disaster

To most outsiders, the Himalayas remain postcard-perfect: towering peaks, misty mountains, ancient temples, and lush green valleys. But during my Askot-Arakot Yatra 2024 through Uttarakhand’s remote mountain corridors, I encountered a very different Himalaya — one far removed from glossy tourist brochures and distant policy reports.

As we drove toward Pangu village, the road resembled a descent from heaven to hell: cliffs loomed over fragile, crumbling slopes; water seeped relentlessly from fractured rock; every turn whispered the threat of collapse. Along the Tawaghat highway, skirting the Kali River where India and Nepal meet, we witnessed a grim spectacle: a no-man’s river turned dustbin. Debris, muck, and silt from upstream construction on both sides have transformed this once-sacred valley into a landfill of policy neglect.

In June 2013, northern India experienced one of its worst natural disasters in recent memory. While Kedarnath became the tragic epicentre, the devastation was far-reaching. Torrential rains, cloudbursts, landslides and flash floods ravaged large parts of Uttarakhand, extending into Himachal Pradesh and western Nepal. Over 5,700 people were declared dead or missing. Hamlets like Dewali Bhanigram in Rudraprayag turned into widow villages. Thousands were displaced, and entire communities erased.

But behind this so-called “natural” fury lay a deeper flaw: the catastrophe was not just a meteorological event but the result of decades of fragile, short-sighted development built on unstable ecological and political foundations. A decade has passed. Infrastructure projects have multiplied, tourism has surged, and climate risks have intensified. Yet one pressing question remains: Has Uttarakhand — and the broader Himalayan region — learned anything from this unfinished reckoning?

Religious vibrance, structural failures

The 2013 Kedarnath disaster was not merely an act of nature. Torrential rains triggered the destruction, but it unfolded atop years of systemic failure: unregulated highways carved through unstable slopes, hydropower projects mushroomed in seismic zones, and construction ignored environmental and social safeguards.

During my 2024 Yatra, I witnessed a telling contradiction at Kedarnath: spiritual vibrance coexisting with structural fragility. Water scarcity plagued areas along the Kedarnath Yatra Marg, while Sonprayag — heavily damaged in 2013 — is now more congested than ever, featuring multi-story parking structures. Garbage piles, plastic waste, and unchecked reconstruction on fragile riverbeds have come to frame the pilgrimage route.

Road-widening projects snake up the mountains, but basic services like education and healthcare remain scarce. In Phata, helicopter noise interrupts school lectures every few minutes. Wildlife sightings have dwindled, and traditional Char Dham walking trails lie broken and forgotten. Both nature and heritage are quietly suffering.

Despite the 2013 wake-up call, the development model remains unchanged. Over 70 hydropower projects continue to fragment rivers, destabilise slopes, and heighten seismic risks (Ghughuti, 2023). Mega-projects like the Pancheshwar Dam advance despite serious ecological concerns. The 889-km-long Char Dham Highway slices through fragile terrain, often bypassing environmental and social assessments. The Supreme Court’s High Powered Committee has repeatedly warned that non-engineered slope cutting dangerously increases landslide risks.

As historian Shekhar Pathak observed during the Yatra: “These recurring crises are not isolated events but products of a linear development paradigm that disregards the Himalayas as an ecological whole.”

Roads sans development

In villages like Kanar and Gharguwa, roads remain absent even today. Residents walk hours across unstable trails for access to basic services — services that often barely exist. Their remoteness hasn't shielded them: landslides, shrinking water sources, and soil instability continue to erode both land and livelihoods. Outmigration is a quiet, persistent reality as younger generations leave in search of education, healthcare, and employment.

In contrast, villages like Pangu, Aala and Hookra now have roads — but little else. These newly cut mountain roads are frequently blocked by landslides and weakened by unregulated slope-cutting. Schools remain underfunded, healthcare is nonexistent, and jobs are largely seasonal. The road came — but development did not follow.

In the fragile Neeti Valley, along the India-China border, the risks are even more acute. Despite its strategic significance, the same reckless construction persists: muck is dumped into rivers, steep slopes are cut without engineering oversight, and road widening continues unchecked. These practices endanger both locals and Indian armed forces operating in this sensitive frontier.

The same pattern plays out in Joshimath, a critical pilgrimage and military town now sinking under its own weight. Cracks have split homes, temples, and shops. In the cantonment where I stayed, workers filled fresh fissures with concrete — a desperate gesture to hold back what nature can no longer contain. For many, relocation is economically and emotionally impossible. They live trapped within the very development model that caused the crisis.

Across the Himalayas, the same story repeats: connectivity without resilience, construction without safety, growth without stability. Here, disasters don’t just arrive suddenly — they unfold daily, as chronic ecological and human degradation engineered from afar.

The Himalayan crisis is no longer driven by poor development choices alone — climate change is now its most dangerous accelerant, silently amplifying every existing risk. The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment reports a 28 per cent loss in glacier ice between 1987 and 2015. This rapid melting destabilises slopes, swells glacial lakes, and magnifies both droughts and floods — affecting millions across the Indo-Gangetic plain.

The Himalayas are undergoing the fastest geological transformation in their history. Yet we continue building as though nothing has changed. As ecologist Maharaj K. Pandit warns: “In the Himalayas, geology is destiny — but policy pretends otherwise.”

In Joshimath, Dharchula, Gopeshwar, and beyond, one message echoes clearly: people are not against development — they are against reckless development.

In Joshimath, residents live amid widening cracks and uncertain compensation. In Dharchula, youth migrate in growing numbers — a trend mirrored across the state. In villages like Kaflon, Uttarkashi, parents despair over schools and clinics that remain empty shells despite new roads. As a villager in Pangu put it: “We have the road now, but where is the doctor? Where is the teacher?”

What people seek is simple: durable roads, functional schools, healthcare, and livelihoods that respect ecological limits. Instead, they get precarious work, speculative tourism, and deepening vulnerability. As sociologist Amita Baviskar notes, “The state delivers an extractive form of development where risks are socialised onto communities, while profits are privatised by elites.”

The reckoning is not over

The 2013 Kedarnath disaster was not a freak incident, but a brutal verdict on a development model that gambles with fragile ecologies for short-term gain. A decade later, even with better technology, improved disaster response, and louder warnings from both scientists and communities, the structural flaws remain — rooted in political expediency, extractive economics, and a chronic disregard for the fragile foundations of the Himalayas.

The Himalayas are not passive backdrops for national growth — they are living, shifting systems. Their destabilisation is no longer a distant threat; it now endangers millions. Without a radical shift in the Himalayan development paradigm — one grounded in climate science, ecological knowledge, and genuine local participation — disasters like Kedarnath, Chamoli and Joshimath will not remain anomalies. They will become the norm.

As an old wisdom reminds us: “The foundation must be strong; a beautiful building on a weak base is merely a gamble with fate.”

The mountains have spoken. The reckoning remains unfinished.

Ankita is a Research Scholar at Centre for Political Studies-Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her core area of work revolves around Disaster, Climate Change and Development politics in Highland

Views expressed are author's own and don't necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth