Rising disasters in the Himalayas: A wake-up call for a new political agenda

It was still raining when the first shouts came from the riverbank in Dharali. People ran towards the roar — a muddy wall of water carrying tree trunks, tin roofs, and the splintered remains of kitchens and shops. Someone yelled that a lake had formed upstream near Harsil. The army was already working to carve a spillway, but the weather had its own script. “We’ve lived with the river for generations,” said a shopkeeper, “but this river is not ours anymore. It comes as a stranger now.”

Barely a month earlier, the people of Seraj in Himachal Pradesh had heard a similar sound. On June 29, rain turned to deluge. Streams became torrents, slopes gave way, homes slid, and bridges folded like matchsticks. Entire stretches between Bakhli-Nal and Thunag lay cut off. For days, some villages saw no rescue teams; it was weeks before electricity and water limped back. In one hamlet, an elderly woman told me: “We’ve seen storms before, but the mountains held. This time they broke.” This will further increase in the days and years to come.

The injustice at the heart of the crisis

Let’s be clear: these disasters are not “acts of God.” They are climate-induced shocks in a region that had almost no role in causing the problem. The Himalayas are already more than 1.8°C warmer than pre-industrial averages — far above the global mean — yet their people did not burn the coal, build the smokestacks, or drive the industrial sprawl that brought us here.

The true culprits are easy to name: the high-emitting economies — the global north, primarily — and the transnational corporate giants whose supply chains and extraction have driven the bulk of historical emissions. Studies show that just 40 transnational corporations are responsible for more than 40 per cent of global carbon emissions in the past three to four decades. These include oil and gas behemoths, coal conglomerates, and agribusiness majors whose profits have soared even as frontline communities like ours are left to foot the bill in lives and livelihoods. Climate change in the Himalayas is less a story of guilt than of injustice: it is the equivalent of being forced to play a dangerous game you never signed up for, on a field already tilted against you.

(Who’s Heating the Himalayas? Just 40 corporations = 40% of global CO₂ in the last 3–4 decades)

How the trap was set

The vulnerability here is not accidental. In the 1990s, the central government rewove the region’s financial architecture. Loans, incentives, and policy signals were all aimed at accelerating hydropower, tourism, and real estate. States — cash-strapped and eager for revenue — fell in line. Local communities were told this was “development,” but in reality, it was extraction: cutting into eco-sensitive zones, bending environmental clearances, and sidelining traditional, safer land-use practices.

Once on that path, Himalayan states have had limited room to turn back. The centralised model of growth rewarded speed over stability, concrete over commons. For many, the choice has been between bad options: join the road-widening, resort-building economy, or be left out of the cash flow entirely.

State policies: a ledger of omissions

Look at Uttarakhand’s Char Dham highway widening. By splitting the 900-km project into bite-sized clearances, the authorities sidestepped comprehensive environmental appraisal. Slopes were cut too steep, muck dumped into streams, and drainage ignored. Landslides multiplied — not as a surprise, but as the engineering cost of haste.

Himachal’s record is no better. My own letter to the Chief Secretary this August, written after the Supreme Court’s Pristine Hotels judgment, urged a course correction. The Court had reminded the state that development cannot override ecology — that the right to be free from climate harm is now part of our constitutional rights. But our planning regimes still treat eco-sensitive zones as “premium plots” for resorts and second homes.

Urban master plans rarely include hazard zonation maps. Carrying capacity studies are either absent or ignored. Building bylaws remain blind to climate projections. And every “regularisation” of an illegal structure signals to others that rules are pliable if you can pay or lobby.

Conventional wisdom, eroded

What makes this loss doubly tragic is that Himalayan societies once had their own disaster-mitigation code. Villages kept the river’s floodplains clear, knowing the silt and spread were the river’s breathing space. Houses clung to ridgelines, not steep cut-slopes. Spring sheds were protected as commons. Roofs sloped to shed snow; fields were terraced to slow water.

In Seraj, old-timers recall how settlement patterns avoided the debris fans of past landslides. That knowledge has been pushed aside by the lure of “view property” and the state’s own promotion of riverbank hotels. The same state that should have enforced safe siting now runs damage assessments after every monsoon, cutting cheques for losses that could have been avoided.

The bypassing of limits

Have we reached the geological limits? The mountain is young, restless, and seismically alive — limits were always there. What’s changed is that we have built over those limits.

When a slope is over-steepened for a road, when a floodplain is concretised for a parking lot, when forests are cut for linear projects, we spend the safety buffer. Climate change — with its cloudbursts and warmer storms — now finishes the job.

The Supreme Court’s mirror

The Pristine Hotels ruling should have been a turning point. It struck down a tourism project that ignored gram sabha voices and ecological appraisal. It called for carrying-capacity-based planning, slope-sensitive land use, and alignment with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate science. And it reminded the state that climate negligence is now unconstitutional.

A future worth fighting for

The disasters in Dharali and Seraj could trigger fatalism — a sense that the mountains are doomed. I reject that. The alternative is clear and possible:

 - Bind hazard maps to law.
 - Adopt carrying capacity ceilings for tourism, traffic, and water extraction.
-  Prioritise geographic solutions: restore forests, protect springs, revive traditional drainage, terrace to slow runoff.
 - Relocate with dignity those in high-risk clusters.
 - Price access responsibly — cap peak-day vehicles, fund waste and slope maintenance through fees.
 - Build local monitoring — weather stations, soil-moisture sensors, and early warnings run by communities.

Towards a new Himalayan politics

The climate lens forces a realignment. In a region where each cloudburst now carries the memory of the last tragedy, politics must pivot from extraction to resilience. That means saying “no” to projects that look profitable on a balance sheet but bankrupt the ecology. It means aligning budgets, bylaws, and investments with the IPCC’s scenarios, not last century’s climate.
This should be the new political agenda for the Himalayan states: survival with dignity. It can unite farmers whose fields slide, hoteliers whose bookings vanish after a flood, youth who migrate when roads collapse, and scientists who watch glaciers retreat.

Because the truth is simple: the disasters will not leave us. The question is whether we will meet them with the same model that brought us here — or with a new compact between people, politics, and the mountain.

If the roar from Dharali and Seraj does not jolt us into that choice, nothing will. 

Tikender Singh Panwar is former deputy mayor, Shimla

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