Himalaya’s towns urgently need carrying capacity-based development plans
There has been large-scale construction near the Naini lake, the only source of water for Naintal in Uttarakhand. Over the past few years,the lake has been
drying up
Shimla shows how in the absence of comprehensive development plans, Himalayan towns are crumbling under their own weight or wallowing in their waste.
A Down To Earth analysis of data with the Town and Country Planning Organisation (TCPO), under the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, shows that none of the tier 1 cities (with a population of over 0.1 million as per the Census 2001) or metro cities (with a population of more than 1 million) in the 13 Himalayan states have master plans to regulate development. As on January 22, 2024, only eight cities have their draft master plans ready under the Union government’s Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) scheme. These include Kargil and Leh in Ladakh, Kullu (Himachal Pradesh), Shillong (Meghalaya), Itanagar (Arunachal Pradesh), Kohima and Dimapur (Nagaland), Imphal (Manipur) and Aizawl in Mizoram. In Nanital, for instance, development works are still being guided by a master plan that was to end in 2011. This hill station, set around Naini lake at an elevation of roughly 2,000 m, got its first district-level development authority only in 2017. This is despite the fact that Nanital’s geology makes it one of the most landslide-prone areas in Uttarakhand.
So, panic gripped the residents of Chartan lodge area on September 23, 2023, when a two-storey building collapsed due to a landslide. Although no casualties were reported, the administration evacuated a dozen adjacent buildings and declared them unsafe. The lodge area is located on the steep slope of Alma Hill, a part of the Sher Ka Danda Ridge that overlooks the Naini lake and is prone to landslides.
The first massive landslide on the hill was reported in 1880, during the colonial rule. The British had then banned construction on the hill and created a 79-km drainage system, a network of canals and nullahs built across the town, for safe disposal of precipitation and thereby reduce the risk of landslides. “Over the years, more than 10,000 houses have mushroomed across the hill. Houses have also been built over the drainage system,” says Vishal Singh, research coordinator at the Centre for Ecology Development And Research (CEDAR), a non-profit in Dehradun.
In 2016, P C Tiwari, geography professor at Kumaun University, Nainital, conducted a study and found that between 2005 and 2015, the built-up area has increased by about 50 per cent in places where construction is banned, while the increase was only 34 per cent in other parts of the town. To provide facilities to millions of tourists who come here every year, there is a continuous increase in construction, which is proving dangerous for the city. A report by the Uttarakhand Disaster Mitigation and Management Center states that the built-up area around Naini Lake was 630,000 sq m in 2005, which increased by about 33.88 per cent in 2010. Increasing concrete construction around the lake has affected its recharge and water quality. In 2017, the high court had asked National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) to study the carrying capacity of Nainital. The project is still going on.
In 2021, severe cyclone Yaas and heavy rainfall during the monsoon season caused landslides and water logging at 270 sites in Darjeeling. Between 2018 and 2020, the hill town in West Bengal recorded 138 disasters, including 100 landslides, cyclones and storms. Earlier in 2015, a series of landslides killed 38 people and injured many more.
“Darjeeling receives one of the highest amounts of rainfall in country, while its soil has extremely low water retention ability. This makes the region conducive for landslides,” says Tapas Ghatak, geophysicist and former expert at Geological Survey of India and the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority. In 2000, Ghatak was a member of a state government-appointed expert committee that prepared housing norms to minimise loss and damage from landslides. But these mostly remained in files. “Now high-rise buildings can be seen even on 65o slope, Ghatak says. “High-rise buildings have come up everywhere, blocking water streams and increasing the risk of landslides in Darjeeling,” says Animesh Bose of non-profit Himalayan Nature and Adventure Foundation (HNAF), Siliguri.
“There has been little improvement in the infrastructure since Independence and the city is almost choking on waste. We are trying to create a new Darjeeling by planning and expanding tourism infrastructure because tourism is our main source of income,” says Anit Thapa, chief executive of Gorkhaland Territorial Administration (GTA), a semi-autonomous council for the Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts of West Bengal. Thapa claims that since coming to power, he has stopped giving permission for high-rise buildings in the region.
In 2010, the Pahalgam Peoples Welfare Organisation (PPWO) filed a public interest petition in the Jammu and Kashmir High Court challenging the Pahalgam Master Plan 2005-2025. In 2014, the Pahalgam Development Authority revised the master plan for the town in Jammu and Kashmir. The revised master plan admits that the old master plan was faulty on many grounds. Apart from basic planning errors, poor implementation and lack of enforcement, the master plan lacked in unbiased vision and sensitivity among Town Planners otherwise required for such a fragile area. One of the major fallacies of the Master Plan-2025 was the unwarranted land use change of existing village settlements into “green areas” without even respecting the legal and natural rights of communities. There were also inconsistency in the land use proposals for the development of tourism infrastructure. “This faulty master plan allowed several illegal constructions between 2005 and 2014,” says Mushtaq Pa-halgami, one of the petitioners.
Even the Pahalgam Master Plan 2014-2032, is not without problems. Activists say it does not cover all the areas of Pahalgam valley. It particularly does not cover the western side where more than 300 hotels, resorts and guest houses have come up during the last 10 to 15 years alone. The waste from these hotels pollutes the Lidder stream and has impacted the surrounding forest areas,” says Mushtaq Ahmad Lone, a Right To Information activist.
“Basic aim of hill area development should be to arrest further damage to the fragile ecosystems and to promote development without destruction,” writes D S Meshram, former chief planner, TCPO, and president of the Institute of Town Planners, in the January-March 2017 edition of Journal of ITPI. This is difficult to achieve if the development happens in an unregulated manner. Such haphazard sprawl is a cause of worry for another reason. Most Himalayan towns are unaware of their load-bearing capacity or carrying capacity, and influx of tourists and unregulated construction activities make them even more vulnerable to disasters.
In August 2023, frequent landslips leading to deaths and destruction made the Supreme Court to moot a re-evaluation of the load-carrying capacity of hill towns and cities. The Centre has proposed forming a 13-member technical committee to evaluate the “carrying capacity” of 13 Himalayan States. While the committee had not been set up till the magazine went to print, experts and policymakers are already taking steps to ensure that planning development or post-disaster rehabilitation works are commensurate with carrying capacity of the region.
The trend has particularly become apparent in the aftermath of land subsidence crisis in Joshimath.
The pilgrim town in Chamoli district of Uttarakhand has been gradually sinking for several years. However, cracks started appearing in houses in 2021. Between April and November 2022, Joshimath sank by 8.9 cm and over a large area. Soon wide cracks appeared in hundreds of houses, forcing the local authorities to order evacuation. A multi-institutional team, comprising experts from the Central Building Research Institute (CBRI), Geological Survey of India (GSI), Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI), Central Ground Water Board, Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, National Institute of Hydrology and Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, arrived in Joshimath to ascertain the causes of subsidence and suggest remedial measures.
The scientists submitted their preliminary reports to the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) by January-end 2023 but they were made public only in September 2023. The NDMA in its Post Disaster Need Assessment (PDNA) states: Joshimath exceeded its carrying capacity, far beyond its capacity, and the area must be declared as a no new construction zone.
The report by the NGRI, Hyderabad states that “evidence of land submergence has been found in Joshimath up to a depth of 20 to 50 metres.” The surface conditions observed there have been found to be up to a depth of 50 meters in many places. The main reasons for land submergence include the construction of buildings beyond the ‘load-bearing capacity’ of the city, lack of drainage, deforestation, obstruction of paths of natural water sources, and expansion of buildings.
The Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology in its report describes the soil structure of Joshimath and says that it is a complex mixture of boulders, gravel, and clay, the boulders here also made of gravel and clay brought from glaciers, which is a major reason for their slipping.
The GSI report observed that cracks were more prominent in densely populated areas and places with multistorey buildings. “The heavy load exerted by a dense construction of towering structures over the heterogenous colluvium debris mass, which is saturated with shallow subsurface water, only accentuated the shear stress on the slope, thus increasing subsidence in these areas.”
After a detailed safety assessment of 2,364 buildings in Joshimath, the CBRI declared 20 per cent of the houses “unusable”, 42 per cent requiring “further assessment”, 37 per cent “usable” and 1 per cent as “needs to be demolished”. The NGRI report states that drain water is continuously seeping into the ground which has increased the level of damage due to excessive rainfall over the past 10 years.
Following the Joshimath crisis, the NGT appointed committees to study the carrying capacities of Mussoorie and Shimla. In both the cases, the committees found that the towns have exceeded their carrying capacity. In January 2023, Uttarakhand chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami had also announced to conduct a carrying capacity assessment of hill towns, where geological instability aggravates.
In fact, In July 2018, the NGT directed the Union Ministry of Urban Development and Union Environment Ministry to initiate steps to undertake carrying capacity studies in all states and Union Territories, which would assess the burden on eco-sensitive zones in terms of air, water, habitat, biodiversity, land, noise and tourism. Compliance from states has been poor so far.
So far, Aizawl is among the few to have prepared carrying capacity assessment. It has accordingly planned future distribution of population, phasing of development over 10 planning zones and land use in its development plan 2030.
Anup Karanth, senior disaster risk management specialist associated with the World Bank, tells Down to Earth that studying the carrying capacity of mountains is a big exercise. Such studies are done at the physical level, however, there is a huge shortage of trained manpower and engineers for this work who can do this entire study.
This was first published in the 1-15 February, 2024 print edition of Down To Earth
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