Road expansion in himalayas leaves fractures in fragile ecosystem
Repairing cracking walls drains the wallets of residents of Khadi, Uttarakhand
As the machinery of development drills through the Himalayan landscape, roads are widened, highways are built, and locals pay the price with cracking walls and fractured lives. Ever since residents of Khadi, Uttarakhand, witnessed their familiar local road being reborn as National Highway (NH) 34, their houses have not been the same.
In Khadi, the new bridge on NH-34 allows two large trucks to comfortably cross each other. However, further up along the mountainside, Aranya Ranjan, 51-year-old social activist, walks past the skeletal structure of what used to be his house.
“This was a bedroom,” Ranjan recalls as he stands on the concrete floor of the demolished house. Broken bricks jut out from where a wall once stood. The demolition alone cost him about five lakhs.
In the himalayan context, cracking walls are nothing new. However, Ranjan remembers those earlier cracks to be smaller and manageable. Unlike them, the new cracks appear with an alarming speed, and soon colonise the house, sprawling over the walls. He remembers how, after the construction of the bridge, the floor of his house tore open, and how powdery concrete would often fall from the cracks on the ceiling.
However, despite the existing fragility that arises from living cradled within the youngest mountain range, Ranjan says, “Everytime the government comes here with a development project, they speed up the geological changes.”
Downhill, in a recently refurbished house, Geeta Bahuguna, a 39-year-old housewife recalls the promises of the road construction company, “They didn’t promise money, but they said they would give us material for our repair work.” When they did not, she and others from Khadi wrote to the Border Roads Organisation (BRO), and the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) but nothing was done. “Only those who lost their houses got money,” she adds.
Bahuguna remembers the tremors that they felt in the valley as the large machines bore through the earth. From blasting rocks, to bringing large machinery almost above their roof, “It felt like a mini earthquake,” she says, “the whole house was shaking.”
In the neighbouring house, 70-year-old Umar Singh Gusain has a pile of empty plastic cans on his terrace. Each can costs him almost 400 rupees, and using the chemicals within he has already filled up the cracks in his house numerous times.
He explains that when the rains come, the cracks don’t follow immediately. Over time as the earth settles and begins to sink, that is when the cracks start.
Looking at vehicles on NH-34, Swati Gosai, another local, recounts how a major wall in her house fell during the earlier monsoon. “For months we would go to sleep in other people’s houses every night,” she says.
The cracks do not even spare a local hospital.
However, an hour away, also situated along NH-34, Dharam Singh’s tragedy is far worse. With the aim of broadening the road, a large wall had been constructed adjacent to Singh’s house. One night, as torrential rains battered the soil, the wall collapsed over Singh’s house, killing his two children, a relative, and injuring him.
Singh has received no compensation for the house, nor for the death of his children. Retelling the tragic incident, Ranjan is frustrated with the government. After numerous protests and court cases, he admits that they lack the numbers and the strength to oppose the government. “They just want profit,” he says, “even if that profit is made over a pile of dead bodies.”
A report by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways of India (MoRTH) explains that Uttarakhand, the ‘Devbhoomi’, is the ‘spiritual heart of India’ and therefore requires a network of ‘stronger, safer, all weather roads’.
The National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited (NHIDCL) is a public sector company under MoRTH. In its performance report for 2022-23 the NHIDLC explains its vision to create a ‘fast-paced construction of national highways’ and mentions how it uses ‘state of the art technology’. In the year 2022-23 the four ongoing projects of the NHIDCL in Uttarakhand had a combined budget of 2,228 crores. Across India, that number rises to 27,742 crores. NH-34, from Rishikesh to Uttarkashi, is one of its projects.
"When a network of good roads is created, the economy of the country also picks up pace. Roads are veins and arteries of the nation which help to transform the pace of development and ensure that prosperity reaches the farthest corners of our nation."
Prime Minister Narendra Modi
Shruti Vats, the 33-year-old Block Development Officer (BDO) of Narendranagar in the Tehri District of Uttarakhand says that road connectivity might be a positive thing but she adds, “We can’t forget about the geography of this area.”
In her short tenure, Vats has already witnessed numerous landlised along NH-34, and she recalls one particular patch where reconstruction work has continued for the past two years. “If the repair work is taking so long,” she adds, “Is the project even worth it?”
The environment-development debate persists, and Ranjan explains that the mountains will not be able to sustain such heavy construction for much longer. Referring to the ‘all weather road’ that the government aimed to build, he laughs, “It is a ‘no weather road!’”
