Joshimath is not an isolated incident. It is happening all over Uttarakhand. The govt must stop all hydro power project immediately.

In the backdrop of rapidly sinking Joshimath town, the state government has pulled out all the stops in an effort to save the beleaguered town. But it is clearly too late as many locations in the town have already sunk significantly making habitation perilously impossible. No wonder Joshimath residents are livid and pained as overnight they have lost their lifetime savings invested in homes, land and livelihoods.

The Joshimath crisis is not a new development. Fifty years ago, the Mishra Committee report advised that the town was prone to land subsidence and later in 2006 a scientific report stated that parts of Joshimath were sinking at the rate of 1 cm per year. In addition to this, the local residents and environmental activists have been time and again raising the issue of sinking land in and around Joshimath for years. But all these warnings were to no avail as the local and central government chose to sweep the concerns under the carpet in order to continue business as usual.

The National Disaster Management Authority’s gag order after the National Remote Sensing Centre-ISRO data suggested the land in Joshimath had sunk 5.4 cm in just 12 days, is another example of government’s refusal to hear the reality. This attitude will neither reverse the damage already done nor mitigate the blame, but being open to scientific data and making the same available to experts across the nation will not only help find a solution to the present crisis faster but will

also aid in preventing more Joshimath like situations arising in the future in other parts of the nation.

A national brain storming of experts is the need of the hour to arrive at an urgent plan of action to retrieve what is remaining of Joshimath and more importantly form a strategy to prevent other Himalayan towns from having the same fate. In order to ensure this access to cutting edge data such as that of ISRO would play a pivotal role as it will help in calculating the speed and extent of subsidence. An urgent assessment is also required to understand rock strength, seismic microzonation of the town besides re-planning its drainage system and rainwater outlets. This is of course assuming that the town is not already beyond help.

Joshimath is also prone to sinking due to tectonic activity and this adds urgency of taking remedial measures that are not only wholesome but also sustainable. As a part of this, some bold and firm decisions need to be taken. One such decision could be to shelve the under-construction power project at Vishnugad and save the region from further distress.

The government had reportedly planned more than

450 hydropower projects in Uttarakhand, one can only imagine the devastating havoc these projects will unleash if they are launched. According to Dr Anjal Prakash, Research Director at the Bharti Institute of Public Policy at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, "The NTPC project must be stopped if we want to save the environment there."

As evacuation, relocation and rehabilitation continues at Joshimath, the government must plan for the immediate future of Joshimath. This ecological plan for the town must have environmental activists, geologists, seismic experts, government representatives and local resident as architects having unfettered access to latest data on the region.

As a part of the immediate future planning of Joshimath, the government must halt all developmental and infrastructural activities in the region and trifurcate the town to manageable settlements that are individually ecologically compliant and collectively are sufficiently spaced apart to not cause any environmental distress to any one location.

These new age “smart settlements” can be tech-savvy, building norm compliant and use only recycled material for construction purposes. In a new measure, the residents of these smart settlements must be made environmental stakeholders whereby each residence and commercial entity would mandatorily participate in ecological audit and submit quarterly compliance report to the government.

There is also a pressing necessity to go global and look for solutions for the unfolding problems in Joshimath. Land subsidence is a fairly frequent problem in many nations and over the last decade many measures have evolved to arrest the process of sinking land. According to the paper published by Joseph.F Poland and Working Group, the issue of land subsidence occurs due to draining of aquifers beneath the land. As the consequent empty space forms, it results in land settling or sinking down. The paper observes that diversion of water bodies towards the punctured aquifer can help refill the aquifer over time and somewhat arrest the rapid rate of land subsidence. The experts could look at this option and see if any river can be diverted for this purpose if it all it is possible.

Over the decades, the entire Himalayan landscape has witnessed unbridled development riding on the demands for tourism and infrastructure. The result is suffering of people, loss of historic towns and irreparable damage to the environment and Joshimath is a living example of the same.

(The concluding part of the two-part series on Joshimath. The author is a policy analyst. The views expressed are personal.)