DEHRADUN: Dharali, a key stopover on the Gangotri Dham pilgrimage route, was completely devastated on Tuesday afternoon by a sudden surge of debris-laden water from the Khirganga river. The flash flood, carrying massive amounts of debris from the mountains, reportedly wiped out the village's market, houses, and hotels in a mere 34 seconds.
Besides Dharali, cloudbursts were also reported in Harsil and Sukki. In Harsil, nine out of eleven Army personnel who went missing after a cloudburst remain untraced.
While authorities acknowledge the potential for a rising death toll, uncertainty persists more than 24 hours after the calamity.
SDRF, NDRF, ITBP, and Army teams are engaged in extensive rescue operations, having evacuated over 140 people so far.
The ancient Kalp Kedar Mahadev Temple, a significant site connected to the Panch Kedar tradition and a major centre of local faith, was also buried under the debris.
Amid the ongoing relief and rescue efforts, environmentalists, social workers, and historians have expressed deep concern over the disaster, appealing to the government to learn crucial lessons from it.
Historian and author Jai Singh Rawat told TNIE that the Khirganga, a tributary of the Bhagirathi, has a long history of destructive floods.
"Emerging from the Srikant peak, the Khirganga has been notorious for its devastating floods," he stated, recalling a 19th-century deluge that buried 240 temples, once part of the Kalp Kedar temple arena.
Subsequent floods in 2013 and 2018 also caused significant damage. "While its waters appear calm, the river holds a history far more terrifying," Rawat added.
Rawat further elaborated that Dharali once housed a cluster of 240 Katuri-style temples, documented by English traveller James William Fraser in 1816. These too were swallowed by a catastrophic Khirganga flood in the early 19th century.
Subsequent floods, including a major one in 2013 and another in August 2018, saw Khirganga overflowing with debris, breaching flood protection walls and inundating over 50 hotels and homes.
The 2018 event also partially buried the ancient Kalp Kedar temple and severely damaged apple orchards along the river.
Anoop Nautiyal, founder of Social Communities for Development, unequivocally termed the disaster "man-made."
He asserted, "Politicians and bureaucrats who lack even basic understanding of environmental balance and ecology should be excluded from Uttarakhand's planning processes."
Nautiyal advocated for handing over environmental policy formulation in Uttarakhand to environmental and geological scientists, emphasising the need for sensitive understanding of nature and minimal human intervention in the mountains.
Pawan Nautiyal, a local resident and intellectual from Bhatwari in Uttarkashi, highlighted a fortunate coincidence: "Most villagers from Dharali, a village of about 230 families, were attending the 'Har-Doodh Mela' in Mukhwa. Otherwise, a much larger number of villagers could have been caught in the disaster."
Rajnikant Semwal, a priest and folk singer from Mukhwa Temple, where Gangaji is worshipped for six months a year, offered a counterpoint to TNIE "Natural disasters cannot be solely man-made. This region witnessed massive devastation in the 1800s, severe floods in the 1900s, and a major tragedy in 2013 as well."