"The Himalaya range... No other mountains that I have ever seen have any resemblance to their character. ...The size of the trees was generally enormous. One measured 27 feet in girth, which spired up quite straight to its top. Not only pines, hollies and oaks grown to the most enormous size united in producing an effect both new and splendid."
Thus wrote Fraser of East India Company leading a party of troops near Shimla in 1820.
I had an opportunity to spend 10 days in June 1981 experiencing the grandeur and tragedy of these magnificent mountains in the company of the Chipko activist Chandiprasad Bhatt of Gopeshwar in Chamoli at his ecodevelopment camp in the village Bemru. When we reached the valley below the village, he pointed out Bemru, which was a good distance up the steep slope from the valley. Gazing at it my head began to spin.
I had been wandering all over the hills and dales of the Western Ghats for many years, but these mountains surpassed even the Nilgiris! Moreover, these hill slopes had a fragile cover formed from the sediment on the bottom of the Tethys Sea -- an ocean from the Paleozoic Era (541 million to about 252 million years ago) to the early Cenozoic Era, which began 66 million years ago.
In the course of evolution, these slopes had developed a vegetation cover of oak and rhododendron that held the soil and water firmly together preventing erosion or landslides. Human habitation had spread in this mountainous terrain and tiny villages soon came alive on the plateaus. It was the dream of Mahatma Gandhi that India would come to be constituted as a republic of such self-reliant villages.
Chandiprasad's organisation was inspired by this vision. When I witnessed what was going on at the Bemru ecodevelopment camp, I realised that they were implementing the Kaizen system of the Japanese company Toyota. Kaizen or "improvement" refers to business activities that continuously improve all functions by involving all employees -- from the CEO to the assembly-line workers.
Similarly, in each ecodevelopment camp there was careful planning of the work programme. The various elements of this work, such as soil and water conservation, erection of a stone wall to protect the forest, or tree planting, were executed by everybody working in unison.
One of their plans involved using the waterpower of perennial streams on steep slopes. There was full and free discussion on the scientific and technical background and the various possible alternative technologies in easily understandable language. The discussion was led by a physics professor from Gopeshwar college, but stonemasons who fabricated the water mills also provided their inputs. Unfortunately, the government had a monopoly on the water resources and their only interest was to construct giant projects like Tehri to supply electricity for the capital city of Delhi.
This tragic diversion of all resources of Himalayas in the service of the powers that be, in fact, had begun when the British government leased forests from the Tehri maharaja. When reserved forests were being demarcated in 1905, some officials reported that these could not sustain commercial forestry and recommended that reserved forests should be converted into community managed forests.
The government disagreed and in 1930 Padam Singh Raturi of the Forest Department told the villagers to throw their cattle down the cliffs since they will not be allowed to graze in reserved forests. The agitated people captured him, but he managed to escape. In the meanwhile, people set up a parallel government. The Tehri maharaja was out of the country and the dewan of the state had his men corner the people's meeting and open fire on them, killing more than two hundred.
The consequences of such confiscation are now starkly evident.
The Chamoli disaster of February 2021 was caused by a large rock and ice avalanche consisting of material dislodged from Ronti peak with flooding of the Rishiganga, the Dhauliganga and Alaknanda. The disaster left over 200 dead or missing. Most were workers at the Tapovan dam site.
Now, the Joshimath disaster has led to land subsidence and cracks in 603 buildings displacing at least 68 families.
Both are not only tragedies for the environment and the local communities, but have entailed serious economic losses far outweighing the gains from the projects imposed on these fragile mountains.
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(Padma Bhushan Madhav Gadgil is an Indian ecologist, academic, writer, columnist and the founder of the Centre for Ecological Sciences.)