‘Assault on the Himalayas’: Chairman of Char Dham Committee resigns
Environmentalist Ravi Chopra has resigned as chairman and member of the High-Powered Committee (HPC) for the Char Dham Project, citing an assault on the Himalayas in an explosive letter
The Char Dham project, inaugurated by Prime Minister in 2016, aims to widen roads in India’s Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. However, the study of rocks in a key area where blasting is underway shows that the project is responsible for many of the landslides have been occurring recently.
The area in question is Tota Ghati (‘Parakeet Valley’), a less-than 10-kilometre stretch that lies between Kadiyala and Sahni Dhar on National Highway 58 in Tehri district, Uttarakhand.
In this stretch, the highway passes through a complex geological terrain, with multiple rock types and slopes susceptible to ‘failures.’
A slope failure is a phenomenon in which a slope collapses abruptly due to weakened self retainability of the earth under the influence of a rainfall or an earthquake.
Tota Ghati, where there are seemingly stable rock slopes, has been in the news of late for having had a number of slope failures recently.
Environmentalist Ravi Chopra has resigned as chairman and member of the High-Powered Committee (HPC) for the Char Dham Project, citing an assault on the Himalayas in an explosive letter.
Chopra was offered the chairmanship of the HPC in September 2019. He mentioned what compelled him to take it up in his letter:
In September 2019, when asked to accept the assignment to chair the HPC, I deliberated whether my age would permit me to fulfil the strenuous responsibilities the assignment entailed. I was compelled to accept an inner voice born out of a 40-year commitment to help restore the degraded Himalayan environment and the livelihoods of its people.
He continued that “it is that same inner voice now compels me to move out. The belief that the HPC could protect this fragile ecology has been shattered. I can do no more. I therefore choose to resign.”
He wrote that sustainable development demanded approaches that were both geologically and ecologically sound.
Such development also enhances disaster-resilience and hence national security, especially when climate challenges to slope stability are becoming far more unpredictable.
He noted:
As a member of the HPC, however, I saw at close quarters the desecration of the once impregnable Himalayas … I have seen engineers armed with modern technological weapons assaulting the Himalayas. They have slashed through pristine forests, wounding vulnerable Himalayan slopes to widen highways. Ever-increasing numbers of tourist's speed along them, their vehicles spewing noxious gases that cover the towering peaks ahead in an unsightly haze. The engineers exult and circulate photographs proving their conquest of Nature, little realizing that they too are a part of Nature and cannot survive if their own natural environment is destroyed.
Chopra continued that “nature, however, neither forgets nor forgives such Wilful wrongs inflicted on her treasures. Already we have witnessed stretches of roads disappear that have later taken months to repair. Nature sounded warning bells in June 2013 and February 2021 with disastrous consequences.”
He called the Himalayas, the ‘marvel of Nature’.
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