Cracks begin to show in India’s Himalayan building spree
Land beneath Maroda houses has weakened by the rapid construction in the geologically unstable mountain
One morning 18 months ago, Jaswant Singh Butola woke to find hairline cracks had spread up the walls of his house, which overlooks a railway being built to take pilgrims to Himalayan holy sites in India near the border with China.
Since then the cracks have widened. A pillar hangs loosely from a wall and Butola, 55, fears he will soon have to abandon Maroda, the village his family has called home for generations. “It is an old village, our ancestral village,” he said, gazing at earthworks for the railway from his lopsided house, itself surrounded by other shattered homes. “This is absolute destruction.”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's push to carve roads and rail deep into the Himalayan mountains is smoothing the way for millions of Hindu and Sikh pilgrims to visit a clutch of religious sites that include the source of the Ganges river.
Developing the area is part of the Modi government's stated strategy of reaffirming India's presence along the largely undemarcated border with China, which has its own infrastructure drive on the neighbouring Tibetan plateau. “Modern connectivity is also a guarantee of national security,”
Modi said at an election rally at a border village in October, where he said the new transport links would bring development to remote regions. “The border areas of the country are being connected with the best and the widest highways.”
The strategy has run into trouble, however, with some works halted by local authorities in the face of protests by residents after hundreds of houses were damaged by subsidence along the routes, in India's northern Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. The buildings and the land beneath houses had been weakened — geologists, residents and officials say — by the rapid construction in the geologically unstable mountains.
The office of Uttarakhand's chief
minister and the spokesperson for the federal government did not respond to requests for comment for this story. India's ministries of highways and railway, which own the state-run companies building the road and rail projects, also did not respond.
On a reporting trip in January, Reuters found damage in Maroda and five other towns and villages close to either the $2 billion railway or a connected $1.5 billion highway project, both named after the Char Dham pilgrimage route. While the news agency was unable to find definitive proof connecting all the problems to individual infrastructure works, in two of the towns authorities made a link between subsidence and the projects.
In Maroda, the district magistrate said in a written communications with residents, reviewed by Reuters, that the railway ministry's construction company, RVNL, would compensate villagers by buying additional land affected by subsidence. RVNL did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Nine residents from three villages along the 125km rail route stretching from Rishikesh to Karnaprayag, showed Reuters damage to their homes they said started appearing soon after blasting or other
work for 104km of tunnels began near their villages. “There is a direct connection,” environmentalist Ravi Chopra said about the link between the projects and subsidence.
“When the explosions take place, whether it is for tunnelling or it is for blasting rocks, the mountains shake and very often new fissures are introduced,” said Chopra, who has studied the region extensively and headed a Supreme Court appointed panel assessing the Char Dham highway.
‘We live in risk’
Piyoosh Rautela, an executive director with Uttarakhand's disaster management authority, said poorly planned residential construction was responsible for subsidence in towns where populations are growing fast to accommodate the influx of pilgrims in previously inaccessible areas.
Maroda, however, had barely grown or changed in decades until the railway engineers approached the cluster of houses in 2021, and started slicing through rock with heavy machinery to prepare for tunneling, nine residents told Reuters.
Eight of the families neighbouring Butola have now left the village, their homes riven with cracks, villagers said. “The whole
night the work goes on below on the railway line and the cement from the house keeps falling down. We live in a lot of risk,” village resident Munni Devi said.
When Reuters visited on January 17, a railway employee measuring the depth of subsidence on the outskirts of the hamlet said the land appeared not to have sunk further in recent weeks.
A notice posted in November at the village authority's office states that RVNL was purchasing an additional 1,387 hectares of land from villagers because of subsidence, at a cost of almost Rs300 million ($3.6 million).
The costs were worthwhile, the notice signed by the district's highest-ranking official said, because “with the development of the rail line it will become easier to reach the border areas, and from the perspective of tourism it will also make the Char Dham pilgrimage more comfortable”.
Butola said RVNL officials had told him verbally his home would be included in the purchase, but he had yet to receive written notification or payment. More than 80km of tunnels have been completed, the federal railway ministry said on January 7. Work is ongoing and scheduled to be completed next year.
Joshimath
The situation in Uttarakhand garnered national attention in January after cracks developed in more than 800 homes in the town of Joshimath, further into the mountains from Maroda and 100km from the border with China. Some houses crumbled completely, forcing hundreds of occupants to evacuate. Officials halted road construction work near the town, fearful of a bigger collapse.
For some residents, blame for the subsidence lies with a large hydropower project being built by state utility NTPC a few kilometres away from Joshimath.
Officials and experts mostly disagree with this assessment, but like other construction projects in the area the hydro power project has run into difficulties with the glacial Himalayan geography. A tunnel borer is trapped underground and NTPC has been trying to free it for more than a decade, the company said in a written response to Reuters.
Work was halted, including controlled explosions at a distance of about 10km from the town, once the scale of the damage in Joshimath became clear, NTPC said. — reuters