Highways that spell disaster

On 16 September, Uttarakhand's capital Dehradun got a taste of the rain-and-flood fury that had earlier devastated the upper reaches of the mountain state.

A cloudburst accompanied by heavy rain brought heavy debris and sludge in its wake into the commercial complex of IT Park. Several villages above the tourist spot of Sahastradhara and key bridges across the town were destroyed overnight.

The big tourist towns of Kullu and Manali in Himachal were also badly hit, with shops, homes, Tibetan settlements washed away, as also multiple stretches of the newly built Kullu–Manali National Highway.

The Himalayan states of Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir have been pulverised in the recent rains. The damage to roads, railway lines and bridges is extensive, with losses running into thousands of crores. In J&K alone, an estimated 12,000 kilometres of road have been destroyed. All 23 districts of downstream Punjab are reeling under floods, with much of its precious kharif crop ruined by the waters of the Beas and Ravi.

The government would have us believe that all this is due to ‘nature’s fury’. No one will deny that there is a recurring pattern of cloudbursts and landslides caused by heavy rain. But to foreground cloudbursts and glacial melt and other climate-induced phenomena has become a standard escape route for all those who profit from this reckless commercialisation of the Himalayas.

For example, the drive to increase pilgrim/ tourist inflows has led to road-widening projects in violation of all norms. The Char Dham Pariyojana — to connect the Hindu pilgrim centres of Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri and Yamunotri, at an estimated cost of Rs 12,000 crore — is the most conspicuous example of this recklessness and venality.

Ropeways, Char Dham redevelopment projects, Four lane Highways, Rishikesh Karnprayag Rail in the Himalayas are the development projects not demanded by the natives but the govt's plan of burdening the fragile Himalayas with the tourists that it cannot sustain. Save Himalayas! pic.twitter.com/d2Xc1wEKWs

— Himalayan Malt гималайский (@HimalayanMaltt) August 9, 2025

Let’s face it — we’ve invited this disaster

The agency mandated to oversee construction of these highways and their controversial ‘four-laning’ is the NHAI (National Highways Authority of India), which reports to the Union ministry of road transport and highways, run by Nitin Gadkari. It is this man who has greenlit all these highway projects in Uttarakhand, Himachal and J&K without any Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), and it is he who must shoulder the responsibility for the devastating consequences we now witness.

When governments flout rules, the public gets a free pass. Entire marketplaces and commercial complexes have come up along the river banks in Uttarakhand, for example.

Rivers will inevitably swell during the monsoons and carry downstream whatever is in their way. They will reclaim their floodplains, and so it was that Dharali, Harsil, Tharali, Kullu, Mandi, Chashoti, Kishtwar and many other tourist hotspots were destroyed when the rivers surged. As were several crucial highways, the lifelines for border regions in Uttarakhand and J&K. Among them were Gangotri and Yamunotri, large chunks of the newly inaugurated Kullu–Manali road and the 270 km Jammu–Srinagar highway.

Given the mind-boggling magnitude of loss, both human and economic, one would have expected the minister to take moral responsibility — and offer to step down. But Gadkari has instead laid the blame for unscientific road construction squarely on civil engineers, eliding the role of agencies under his ministry, and his own hand in brushing aside cautionary warnings.

Dr C.P. Rajendran, an expert on earthquakes at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, points out, “The minister now admits that serious design mistakes have been committed by the engineers under his administration in the road construction projects, destroying the fragile Himalayas, causing immense environmental damage and loss of human lives. The NHAI is part of his ministry, and therefore, the minister cannot wash his hands off. It is his responsibility to ensure that the DPRs (detailed project reports) prepared by his engineers are vetted.

Never forget that it is in this pristine, delicate ecology that the Modi Government rammed through a 12,000 crore road project by cutting mountains and chopping over 50,000 trees. pic.twitter.com/QhpKYPdkcP

— Kunal Purohit (@kunalpurohit) August 6, 2025

‘Scientists are not enemies, listen to them’

“Independent experts have repeatedly flagged unsuitable design parameters and poor terrain preparation. Why did the government choose to ignore those alerts?”

Two years ago, while visiting flood-affected areas in Himachal, Gadkari came up with a ‘solution’ that revealed how well he understood the problem: the rivers, he declared, had to be straightened and walls built around them to prevent flooding. “It’s shocking to hear such foolish, unscientific statements from a senior minister in the Union cabinet,” says Rajendran. “No engineering technique can make a naturally meandering river straighten its course! A river follows its natural course, dictated by physical forces. Attempts to tamper can only result in disaster.”

On 7 March, while addressing an automobile industry meet in New Delhi, the minister said he wouldn’t tolerate “faulty DPRs” anymore. All projects over Rs 1,000 crore would henceforth be joint ventures with Austrian, Swiss, Spanish companies. This, he declared, would ensure that all the paperwork was tickety-boo — we’d have to just copy-paste. How’s that for ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’?

The Himalayas have a unique topography best understood by our own scientists and geologists. Do we need pricey foreign consultants to do what our experts can deliver at a fraction of the price? Our experts are neither consulted nor heeded — and if someone says beware, he is dismissed as a stick-in-the-mud.

A recent Niti Aayog report has shown that after the Char Dham Pariyojana got underway, Uttarakhand has developed 811 landslide zones along a 900-kilometre highway. How many landslides per km is that? You do the math.

In Punjab, the NHAI is responsible for building roads connecting Amritsar–Katra, Amritsar–Bathinda, Ludhiana–Bathinda, Sirhind–Sehna, Mohali–Sirhind, as well as the Southern Ludhiana and Northern Patiala bypasses. These elevated roads lack culverts (transverse drains), and as a result obstruct the natural drainage of water from surrounding agricultural fields.

A parliamentary panel headed by Congress Lok Sabha MP Charanjit Singh Channi has identified elevated roads as a major cause for Punjab’s present flood situation.

On 5 September, Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa, the Lok Sabha MP from Gurdaspur, wrote to Gadkari urging him to take action against NHAI officials for failing to build culverts. Randhawa said his request that NHAI officers visit flooded areas in order to identify and rectify the causes of waterlogging fell on deaf ears. “When I told an officer that the flooding was due to the agency’s negligence, he curtly told me off and said he would ask an SDO-rank officer to look into the matter.”

Is there more to the NHAI’s push to widen highways than meets the eye? Says Hemant Dhyani, an activist associated with NGO Ganga Ahvaan, “Gadkari’s ministry is spending Rs 12,000 crore to widen the 900 km Char Dham road. This works out to Rs 8–10 crore per kilometre. The typical budget for hill roads is around Rs 80 lakh per kilometre.”

But there is no CAG (Comptroller and Auditor General of India) audit on why these highways are being built at such high cost.

Three weeks after the Dharali disaster, crucial food supplies could not be delivered to this holy town — the highway leading up to Gangotri was unusable due to the landslides on 5 August. But even that hasn’t stopped the NHAI from going ahead with its plan to fell 6,000 deodar trees to widen the road leading up to the Gangotri shrine.

These trees stand along a 10 km stretch between Jhala and Jangla in Uttarkashi district, which includes the villages of Dharali and Harsil. Denuding the slopes of the trees that remain will further weaken slope stability. Every villager knows this, but clearly not the minister or his minions. Or they do not care.