On paper, India’s development story is dazzling: wider highways cresting over mountain passes, tunnels slashing journey times, and hydropower projects promising clean megawatts for a growing economy. On the ground, the ledger looks different. Roads shear off into rivers. Whole slopes give way. Market towns tilt and crack. The bill—paid in lives, homes, and public money—arrives with every monsoon.

The recurring disasters in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand are not acts of God in the old sense. They are, in significant part, acts of policy—of where and how we build, what we permit, and what we ignore.

Over the past fortnight alone, fresh landslides have severed the Chandigarh–Manali highway in multiple sections; in Kullu, the Beas tore away large portions of carriageway, leaving travellers stranded and authorities scrambling to restore connectivity.

A Fragile Geology, A Harder Monsoon, And Soft Regulations

The Indian Himalaya is among the world’s most landslide-prone mountain systems. Scientific reviews place an overwhelming share of South Asia’s landslides in the Himalayan arc, now warming faster than the global average—a “third pole” where climate changes translate into more intense rainfall, destabilised slopes, and cascading hazards.

If this were solely about climate, there might be limited room for intervention. But policy choices amplify natural hazard into human disaster. India’s road-widening spree in high mountains—typified by the Char Dham project—has cut into unconsolidated slopes, often without stabilisation that matches the terrain’s fragility.

A Supreme Court-mandated panel has repeatedly flagged the widening plans as unsafe in their current form, urging narrower, safer designs.

The regulatory climate has also shifted. In 2023, Parliament amended the Forest (Conservation) Act. Conservation scientists and Himalayan communities warned that the changes would ease diversion of forests—particularly for “linear projects” near borders—diluting safeguards in precisely those ecologically unstable regions where guardrails should be strongest.

Joshimath: An Alarm That Keeps Ringing

No town symbolises the collision of geology, climate, and development choices quite like Joshimath. Built on an ancient landslide mass, the settlement sits on overburden rather than bedrock, threaded by streams and seepages that maintain slope stability—until we disrupt them.

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Multiple studies connect the town’s accelerating subsidence to a cocktail of factors: unplanned construction and drainage, obstruction of sub-surface water flows, location on a paleo-landslide, and the cumulative impacts of large infrastructure including hydropower tunnelling.

One frequently cited concern is the Tapovan-Vishnugad hydropower project’s tunnel, alleged to have intersected an aquifer and altered local hydrogeology—an accusation the developer contests, but which remains part of the technical and public debate around slope stability in and around the town.

Whatever the precise attributions, the message is consistent: in such terrain, small mistakes compound into large failures.

Himachal’s Road To Nowhere

Himachal Pradesh offers a grim case study. Since last monsoon, scores of landslides and flash floods have repeatedly severed highways, collapsed buildings after progressive ground movement, and imposed colossal repair bills.

A four-storey structure in Mandi district, pre-emptively evacuated after cracks, folded in on itself—no casualties, only luck. Throughout the season, hundreds of roads remain blocked at any given time, with death tolls and damage figures climbing year after year.

The latest episodes—toll-plazas turned into riverbeds, long highway sections vanished—are not just meteorological anomalies. They are design failures: embankments hard up against a Himalayan river’s dynamic channel; cut slopes without long-term reinforcement or adequate drainage; debris disposal that itself loads fragile hillsides.

Officials restore carriageways at speed because they must; equally, a policy failure is to keep rebuilding like-for-like.

What The Rulebook Already Says—And How To Use It

It’s not as if India lacks guidance. The National Disaster Management Authority has long published technical frameworks for landslide hazard zonation, slope stability, and risk-informed planning, including calls for large-scale hazard maps for corridors in Uttarakhand and Himachal.

Followed rigorously, these would push major alignments off the most unstable terrain and force fit-for-purpose stabilisation where works are unavoidable.

Later guidance reiterates what hill engineers and geologists know: treat drainage as critical infrastructure; enforce building codes; ban heavy cuts in loose slopes; avoid toe-cutting along rivers; and invest in bio-engineering, not just concrete.

Reviews have repeatedly flagged poor hill-town planning, lax enforcement, and unchecked tourism load as core drivers of risk—years before the current toll.

A Different Yardstick For “Development”

If development merely counts kilometres of black-top and megawatts installed, it will keep rewarding projects that look impressive in a press release and fail in the first red-alert.

A better yardstick is simple:

• Does it reduce risk over a 30-year horizon? If a highway realignment saves lives and maintenance by yielding the river room to move, that is development. If a narrower, smarter mountain road survives the monsoon where a six-lane cut will not, that is development.
• Does it keep ecological systems functioning? Forests on steep slopes aren’t ornamental; they are slope-stability infrastructure. Weakening protection—especially in eco-sensitive, border-adjacent ranges—shifts costs to those living downstream.
• Is it accountable to the hazard maps? If a landslide zonation says “no go”, it must mean “no go”—not “value-engineer it later”.

If we need a road, we must pay for the geotechnics, drainage, debris management, and long-term monitoring that make it survivable.

The Cost Of Carrying On As We Are

Imagine a fiscal exercise that counts the full life-cycle cost of mountain infrastructure: not just capex, but routine monsoon rebuilds, disaster relief, loss of productive days, and damaged private assets.

Add the climate signal—a wetter wet season, more high-intensity rainfall hours—and the old calculus falls apart. Continuing as we are is anti-development: it maximises stranded assets and socialised losses.

In Manali, engineers will rebuild the highway again. They will do it quickly and with skill. But if alignments hug the shifting Beas without adequate set-backs and floodplain discipline, if cut slopes remain unarmoured and drains clog with spoil, this season’s images will replay next year with numbing familiarity.

The choice is not between roads and forests. It is between roads that work and roads that don’t.

Three Uncomfortable Commitments

Design for the mountain, not against it. In the Himalaya, lighter footprints—narrower carriageways, tunnels in rock rather than miles of cliff cuts in debris slopes, river-friendly bridges and set-backs—often deliver more reliable connectivity than brute-force widening.

Restore teeth to forest and land-use regulation in sensitive belts. The Forest Act amendments’ most contentious provisions should be reconsidered with explicit exclusions for highly unstable terrain, alongside strong community consent processes.

Make landslide protocols mandatory in financing. No detailed project report, no loan, and no tender without slope stability modelling, debris disposal plans, drainage designs, and maintenance budgets appropriate to hazard class—and independent audits to check that what’s on paper exists on the hillside.

Conclusion

India can have growth that lasts in the hills—or “development” that washes away every July. The difference is governance.

If we keep treating forests as vacant lots and rivers as ditches, the mountains will keep answering with landslides and flash floods.

If we treat forests, floodplains and slopes as infrastructure in their own right, then the next generation might inherit roads that stay where we put them.

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