If Covid-19 has reported a fact, it is the importance of trees and forests to involve any epidemic. And yet our mountainous states, driven through Uttarakhand, have felled thousands of trees, the livelihood of any mountainous state.
The Ministry of Road and Road Transport’s last wave of thought is to build a Delhi-Dehradun highway that will reduce driving time between them to less than 3 hours. To achieve this dubious goal, the beautiful forests along the foothills of the Shivalik mountain range will have to be felled to widen the road. Thousands of old Salt trees planted more than 150 years ago will be felled. More than two thousand trees will also be felled from Cheer, Sagun, Peepul, Mango, Gulmohar and Blackberry, among many other varieties of trees.
This assignment has been described as questionable because the Meerut-Muzaffarnagar beltway has already reduced driving time between Delhi and Dehradun to 4 hours. In addition, there is air connectivity between the two cities, reducing time to two hours, adding time spent on safety inspection. Increased exercise connectivity also ensures that a middle-income student can travel the distance in five hours. So why is there a heartbreaking rush to destroy one of the few green belts? Trees in Rajaji Tiger Reserve play an essential role in preventing soil erosion and are a safe haven for wildlife, adding tigers, leopards and elephants.
The cost of this highway will cost more than 10,000 Rs and bureaucrats from the Department of Road Transport believe they will get this cash from advanced tourism, even though the Covid-19 pandemic has cried tourism for now.
The Garhwal Himalaya has already experienced widespread deforestation. The ambitious all-weather road “Char Dham Pariyojana” is expected to have 4 routes to 4 pilgrimage centres in Kedarnath, Badrinath, Yamunotri and Gangotri. It is said that a lakh has already been knocked down for this (although the official figure is lower). Several species of silver oak, pine and deodar have been felled to facilitate the extension of this road.
This deforestation is the explanation for why landslides occur more along these roads, in periods of approximately every 10 km. More than 10,000 trees were felled in the Rudraprayag forestry department alone, which suffered massive ecological losses in the 2013 flash floods in Kedarnath and surrounding areas, where more than 5,000 people died.
Char Dham’s allocation deserves to have been carried out with great caution, especially since it crosses 529 landslide-prone areas, but is under a structure with no mandatory environmental effect on evaluation approvals. Neither the Ministry of Environment and Forestry nor the Government of the State has carried out a detailed cumulative assessment of the effect of this allocation on this ecologically sensitive region of the Ganges basin.
Dr. Ravi Chopra, former director of the People’s Science Institute, Dehradun, says the domain bureaucracy is the central thrust region of the small Himalayan region. “This is where the Indian tectonic plate passes through the Eurasian tectonic plate, which makes the total region vulnerable to earthquakes and landslides,” he says.
The Indian Geological Survey does just the same when it asserts that the structure of the roads in the mountains reactivates landslides because it disturbs the “foot of the grassy slope of the hill”.
In an attempt to involve this loss, Chopra, who is chairman of a High Power Committee appointed through the Supreme Court on the Char Dham Highway, along with 4 other members, all specialists, advised that the road be limited to a width of 5.5 meters. Matrix with a maximum width of 7 to 8 meters. But the remaining 21 members of the committee, many of whom are government officials, in addition to 8 district judges, insisted that the original width of 12 meters be maintained. No wonder Prime Minister Narendra Modi is willing to quickly complete the four-lane road.
Surprisingly, the Chopra stand corroborated it no less than through the Ministry of Road Transport, which in a 2018 circular said that a 12-meter wide road was not suitable for the terrain of this mountainous area.
The 21 team members argued that this direction was strategically priced and that, therefore, if it were wider, it would allow an uninterrupted and immediate movement of the defense teams. But Chopra refutes this reasoning by saying, “When the army moves, it moves in a column: Pulwama?”
Another equally debatable assignment is the rail link between Rishikesh and Karnaprayag, which is also under structure to bring tourism to life. This will require cutting down even more trees. If the charm of the Dham road can charge up to Rs. 13,000 crore, the rail link will charge around Rs.18000 crore, a big jump from the Rs.4000 crore in the original proposal 8 years ago.
This questionable rail link was not legal through the Ministry of Environment of the State of Uttarakhand for several years because he was convinced that the road alignment plan was not linear, which is a mandatory requirement to protect the fragile Himalayas. But the Center has given it the soft green and this railway link will come with 16 bridges and a lot of tunnels, one of which is 15.8 kilometers long. The rail allocation will also not have to go through an environmental impact on the study.
Speaking of anonymity, an assignment manager said they had already gained an expanse of giant land in which the forest will have to be cut down. It was the acquisition of personal land that created a barrier. The official warns that to “cross these fragile mountains, most of the rail link would consist of giant underground tunnels.”
Activists warn that such extensive tunnels will generate gigantic amounts of dust and land waste, for which there is no adequate disposition. This is a consultation given that the maximum damage from the 2013 Uttarakhand flood was due to those unattended mounds of dust.
SP Sati, a geologist at Tehri University of Horticulture and Forestry, says the consequences are already visible. “This year, the monsoon accompanied primary landslides along the Alaknanda and Tehri roads with thousands of trees uprooted due to landslides,” he says. Badrinath Road has been closed for 3 weeks.
“Spill sites [for waste dust] are more than eye baths. Huge amounts of dust are being poured into those river basins. Now they are looking to build retaining walls at the top, but given the heavy rains, there is a chance that they will lay the walls, “streets of Sati.
Om Prakash, uttarakhand’s new lead secretary, responds to these considerations by recalling the order of the Nainital High Court that dust removal problems should be created 500 metres from the structure site. “This is not imaginable given the existing land,” he says. “Where will we locate the floor to create those [elimination problems]?”
However, Prakash supported the 21 members of the High Powers Committee in the 4 lanes of Char Dham Road. It argues that since this road would lead to the border with Indochina and is used through the security forces, it will have to widen. “Just to get the 12-meter Bofors canyon to the border, we want a [adequate] road and there’s no way the road structure can be blocked,” he says.
He says the path is moving forward according to clinical principles, which will stabilize the slopes. It also says that stagnation is vital because Uttarakhand relies heavily on tourism as a source of income and employment.
Mallika Bha, a member of Ganga Ahvaan, an organization that opposes dams in the Ganges, warns that cutting down hillsides to build roads and rail connections will only exacerbate the immediate environmental degradation of those already fragile slopes. Dr. Vaidya, an environmentalist at the Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research in Bengaluru, says the structure activity performed pays sufficient attention to the geological and hydrological characteristics unique to the decreasing Himalayan region. Vaidya warns that it opposes the structure of roads along seismic faults in this earthquake-prone state. Construction on fault lines can weaken rocks at the base of roads, making parts of them vulnerable to landslides and landslides, as we have seen.
Environmental lawyer Sanjay Parikh, who was one of the petitioners who opposed the widening of the road before the Supreme Court, said: “The mountain slopes along the roads are cut at 90-degree angles, so this deserves to be done at forty five degrees. Assistance on the slopes of the mountains to limit the flow of water, but if they are poorly cut off, the water can enter the roads.
Even cities are not spared this frenzy of felling trees and the wooden mafia is undoubtedly the sparse canopy that is being cut at an alarming rate, all in the call of infrastructure development.
Sanjeev Srivastava, founded in Dehradun, a member of Friends of Green Doon and other environmentalists, fight against any prognosis so that the old trees that give Dehradun their unique environment not be cut down for those projects.
“From Ghantaghar in the city centre to Prem Nagar [through the city], Dehradun PWD cut all the trees on both sides of the road to Chakrata. These have not been replaced to date. They now plan to cut down 38 old trees between Survey Chowk and Raipur Chowk. We’ve started a motion to save the centuries-old trees that grow here. They also plan to cut down another 1400 trees along the Sahasradhara road to widen the road. We want a lot more from the other people on the court for this fight, ” said srivastava.
Aanchal Sondhi, who runs the NGO Titli, regrets that the Forestry Department is too weak and unable to deal with the dictates of the Mussoorie Dehradun Development Authority, the PWD and the Dehradun Municipal Corporation, which burden them.
The basic challenge is that the State Government and the Centre do not pay attention to experts. This misguided logic led the Ministry of Environment and Forests to also approve a zone master plan for the Bhagirathi Eco-sensitive Zone (BESZ). This prestigious replacement will destroy the last pristine green belt of the Garhwal Himalaya. The state government had opposed beSZ, which banned hydropower industries or power plants in the region, which it called “anti-development”. The Char Dham four-lane highway has discovered the best excuse to satisfy the desires of defense and tourism, but all this environmental loss will ultimately result in more damage than good.
He’s a freelance journalist. Opinions are personal.