Floods of the alps: Uttarakhand Disaster
The range of disaster was extreme, it flew more than 6000 lives and around 12000 people were assumed to be perishable. Roads have been destroyed, hundreds of buildings got washed away along with several bridges and hydropower projects.
It is a natural disaster, involving various natural resources like Himalayan Mountains, Forest, Rivers, Glaciers and ultimately the “people”. This damage is majorly due to the “climate change and poorly planned development.” this, in turn, highlights the “Anthropogenic reasons” which increased the impact leading to a question on environmental security in India. The region has a young mountain that was vulnerable to the various impacts of a disaster. This has to be dealt with in greater detail as in to understand the sensitivity of a young region., which has cleared all the human interventions making it worse.
Lack of –
•Warning,
•Disaster management systems.
What happened to the “carrying capacity” of this fragile area?
Disregards towards the infrastructure development, hydropower plant, etc., in the fragile area without proper checking and monitoring. Illegal riverbed mining was so unsustainable, destructive and rampant. If we look back, a large amount of forestland has been legally diverted to various projects of development. Over 1,600 ha of riverbed mining was given a legal sanction in the same period. During this time tourism in the state has gone up by up to 380%. Uttarakhand has at least 51 existing hydropower projects of various sizes, and another 47 under construction and 238 planned. Post-disaster report from the “National Institute of Disaster Management “confirmed, all these activities have significant environmental and social impacts that hugely increased the disaster potential of the area. For example, hydropower projects below 25 MW do not require an Environment Impact Assessment (EIA), monitoring or public consultation process although it is well known that they can have very significant adverse impacts on the local communities and the environment.
There is no cumulative impact assessment process which creates no room for the analysis of –
1.Disaster vulnerability
2.Climate change3. Carrying capacity.
A 2010 report by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests identified the Himalayan region as one of the four most vulnerable areas to disaster. This region covers 16% of India’s total geographical area, spread over 12 states. Almost two-thirds of this region is designated forests, but “with few exceptions, most of this forest has been cut,” says the report. Climate scientists have been warning that higher frequency and amplitude of the untimely and high-intensity rainfall events that triggered the Uttarakhand disaster are a likely consequence of climate change.
Conclusion:
It was clearly the development without a backup status analysis which leads to this disaster. It has to recover and rehabilitate accepting these factors as major mistakes.
•Provide with a path of rivers, No – Go areas for construction with the relocation of buildings with regulations.
•Start cumulative impact assessment and carrying capacity study of the river basin.
•Removal of existing hydropower plants along with regulations of no more power plants in the vulnerable areas.
•Active participation of disaster management cell to avoid further disasters.
•Assess the vulnerability of infrastructure and people to climate change.•Adding a good environmental governance that provides monitoring and information dissemination.