At breakneck speed Joshimath has for the first time questioned our tendency to turn hilly regions into tourist destinations and believe that this is development. 17,000 people live in this small town in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. Sudden landslides, fissures in the mountains and cracking of roads and buildings seem to be a warning of nature’s dangers.
So far 169 houses have been declared dangerous and the occupants have been sent to shelters. Those houses are demolished. Day by day many houses and buildings are getting new cracks and the city itself is soon declared unlivable.
Joshimath was a small village inhabited only by hill people. This place is the gateway to the famous Badrinath shrine. Apart from this, tourists who go for adventure sports in the Himalayas also stay here. A Sikh shrine is also nearby. Joshimath thus became an important shelter. Many buildings were built for this purpose.
On the other hand, NTPC, a central government company, is implementing projects to generate electricity by damming the Himalayan rivers. For this, long tunnels are dug through the mountain here and there. Development projects like these tend to upset the balance of the region as a whole, resulting in this tragedy.
Images taken by ISRO satellites show that Joshimath sank 8.9 cm between April and November and 5.4 cm in just 12 days from December 28 to January 8, the report said.
It is said that this problem has been there since 1976 and this condition is the result of construction of buildings without worrying about it. The city has been built on the site of an already landslide and accumulated waste.
Building structures without understanding the structure of the mountains and without understanding the nature of the soil and making the hill habitats into concrete jungles should be stopped. Respect the nature of nature. This is what the Himalayas convey to us through Joshimath risk.