Uttarakhand: Protecting the Border, Abandoning the Borderlands

Since June this year, reports about India-China border clashes have focused on the Aksai Chin region in Ladakh. There was an obvious reason for this: it was where most of the tensions spiked, and where – in the Galwan River Valley – soldiers died. Aksai Chin is unpopulated, however, save for the soldiers on both sides who are stationed there. However, southeast from Ladakh lay the Indian states of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, where smaller sections of the mountain border are also disputed. There the situation is the reverse: Those border areas are populated, if sparsely, but have not seen any major tensions in 2020 (or  in decades). Still, the lives of local villagers there are intertwined with the border conflict in various ways.

West of Nepal, there are four areas of border dispute between India and China. The largest and by far the most significant is the already-mentioned Ladakh. The other three small areas barely make news in the international media: the Bara Hoti-Topidunga area, the Nelang valley area, and the Shipki pass. The first two belong to the state of Uttarakhand from the Indian perspective, and the third to the state of Himachal Pradesh. From China’s perspective, all of these should belong to the Tibetan Autonomous Region. 

In 2019, long before the June 2020 clashes in Ladakh, various Indian media outlets reported that entire villages on the Chinese border with Uttarakhand had been completely abandoned. The border dispute could perhaps be one of the reasons for this in few cases, as according to the media local herdsmen complained that incursions by Chinese soldiers were taking place also in Uttarakhand, affecting the safety of herding in places like Bara Hoti-Topidunga. But this would have been a significant factor only near the disputed short sections of the border. The larger picture is that the relatively poor and mostly mountainous Uttarakhand has faced the depopulation of remote hamlets for decades. This process has enveloped hundreds of villages, many of which are nowhere close to the disputed areas. 

A 2016 report by Shreeshan Venkatesh for Down to Earth states that as many as 9 percent of Uttarakhand villages could have been abandoned. Other villages are occupied by just a few inhabitants. Some of the settlements are also traditionally occasional – the people move twice a year, living in the upper village during the summers, and in the lower one during winters. Thus, the total landscape of depopulation may be even worse than the statistics on deserted villages suggest.

According to Venkatesh, the main reasons for this are poverty and a dearth of job opportunities, poor health care, and depleted water resources. A 2020 state government report declared that search of employment was the main reason for migration for more than 50 percent of respondents. Some of the hamlets have also been deserted after natural disasters, such as the 2013 floods. 

Another crucial factor is poor infrastructure. In the mountainous terrain many of the villages are difficult to reach, and the more scarcely inhabited they become, the less pressure there is for the authorities to invest in connecting them. This infrastructure gap encompasses not only the transport aspect but digital connectivity too. Some complain of problems with phone network connections, to the point where some of the villagers living closer to the border with Nepal are forced to use Nepali SIM cards rather than Indian ones. 

Another aspect is the reclaiming of space by wildlife. As some fields and villages are abandoned, wild animals have begun roaming, endangering the remaining people and crops. Thus, while across India demographic growth is a mounting issue, a part of Uttarakhand is facing the problem in reverse. 

Even though this depopulation is largely not caused by the border dispute, the broader issue of relations with Beijing is nevertheless intertwined with local life in one, paradoxical way: In search of safe employment, many of Uttarakhand’s men enroll in the army, thus strengthening the armed forces but further depopulating the border areas. 

For some villages, the India-China border dispute was a life-changing event, but in a much more distant past. Take the village of Mana, near the holy site of Badrinath. The small settlement is the last on the road to the border with China, although not to a disputed section. It is inhabited by Indian Tibetans – not refugees, but a community that had been in India much longer. Its members practice Hinduism while speaking a Tibetan dialect. The village used to live off the trade route that connected India and Tibet through the Himalayas. The route, however, had been sealed off by the Chinese in 1959, after the anti-Beijing uprising in Tibet and Dalai Lama's flight to India (all of which was caused by China’s annexation of Tibet a few years earlier). West of Nepal the border has been blocked for decades and there seems no opportunity for the situation to change, given the conditions as they look in 2020.

And yet depopulation may prove to be a growing challenge for Indian forces. As villagers are abandoning their households, the monitoring of the borderlands is being left entirely to soldiers (and paramilitary forces). “Villagers of these areas serve as critical sources of information for defence forces on the ground,” wrote Mohammad Anab and Prashant Jha for the Times of India. In July 2020, soon after the Galwan River Valley clash, the New Indian Express also reported that authorities were distributing a few hundred satellite phones to the local population “to keep eye on border areas.” The matter of village abandonment was regarded as concerning long before the current tussle between India and China. According to the press, the issue was brought up in a 2019 meeting of India’s National Security Council. A year earlier, India’s Home Minister Rajnath Singh, equally worried about migration, called the borderlands population “a strategic asset for us.”

The governments – in Uttarakhand and in New Delhi – are thus aware of the problem. In 2017, the state government established the Uttarakhand Rural Development and Migration Commission. The body recommended a host of solutions, such as supporting the local population with soft loans, extending the national temporary rural employment scheme (MGNREGA), enhancing infrastructure, and promoting tourism. Some of these steps have already being taken, although only time will tell if they are sufficient. Some of the solutions also include joint farming. Statistics prove that in Uttarakhand fields belonging to a given household tend to be of small size, which adds to the people’s economic vulnerability. Experiments in shared agriculture and horticulture are underway. A June 2020 text by Divendra Singh for Gaon Connection suggests that some of these measures, like the MGNREGA, are working. Yet, as Singh points out, the main reason for recent remigration is the pandemic-caused lockdown. As many as 60,000 residents of Uttarakhand are said to have returned to their villages, mostly not to due to new job opportunities in the rural areas but because of the loss of such opportunities in the cities. This may mean that this process is temporary.

As of now, the central government is even considering partially lifting the Inner Line Permit, meaning that tourists would be allowed into some previously sensitive areas without special permits. The areas under consideration include the disputed Nelang valley. “[T]here should be some tourism and economic activity so that the border villages remain inhabited,” Uttarakhand’s tourism minister wrote in September 2020. An interesting reversal is taking place: Some border areas that were out of bounds for tourists because they are disputed now may be opened to tourists for exactly the same reason.

So far, the depopulation of Uttarakhand’s remote villages is mostly a social and economic problem: A challenge for the government, which needs to take care of its citizens. It cannot be ruled out that it may become a growing security issue as well. The disputed areas of Uttarakhand have not been a focal point of this year’s flash in China-India tensions. In recent years, the Bara Hoti-Topidunga region reported “only” a few incursions by Chinese soldiers, an easily missed detail in comparison to hundreds of such incidents that take place along the entire China-India border every year, mostly in Ladakh. However, as it seems that New Delhi-Beijing are growing tense, it cannot be ruled out that incursions will become more intense in Uttarakhand as well.