Himalayan Town of Joshimath Is Sinking

Joshimath is sinking. 

Large parts of the Himalayan town and surrounding areas have subsided. Several buildings are tilting dangerously, and the walls, ceilings, and floors of hundreds of houses have developed serious cracks. There are deep and long fissures across roads, and a temple has collapsed.

A small but crowded Hindu temple town, Joshimath lies at an altitude of 1,874 meters in the foothills of the Himalayas. It is the gateway to several places of pilgrimage and Himalayan trekking and mountaineering routes. The town, located close to the disputed China-India border, has strategic significance too. Home to one of the Indian Army’s most important cantonments, Joshimath is the staging ground for troops deployed to the disputed border region. 

It was in October 2021 that residents noticed cracks in the walls of more than a dozen houses. They alerted authorities. But nobody paid much attention, neither the Indian media nor the local administration. 

Then in December 2022, cracks appeared on hundreds of buildings. In several parts of the town, the ground had caved in. According to officials of the Chamoli district administration, the number of damaged houses stood at 561 on January 4. A fortnight later the figure crossed 800. Residents of other towns – including Mussoorie, Dehradun, Nainital, and Karnaprayag – are reporting cracks in buildings too.

A study by the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing based on satellite data collected between July 2020 and March 2022 found that Joshimath and surrounding areas are sinking at a rate of 6.5 cm (2.5 inches) per year. 

Worryingly, the town is sinking at an increasing pace.

According to the National Remote Sensing Center (NRSC) of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), Joshimath sank by 9 centimeters between April and November 2022, and then between December 28 and January 8, the town sank by another 5 centimeters, indicating that a “rapid subsidence event was triggered.”

Joshimath is vulnerable to natural disasters. It lies in a seismic zone and is thus highly prone to earthquakes. Additionally, the town was built on approximately 500 meters of debris from past landslides. Its very foundation is therefore unstable and prone to land subsidence.

There is a human element, too. The weight of human activity and massive building construction in the area has exacerbated the sinking problem.

Around 50 million pilgrims and tourists visit Uttarakhand each year. Hotels have sprung up everywhere to accommodate them, and roads are being constructed and widened to facilitate mass travel to Hindu pilgrimage sites at higher altitudes. 

Cutting into mountains in a geologically and ecologically sensitive zone to build roads is a bad idea to begin with; constructing two-lane roads in such terrain is at best a recipe for disaster. In Uttarakhand, around 900 km of hill roads are being widened by 10 meters. At the time of Indian independence in 1947, Uttarakhand had just around 100 km of roads; 75 years later the figure has jumped to 40,000 km, according to a former top official cited by The Hindu. 

Additionally, the Himalayan foothills have witnessed heavy deforestation, which has made Uttarakhand more prone to landslides.

Environmentalists are blaming the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC)’s under-construction 520 MW Tapovan Vishnugarh hydropower project for Joshimath’s subsidence. The project, which is coming up on the Dhauliganga river in the Chamoli district, is around 15 km from Joshimath. 

Experts say that a tunnel for the hydropower project has hollowed the ground beneath Joshimath. Moreover, they allege that the NTPC has been blasting rocks to construct the tunnel. 

The NTPC denied the allegation, claiming that it is using tunnel-boring machines and that the tunnel does not run beneath Joshimath. Reportedly, the tunnel ends 5 km from Joshimath

The Tapovan Vishnugarh project has run into trouble repeatedly. Three years after construction work began, a tunnel-boring machine punctured an aquifer. Then in February 2021, when a portion of the Nanda Devi glacier broke off near Chamoli, flash floods ravaged the region. Two hundred people were killed, most of them construction workers trapped inside the tunnel at the Tapovan Vishnugarh project.

There were reports of land subsidence in the Joshimath area in the 1970s. In its 1976 report, the Mahesh Chandra Mishra Committee, which investigated the frequent landslides and land subsidence, recommended that “heavy construction be banned in the area around Joshimath” to stop the township from sinking.

Successive governments did not heed those warnings and went ahead with infrastructure development in the region. A disaster at Joshimath was waiting to happen.

Uttarakhand has always been home to powerful environmental protest movements.  The tragedy unfolding in Joshimath has triggered massive protests against the Tapovan Vishnugarh project and other planned hydroelectric projects in the region. People are mobilizing against big dams and roads that India is constructing in its Himalayan region, including Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim, and Arunachal Pradesh.

Will the Indian government heed the warnings and recommendations of countless geologists and environmental experts, and the demands of tens of thousands of people in the Himalayan region whose lives have been shaken by the unfolding disaster at Joshimath?

Responding to the developments unfolding at Joshimath since December 2022, the local administration has been evacuating people from the area. Severely damaged buildings are being demolished. However, changes are needed on the policy front, and the government’s initial response to the unfolding tragedy at Joshimath does not bode well.

Ministers in the Narendra Modi government and officials are bent on downplaying the crisis. Experts from government-run organizations have been forbidden by the government from sharing information on land subsidence. The National Disaster Management ordered officials associated with survey and data collection in Joshimath not to interact with the media or share data on social media. When the findings of the NRSC report about the quickening pace of land subsidence at Joshimath in December-January created a stir in January, the report was pulled from the ISRO website. 

But denying a problem will not make it go away.