Courtesy of Bloomberg, a sobering report on how Modi’s push to develop along India’s tense border with China heightens risks to the already fragile area:

On January 3, 2023, cracks suddenly spread over hundreds of buildings in Joshimath, India, and they started sinking into the ground. Residents gathered up what furniture and prized belongings they could and left. Over the course of a few days, more than 1,000 people sought temporary shelter as snow covered what was left of their homes.

A year on, the homes are still empty, with traces of life before the collapse. A wedding photo album and a prayer scroll sit on one shelf; at a former hotel a red sign reads, “A warm welcome awaits.”

Joshimath is only one of the mountain communities perched dangerously between the growing impacts of climate change and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plans for developing the region, which are coming into sharper focus ahead of the country’s elections this spring. Modi sees strengthening India’s contested northern border with China as critical to national security, and hopes to turn the Himalayas into a renewable energy powerhouse. The region, dotted with holy sites, has strong religious significance for supporters of his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

This month alone, Modi and other top officials toured border towns, while Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari approved or inaugurated six major road and rail projects in the region.

Yet heavy construction on the area’s unstable ground, combined with climate change, has heightened the risk of disaster.

Standing at an altitude of 1,875 meters (about 6,100 feet) on a mass of compact but unstable debris known as moraine, which is typically left behind by a shifting glacier, Joshimath has always been prone to sinking due to the terrain it was built on. The threat was idle for over a thousand years as the small city welcomed tens of thousands Hindu devotees walking the Char Dham pilgrim circuit each season.

The area around Joshimath is home to one of the military outposts along the disputed Sino-Indian border known as the Line of Actual Control, where India deploys around 20,000 troops and weaponry, and it also serves as a landing ground for private helicopters.

Roads and railways are being built not only to move troops, but also to improve connections with the rest of the country. One of the biggest ongoing projects is the $1.5 billion, 890-kilometer (550-mile) Char Dham highway in Uttarakhand state, which will connect Joshimath to other mountain hamlets along a Hindu pilgrimage route.

Back in the early 2000s, India’s leaders saw the Himalayan peaks as an effective defense from a hostile neighbor. That changed when China ramped up infrastructure on its side of the border. The BJP responded by matching its efforts, said Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, director of the Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi. The party, in power since 2014, positions itself as pro-development and able to stand up to China and the West.

If Modi consolidates his power for a third term, Rajagopalan added, development in the Himalayas will most likely intensify along with the religious messaging around it. “Most Indians are comfortable with the pro-Hindu narrative that Modi has been promoting across the region” by building temples and opening up new pilgrimage routes, she said.

The slow ascent up the foothills and away from Delhi, the world’s most polluted capital, used to be a sure respite from bad air. Today, clouds of dust from heavy construction follow the visitor.

Near Dehradun, Uttarakhand’s capital, a newly widened road snakes into the horizon, built on a dry riverbed and against a crumbling mountain wall. Beside a freshly excavated tunnel one day this winter, workers gathered around a tin-roofed food stall offering plates of rice and yellow curry. Once the project is complete, the journey to higher altitudes will be shorter.

Meanwhile, dams are multiplying. India’s electricity demand is surging, and the Himalayas are “endowed with hydropower,” says Rajnath Ram, an energy adviser with the policymaking agency of the Indian central government. The country has 150 gigawatts of hydropower potential, of which just over 50 is currently being exploited, he said. “Our plan is to increase this figure to 68 gigawatts. We need hydropower in a big way to support our renewable energy,” he said.

“Climate projections, we have included some” in planning, Ram continued. “But the specificity of this region still needs to be assessed. But we know that we have huge [hydropower] potential.”

According to Global Energy Monitor, India has more than 100 new hydroelectric dams in planning or under construction across the Himalayas — the perfect location to intercept huge amounts of water flowing from the mountains’ melting glaciers.

A glacial lake — swelled by ice melt to the point of exploding — burst last October in the state of Sikkim. It caused a sudden flood that killed at least 40 people and destroyed the 1,200-megawatt Teesta III dam. A month later, a tunnel in the Char Dham road project collapsed after a landslide, trapping 41 workers for over two weeks.

An ambulance waits to carry workers from the site of collapsed tunnel in Uttarakhand in November. Source: AP Photos
Atul Sati, a Joshimath activist who has been advocating for the rights of its displaced residents, likens the new level of risk to the impact of a large stone versus the pebble-sized risk of the past. “If I throw a little stone at someone, it will damage them a little,” he says. “But if I throw a boulder, the damage will be on a different scale.”

Scientists say the additional weight of new, large-scale infrastructure as well as the regular blasting of the mountains to make space for roads and tunnels increases the danger to Joshimath and other mountain towns.

In 2019, a landmark scientific review estimated that more than 1 billion people across the Hindu Kush Himalayan region, spanning eight countries from Afghanistan to Myanmar, are exposed to more frequent and severe weather events, including flash floods, avalanches, landslides and droughts.

Arun Shreshta, a senior climate specialist with the Nepal-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), says the problem isn’t development in and of itself. “People need access to food, energy and all kinds of services,” he said. “But it cannot be done without considering the impacts of climate change on different environmental scenarios.”

When new infrastructure projects are being planned, the authorities study the impacts on the surrounding environment and try to mitigate them. Even so, Shreshta said, “we are growing more concerned that the impacts of the environment itself on infrastructure are getting worse because of climate change.” Landslides and flooding events have always occurred in the mountains, but climate change is exacerbating these risks.

A project’s risk exposure can’t be understood without taking into account the possibility of “cascading impacts,” he said. For instance, the collapse of one dam on a river would stir up so much debris and sediment that it could overwhelm dams farther downstream. Still, he said, that scope of assessment “is something which normally project [managers] do not do.”

With what science tells us now, he said, “rampant development anywhere you want simply is not going to work.”

Ongoing construction on the Helang bypass road, part of the Char Dham highway project in Uttarakhand. It is meant to shorten pilgrims’ journey to Badrinath, bypassing Joshimath. A tunnel that was being built as part of the same project was stopped after Joshimath started sinking.

The joint secretary for transport in India’s Ministry of Road Transport and Highways and the secretary in charge of energy for the chief minister of Uttarakhand did not respond to requests for comment on government plans for transport and energy expansion in the Himalayas.

When Joshimath made headlines in January 2023, it was covered in snow. This year, the city and the surrounding mountains faced a weeks-long dry spell that meteorologists call snow drought. Argha Banerjee, a glaciologist with the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune, said that reduced snowfall contributes to the progressive shrinking of the Himalayan glaciers, which in turn alters the region’s hydrology.

For thousands of years, glaciers have been replenished by snow falling from clouds caught amid the high peaks. But as temperatures rise from climate change, ice retreats, releasing water that feeds expanding mountain lakes at lower altitudes, sometimes hidden under the ice itself. This accumulation can lead to flash floods, which become even more disruptive as they trap sediment and debris on their race downstream.

“As we build more infrastructure in the region, we are likely moving closer to these susceptible areas,” Banerjee said, and with so many incidents already happening, “it seems like we are not using whatever environmental knowledge we already have.” As climate change alters the mountain weather in unpredictable and violent ways which scientists are only now starting to grapple with, “What happens when we have to integrate the scientific knowledge we’ll generate in the next decade into planning decisions we make now?” he asked.

Geologist Piyoosh Rautela, the executive director of the Uttarakhand State Disaster Management Authority, a government body, warned in a 2010 paper that disaster “looms large over Joshimath” because of haphazardly approved hydroelectric projects. But now he says there is no scientific evidence that human intervention may be contributing to the region’s subsidence, and that such theories are soundbites from the “environmental lobby.”

The area is historically prone to disasters; geological instability didn’t emerge with the construction of new roads, he said. And road projects need to go ahead because the region is of strategic importance: “We share borders with both Nepal and China. If the need arises, we have to be able to move [military] forces.”

Disaster management in the state is sophisticated, he said. Its mandate is not to advise infrastructure planners, but to raise awareness about impending dangers such as geological shifting or even earthquakes, for which the department has set up an early warning system able to warn about a major shockwave up to five minutes in advance.

For thousands of years, Himalayan glaciers have been replenished by snow falling from clouds caught amid the high peaks. But as temperatures rise with climate change, the ice retreats, releasing water that can cause flooding at lower altitudes. Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg
Building guidelines are also much more extensive than they used to be, according to Rautela. Scientists are drawing detailed geological profiles of 25 hill cities, employing remote sensing techniques such as laser-based LIDAR mapping, among other tools. The problem, he said, is that “with the kind of growth we are witnessing, you cannot have policing.” Compliance with the building rules ends up being voluntary and can only be encouraged through awareness.

Around Joshimath, one can still make out ancient footpaths: thin, horizontal lines carved on the side of the mountain. Wide enough only for crossing on foot, the perilous paths embodied the sacrifice required to reach enlightenment. Safer, wider roads were later built to make Joshimath more accessible, and its center expanded around ancient temples in a flurry of street markets, guest houses and hotels.

And while more people can now complete their journey along the Char Dham pilgrimage route, one of its sacred destinations, the centuries-old Narsingh Temple, has started to visibly sink, along with so many other buildings.

The latest round of geological surveys has identified new risk areas, and more people have been advised to move away. But this time, many are resisting, saying that as the city crumbles, they have not been offered a viable alternative to staying put.

The owner of the hotel with the red sign, Laxmiprasad Sati, in his early eighties, and his wife now rent a flat nearby and spend their days watching over their old home. They have no plans to leave.

Lakshmi Devi, who was displaced from her home, inside her temporary dwelling. Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg
A woman in her mid-thirties named Lakshmi Devi is one of the lucky few who was resettled after the disaster in a village of metal structures next to the old town. She has set up her new living space tastefully, with a sofa for visitors to sit on while she makes tea and colorful posters on the wall, but she refuses to call it home. The mother of three was a farmer and a domestic worker, but she is now dedicated to local activism. Not trusting the government assessments, she personally surveyed about 400 homes for signs of breakage.

Devi has yet to see compensation for the loss of her house and the land she used to cultivate to feed her family, and despite her activism she has little hope it will ever come. “Without land to farm, what will we be doing?” she said. “We are mountain people. We can’t go off and become something else.”