Why in news?

With the sinking of Joshimath town, there is a considerable amount of research on the vulnerabilities of Himalayan geology brought to the fore.

How vulnerable is the Himalayan range?

• The Himalaya is a fragile mountain range that is still rising as the Indian plate continues to push into the Asian plate.
• The mountains are mainly the shale upwelling of the sea, which makes them quite unstable.
• In fact, they are largely held together by the forests that they support.

What is the case of Joshimath crisis?

• Geography – At over 6,000 feet, Joshimath sits on the side of an unstable ridge created largely from glacial moraine rock and shale in a rift valley.
• It is also a seismic zone.
• The ground beneath is a heterogeneous mass with pockets of variegated rock and open spaces occupied by water and mud from old glacial deposits.
• It also holds some important aquifers.
• Issues – Joshimath is no place for a tourist town that supports more than 2 million pilgrims a year or a four-lane highway.
• The government has sanctioned a hydropower project in the Dhauliganga-Alaknanda basin which upon tunneling punctured an aquifer in 2009 and contributed to the Joshimath slide.
• Uttarakhand state has more than 40,000 km of roads and counting today for tourists to visit the Char Dham sites (Yamunotri, Gangotri, Badrinath and Kedarnath).
• India also appears to be competing with China to build high-altitude railways.
• The mountains in Tibet on the Chinese side are made of firm rock whereas most of the Himalayan mountains are made of the unstable shale.

What are the concerns?

• Extreme weather events – With the consequent loss of forest cover and extreme weather events (the 2013 Kedarnath flood), catastrophes have occurred at a steady beat in all of Uttarakhand.
• Soil and water degradation – The local soil and water have been degraded.
• Decline in natural springs – The number of natural mineral water springs is declining.
• Increasing landslides – The number of landslides is also shooting up.

What lies ahead?

• If India needs any strategic border roads, they must run along rocky terrain to be stable.
• Those roads that exist on shale or other loose-soil hills must be urgently forested to stabilise the steep hillside as well as hold water and restore springs.
• There must be a complete ban on any hydroelectric power projects in the Himalaya, especially on the source-rivers of the Ganga (Bhagirathi and Alaknanda).
• Indian Himalaya has to be declared as an “inviolate protected zone” and a “planet reserve” similar to the declaration of Amazon basin as a “strictly protected zone”.