Monsoon Mayhem

The monsoon, once seen as a seasonal blessing, is fast turning into an annual reckoning. In Jammu’s Kathua district, a sudden cloudburst tore through hillsides, killing four people and sweeping away a railway track, a stretch of the national highway and even the local police station. In Jodh village, six people remain trapped under mud after a landslide obliterated roads and homes. Cloudbursts, flash floods and shooting stones are likely to be a fixture across the Himalayan foothills in the coming days.

Across the border in Himachal Pradesh, the skies have been just as merciless with flash floods in Mandi district washing away stretches of the vital Chandigarh–Manali highway. Hundreds of roads and power lines lie broken. The state disaster authority counts 257 dead since June, more than half from landslides and floods. Himachal’s famed mountains, once a refuge for tourists fleeing the plains’ summer heat, now look increasingly like death traps.

Such tragedies are presented as acts of God, unpredictable and unpreventable. Yet the pattern is too stark to dismiss as misfortune. Climate change is intensifying the monsoon, making cloudbursts heavier and landslides deadlier. Warmer air holds more water, which it unloads with catastrophic force in narrow valleys and along fragile slopes. The Himalayas, young and geologically unstable, bear the brunt of this violence. What once were considered ‘once-in-a-century’ downpours now strike with numbing regularity.

If climate is one culprit, poor planning is the other. India’s hill states have been disfigured by reckless construction. Roads are gouged into unstable ridges to accommodate cars and buses packed with tourists. Hotels mushroom on riverbanks in defiance of safety warnings. Hydropower dams alter river flows and destabilise mountainsides. The very development meant to bring prosperity is undermining the ecological foundations of these states.

Governments, aware of the dangers, issue advisories urging people to stay away from rivers or unstable slopes. Yet such warnings are of little use when communities depend on those very riverside roads, or when officials themselves sanction unsafe construction to court votes and revenue. Rescue operations are mounted after each calamity, but emergency teams find themselves cut off by the very landslides they are sent to manage.

The irony is bitter. The mountains that supply India’s rivers, sustain its farms and beckon its holidaymakers are being steadily eroded by the twin pressures of a warming climate and human folly. The season that once replenished fields and filled reservoirs is now synonymous with funerals and collapsed homes. The economic losses run into billions each year, dwarfing the costs of prevention.

India cannot halt the monsoon. But it can decide whether to keep meeting it with bulldozers and body bags, or with foresight. That means regulating construction in fragile zones, investing in slope stabilisation, and designing infrastructure to withstand the torrents that are no longer unusual but expected. It means recognising that ecological fragility is not a constraint on development but its precondition.

Unless that lesson is learnt, the Himalayas will continue to tumble.