When the Mountains Weep: Kullu’s Tryst with Disasters and Displacement

The monsoon rains come every year, but lately they bring something more than water—they bring destruction. Cloud bursts, flash floods, and landslides have become unwelcome companions to mountain communities, leaving behind trails of boulders, gravel, and sludge that swallow farmland, bury homes, and redraw the very courses of rivers and streams.

This isn’t just nature taking its course. Construction, deforestation, and relentless road-building in the mountains have worsened what was already a fragile situation. And how has the state responded? With “river training”—a euphemism for dredging and channelising rivers. In 2024, the Himachal Cabinet even decided to allow mining on private land and doubled the permitted mining depth from one to two metres.

Images of apple orchards at Chowki village buried under sediment after the 2024 flooding in Malana Nala—show a landscape transformed beyond recognition. Another image captures silt debris piled along the Sainj River near Satesh.

The Numbers Tell a Story—But Not the Whole One

Every district conducts scientific assessments to regulate riverbed mining. According to Kullu’s survey report, the district sees nearly 20 million metric tons of sediment deposition annually. To put that in perspective: enough to bury 200 cricket stadiums under five metres of silt, or fill 8,000 Olympic swimming pools.

But the report misses the bigger picture. It fails to address the cumulative ecological and disaster risks from infrastructure-driven extraction, especially after the devastating 2023 floods. While it acknowledges sediment buildup from extreme weather and glacial activity, it frames flood-deposited minerals—particularly in the Beas valley—as commercial opportunities rather than warning signs of environmental instability. Despite detailing replenishment rates and No Mining Zones, the District Survey Report lacks a precautionary approach to floodplains and ignores hard lessons from dam-related disasters. It implicitly green-lights mining in geologically sensitive, tourism-heavy areas without critically assessing human vulnerability.

Maps show hydro-electric projects alongside officially identified dredging sites in the district. These dredging sites—points where massive sediment accumulation poses flood risks locally and downstream—often lie below large projects and official-unofficial muck-dumping grounds.

When Courts Focus on Compliance, Not Causes

After the 2023 floods, the judiciary—particularly the Himachal Pradesh High Court (CWPIL 27/2019)—pressed state agencies and the PWD to act on technical compliance: fix roads, dredge rivers. But it didn’t question the source of all that sedimentation—unchecked construction, as required by a National Green Tribunal order.

Documents obtained under the RTI Act by the Himalayan Advocacy Centre, a local watchdog, reveal that the judiciary never asked whether dredging and river training might actually worsen ecological harm—especially since locals in Raisen and Sainj valleys had already raised alarms about unscientific dredging.

The NHAI’s role, as court records show, was limited to releasing funds and requesting dredging to protect highway infrastructure. The authority conducted no sediment impact studies of its own and didn’t proactively coordinate with local bodies or river basin authorities. This bureaucratic siloing reveals how infrastructure protection takes precedence over restoration, community resilience, or rehabilitation. Even the Ministry of Water Resources and the Central Water Commission acknowledge that river dredging isn’t an effective long-term flood control solution—citing the Brahmaputra in Assam, where siltation is too vast and recurring to manage through dredging alone.

A Familiar Playbook: Turning Disaster into Opportunity

Himachal wasn’t the first to push river training after floods. Uttarakhand’s use of the disaster management framework to enable aggressive riverbed mining drew criticism as “aapda mein avsar”—exploiting crisis for development gains. Under its River Training Policy launched in late 2020, district administrations auctioned rights to excavate sand, gravel, and boulders from riverbeds—ostensibly to prevent erosion. Contractors had to be highest bidders, even though such excavation amounted to commercial mining without environmental clearances. These tenders, issued under the guise of disaster preparedness, bypassed environmental regulations entirely, leading to unchecked extraction with no safety protocols.

Now there’s a proposal for channelisation to tame the “snaking and unruly” Beas River, submitted to the Central Water Commission. The proposal—returned to the state government last year—is rooted in the same engineering mindset that sees concreting, embanking, or straightening river channels as the answer to controlling flow and protecting infrastructure. Environmentalists and river scientists have provided ample evidence that channelisation leads to loss of floodplains, disrupted groundwater recharge, destroyed riparian habitats, and increased flow velocity—causing greater downstream erosion and more intense flash floods. It simply shifts the risk elsewhere, especially in a para-glacial river like the Beas with its heavy sediment loads.

Tabahinama: Echoes in the Aftermath

Two weeks after the 2024 floods, we visited two severely affected sub-valleys of Kullu—Sainj and Malana (Parvati)—to document local testimonies and collect visuals of the flood’s impacts. People’s narratives revealed the uneven geographies of risk and disaster, and how communities, despite the state’s disaster governance machinery, emerge as first responders—engaging in rescue, relief, and rebuilding.

For disaster-impacted residents of the valley—and many other parts of the state—the question of getting life and livelihoods “back on track” looms large among other unexplainable and trying realities. The demand for resettlement and rehabilitation—away from flood zones rendered unsafe—is now gaining public momentum in another year of disasters and has been acknowledged by the state government. But it’s the central government that needs to intervene, given the non-availability of revenue land in a state largely classified as forest and thus subject to the Forest Conservation Act, 1980.

While dam operations need strict monitoring with punitive actions as per the Dam Safety Act, further mega-infrastructure construction must halt. As the lines between short, medium, and long-term responses blur in these cycles of disaster, negligence and the absence of accountability in governance tend to recede into the background.

As those who profess to love the mountains, the least we can do is bear witness—remember these catastrophes and make them part of our collective consciousness, to guide our future actions and decisions as citizens.