Policymakers play ostrich as Joshimath sinks

Why were nine technical reports prepared by India’s leading scientific institutions on crisis-hit Joshimath kept under wraps, in some cases for two years, in others, for a good eight months after they had been submitted to the central government?

Why did the Uttarakhand State Disaster Management Authority need an order from the Nainital High Court to place in the public domain reports dealing with the well-being of thousands of citizens?

These questions demand our attention, even though none of these reports contains any startling new information.

The Hyderabad-based National Geophysical Research Institute, a research laboratory of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, pointed out that parts of Joshimath town had sunk 3-6 feet in one year, and that ‘steep air-filled fissures had developed extensively with the depth of many of them exceeding 100 feet’.

It went on to warn that these fissures ‘on barren and agricultural land were at places as deep as 115 feet and became shallower and tangential at 60-65 feet towards the lower reaches of the town.’

The report on ‘Safety Assessment of Buildings in Joshimath’ by the Central Building Research Institute (CBRI) affirmed that the primary cause of cracks in the houses was ‘excessive vibrations in the ground’ because of increased traffic flow. The CBRI studied 2,364 buildings, of which only 37 per cent were ‘fit for use’, it found.

The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has prepared a 150-page summary of these findings, which have been submitted to the central government in which it noted that Joshimath was sinking at the rate of 12 centimetres per year.

This critical situation was further accentuated by unbridled construction and lack of sewage treatment in the city. The NDMA has made several key recommendations including a complete ban on all construction as also the immediate need to install proper sewage treatment plants in the city.

But there is nothing new in this assessment, nor in the one made by other scientific institutions. Scientist Dr Ravi Chopra of the People’s Science Institute asks, “What is the new research they (scientific institutions) have done? They have not identified any new source for the problem except to state that water was seeping because of cracks in houses constructed on the spring line.’

He did add, however, that his comments were based on newspaper reports and that he needed more time to make a thorough study of these findings.

Geologist Dr S.A. Sati dismissed the assessment as being “old wine in a new bottle. They have not said anything that we have not been saying for the last five years.”

Two reports by the National Institute of Hydrology, Roorkee and the Geological Survey of India (GSI) are extremely ominous because both give a clean chit to the NTPC (National Thermal Power Corporation) Vishnugad–Tapovan hydro project, which features a 15 km long underground tunnel, the construction of which is seen by scientists and residents alike as the root cause of the problem.

NTPC engineers had described this hydro project as being a mere run-of-the-river project. What was not disclosed is that it involved the construction of this 15 km long tunnel, 900 metres below the surface, as also the construction of a 22 metre high dam with a desilting chamber, power house, and the dumping of over 3.1 million cubic metres of muck in the hill town.

Part of this tunnel was being dug by multinational companies using a Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM). Unfortunately, the TBM got trapped in the tunnel not once, but thrice—the first time on 9 December 2009, and then again in February and September 2012. After twelve years of the TBM remaining lodged in the tunnel, the multinational companies withdrew from the project.

In the course of the first accident, which occurred near Selang, a village located 5 km before Joshimath, the TBM punctured an aquifer located in a fault zone, which caused a massive discharge of high-pressure subsurface water at an estimated rate of around 700 litres per second—enough to sustain a population of 20–30 lakh people per day.

Following this accident, the springs in Joshimath and other surrounding villages began to dry up and water shortage has become the norm since then.

Residents insist the problem of subsidence started ever since the aquifer was punctured. A thorough analysis of these three accidents was done by three international scientists, namely Bernard Miller, Giorgio Hofer-Ollinger and Johann Brandt.

They published their findings in Engineering Geology for Society and Territory, in which they emphasised how this unscientific drilling had created new fractures in rocks that allowed for high-pressure subsurface water to gush out.

Several Indian geologists and scientists have also raised questions about its impact on the city of Joshimath, to which the NTPC has not responded, maintaining from the beginning that since the tunnel is located some distance from Joshimath, no blame can be put at the door of the NTPC project.

Scientists led by Ravi Chopra countered this claim by pointing out that the tunnel is “located a mere 1.1 km away from Joshimath if the tunnel is seen horizontally”.

It is, therefore, a great surprise to learn that both the National Institute of Hydrology, Roorkee and the GSI have given a clean chit to the NTPC, especially because the former institute had stated there was a clear link between subsidence in Joshimath and the subsurface water in the form of numerous springs in the western part of the city.

Atul Sati, spearheading the Joshimath Bachao Sangharsh Samiti (JBSS) also expressed concern at the clean chit. “The root of the problem is the construction of the NTPC’s Vishnugad–Tapovan hydro project. Back in 2005, when it was started, the GSI itself had questioned its efficacy.

A reference to its critical findings was made in a report prepared in 2010 by two scientists including Dr A.P.S. Bisht; but the critical findings of the GSI seem to have disappeared from the public domain and official records,” he said.

Sati also questioned why scientists from these nine technical institutes were not allowed to go public with their findings prepared almost eight months ago.

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What gives an even more alarming dimension to this whole debate is that the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology indicated that cracks may increase further in Joshimath as it falls within a high seismic zone. The Wadia Institute found that between 13 January and 12 April 2023, their seismic network recorded 16 micro-earthquakes of maximum magnitude 1.5 within a 50 km radius around Joshimath.

‘The present and past seismic activity has a similar trend of increasing seismicity to the south and south-west mainly concentrated around the epicentre of the Chamoli earthquake,’ it noted. In 1999, Chamoli witnessed a devastating earthquake, which left over a hundred dead and destroyed thousands of homes.

Dr Ranjit Kumar Sinha, head of the Uttarakhand State Disaster Management Authority, and one of the key figures behind this report, after going underground for all these months, has surfaced to say that they are preparing a DPR (Detailed Project Report) on the basis of these reports titled ‘Post Disaster Needs Assessment’.

The implementation of this DPR will require an estimated Rs 1,800 crore, of which the central government has agreed to provide Rs 1,465 crore. This money will be used to rehabilitate people in Joshimath and repair homes that can be saved.

What defies understanding is why the government has been sitting on these reports for all these months. Senior state bureaucrats have known about the problem of subsidence for almost two years now. Why was a DPR for the city not prepared then?

What’s more, subsidence has now affected all the neighbouring villages of Joshimath. Does the government have any rehabilitation scheme for these hapless villagers or are they going to be abandoned to some uncertain fate?