Herald View: Tunnel vision is taking its toll

Is the Modi’s government’s pet Char Dham Pariyojana about devotion, development or defence? It’s hard to tell if you were to simply go by the government’s shifting narrative—it has, at different points in time, sought to justify the project on all these grounds.

But whichever way they spin it, the CDP is at its heart a political, Hindutva project with some economic spinoffs. For devout Hindus, the pilgrim centres of Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri and Yamunotri are laden with religious significance—many think of this pilgrimage as a sort of afterlife insurance.

For a government committed to a Hindu Rashtra, this sentiment is political capital, which it deploys for political returns. At any cost, whether you measure the cost in rupees or lives.

In 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced, with characteristic hyperbolic flair, that the state of Uttarakhand would see more tourists over the next decade than it had in the past hundred years. To give shape to this grand design, the Char Dham circuit is to be connected via 900-odd kilometres of four-lane highways.

The outlay on these 10- to 12-metre-wide monstrosities is Rs 12,000 crore, not counting overruns nor the cost of the ecological devastation the project will surely continue to wreak. But who expects anything less grand from our current prime minister? The announcement triggered a mad scramble for land and a hotel construction spree. 

When the project was challenged in the Supreme Court in 2018, the government initially argued that these highways would make travel faster and easier for pilgrims and tourists alike. It was reminded at the time that its own regulations, notified in 2018, prohibited construction of roads more than 5.5 metres wide in hilly terrain.

The Supreme Court set up a committee to evaluate the project—it had five independent members and 15 government officials. The independent members pointed out that the project would be ecologically suicidal, but their objections were brushed aside by the government officials on the panel.

If that wasn’t bad enough already, in 2020, the government modified rules to allow construction of roads up to 12 metres wide in the hills. When the Supreme Court, upon examining the report of the independent members of the committee, ordered that roads wider than 5.5 metres could not be allowed in the mountains, the government challenged the ruling and demanded a review.

It now produced an affidavit from the defence ministry arguing that wider roads were necessary for military movement and ‘national security’. The petitioners and experts argued that the Indian army had been using existing roads for the past 70 years, and also that flying military equipment and artillery to the border would be easier and faster in this day and age.

But the Court knew better than to get in the way when the bogey of ‘national security’ had been invoked. It went by the defence ministry affidavit and Attorney General K.K. Venugopal’s submission that crucial defence equipment such as the BrahMos or Vajra missile launchers and Smerch rocket carriers needed greater manoeuvring room on the highways leading to the border.

Similar arguments were advanced to extend the railway network and build bridges and excavate tunnels. To speed up construction, the CDP was split into smaller projects in order to dodge the mandatory environmental evaluation of road construction beyond 100 kilometres.

The Silkyara–Barkot tunnel that collapsed on November 12, putting at risk the lives of the workers trapped there, is a part of the CDP.

While there is reason to hope that the workers might finally be rescued, there is no sign that even this accident—not the first and likely not the last—will make the government step back and see that it’s not just wreaking havoc in the Himalayas but also playing with the lives of the same people whose votes it counts on to stay on in power.

Presumably to play down the accident as a one-off mishap, our gung-ho road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari, who visited the accident site on 19 November, said multiple tunnels were being excavated in the Himalayas for rail and road projects at a cost of, hold your breath, Rs 2.75 lakh crores! Why does it sound like a death warrant?