All weather road in upper reaches?
Chamoli is a warning sign and people need to be alert, particularly during the monsoon this year, says Dr Suneet Naithani, a geologist specializing in disaster management and remote sensing
Chamoli is a warning sign and people need to be alert, particularly during the monsoon this year, says Dr Suneet Naithani, a geologist specializing in disaster management and remote sensing, in a chat with Sanjukta Basu. He teaches at Doon University. Excerpts:
Would you call it a manmade disaster?
Trust the media to come up with premature conclusions. If the disaster hit Chamoli around10.30 am, it must have originated hours before somewhere in the upper reaches. There is not much habitation in the upper reaches so nobody saw it, or if they saw, they did not have any means to communicate. We have to investigate various factors before reaching a conclusion. But there is certainly need to have amore efficient monitoring in the upper reaches using drones and remote sensing.
Are you suggesting these measures are not in place?
The administration is expected to ensure regular monitoring using high resolution satellite images, drone images and analyse them with GIS. In inaccessible areas, even a team of 200 people cannot do what these technologies can achieve. Secondly, in the last inhabited areas like Dunagiri, Mana, Malari where development projects are going on, inhabitants need satellite phones since mobile networks don’t work
Is such monitoring happening?
I remember attending an event at Vigyan Bhavan on disaster management. Questions were asked from the government representative, probably the MHA Secretary, as to what kind of monitoring we are doing after the Kedarnath tragedy. He was asked if all villages have satellite phones, if all catchments have meteorological stations etc. But answers were evasive.
People of Raini village had escalated the risks to the level of the High Court…
All projects are weighed on both national interest and regional interest. Tehri Dam was not meant just for Uttarakhand. It is a project that supplies power to several states.
But yes, being a geologist and a resident of the Himalayas, I am puzzled with attempts to have all-weather roads and the ambitious Char Dham project. Is it possible to keep all weather roads open throughout the year? Even if they use unique materials for each climatic zone, I still do not understand how they would handle the Himalayan mountain’s repose angles and how would they control the landslides.
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