The menace of four-lane highways in the mountains

On 5 July, the Himachal Pradesh forest department filed a complaint against the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI), holding it responsible for the massive landslides that occurred on 30 June along the Kaithlighat–Dhalli stretch in the suburbs of Shimla. This is possibly the first time the NHAI has been pulled up by the forest department of a state.

Filed by forest officer Ajeet Kumar after an on-site inquiry by the forest department and revenue officials, the complaint stated: ‘It is beyond doubt that the NHAI is fully responsible for the occurrence of the landslide which caused severe damage to the adjoining forest land due to the negligent and faulty execution of cutting work by the NHAI which is the main cause of [the] landslide and which could have been avoided if the four lane construction had been executed with due precautions and by taking proper safety measures at the NHAI’s end.’

The forest department also held the NHAI responsible for the collapse of a five-storey building in a Shimla suburb — attributing the incident to a landslide caused by flawed road construction methods.

A case against the NHAI has been registered under Sections 32 and 33 of the Indian Forest Act for offences related to protected areas and Section 324(5) of Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita.

This is the fourth such case filed in a week — two of which are by individual litigants — and probably the first instance of a government department demanding action against the NHAI.

In 2023, former mayor of the Shimla Municipal Corporation Tikender Panwar filed an FIR against the NHAI and G.R. Infraprojects, accusing them of criminal negligence. Cutting the hills vertically instead of in slopes between the Parwanoo–Solan stretch of the Kalka–Shimla highway led to ‘shooting stones and falling debris’ causing major traffic jams on the Chandigarh–Shimla expressway.

As a result of the FIR, the NHAI started “rock bolting the mountains in the Parwanoo–Solan stretch” says Panwar. However, in the rest of the state, “they continued vertical cutting”. The least that should have happened didn’t — namely, proactive and scientifically sound construction work by the concerned authorities.

A pattern of negligence repeated across thousands of kilometres of NHAI projects poses a grave threat to the mountain ecosystem. The Himalayan region is reeling from an escalating series of disasters, each worse than the ones before.

Panwar believes the time has come for the public across all Himalayan states to come forward and take unified action against the NHAI in order to highlight the extent of destruction.

Environmentalist Manshi Asher of the Himdhara Collective in Kangra, Himachal Pradesh, says landslides were once rare in the state but have surged over the last 12 years. “Ever since the NHAI started constructing the 197-km long Kiratpur–Kullu–Manali highway at a cost of Rs 18,000 crore, we have seen an exponential increase in landslides. Kullu was not a landslide-prone region — but parts of the new highway collapsed within days of its inauguration.”

The original Pathankot–Mandi highway, Asher pointed out, was a single road that followed the mountain’s natural curves. The new highway being built by the NHAI is linear, and triggered severe flooding. Eighty dead, 31 missing, over 150 homes and 106 cattle shelters destroyed, 14 bridges collapses and 31 vehicles swept away — these are the figures for the destruction in and around Mandi alone.

While scientists have repeatedly warned that hasty, unscientific road construction and dumping of waste in the rivers has contributed to the flood situation, senior NHAI officials have admitted that losses due to the floods have crossed Rs 500 crore.

Asher is acerbic when she calls the NHAI’s idea of building the highway along stretches of the Beas river a “brainwave”. What they haven’t accounted for is that the river keeps changing its course! As a result, large tracts of the road were washed away this monsoon. The muck dumped into the rivers from construction sites raises water levels and causes flooding. It is shocking, she says, that “a portion of the Kiratpur–Manali road was built on this muck!”

The situation is equally bad in Uttarakhand, where over 5,000 landslide-related deaths have occurred in the last 10 years, according to statistics collected by the State Disaster Response Force.

Yaspal Sundriyal, geologist and professor at Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna University, criticises the road-widening process, which he says is being done by workers and JCB operators. “I haven’t seen any engineers or officers on site, providing technical guidance. Wherever slopes are cut steeply, they remain unstable even after five years. The basic principle of ‘angle of repose’ must be followed to prevent further landslides,” he added.

So why haven’t the people of Uttarakhand filed FIRs against the NHAI like those similarly affected in Himachal? The bogey of national security, explains environmentalist Reena Paul.

“NHAI used national security as a pretext to secure Supreme Court clearance for four-laning the Char Dham Pariyojana,” Paul says. “Worse, the environment ministry bent its own rules to bypass mandatory Environmental Impact Assessments. The consequences are now visible: without impact assessments, environmental disasters are inevitable.”

According to locals, any complaint or FIR would have run up against the wall of “national security”.

And what does the NHAI have to say in its defence? Union minister for road transport and highways Nitin Gadkari seems to have blithely put all the blame on civil engineers. Addressing a two-day Global Road Infratech Summit & Expo

(GRIS) in Delhi, Gadkari said: “The most important culprits are civil engineers. I do not blame everybody, but after 10 years of my experience, I have come to this conclusion. [The] culprits are those who are making DPRs [detailed project reports]. Because of small civil engineering mistakes, there are hundreds of deaths.” Nobody, he went on to say, is ready to rectify mistakes.

The question we’d like to ask is this: as the minister in charge of the national highway projects that are wrecking our fragile Himalayas and causing significant loss of life, limb and lucre, why have Gadkari and his handpicked team of bureaucrats failed to scrutinise the DPRs before execution? Why hold the engineers accountable after the damage is done?