(CNN) -- As the source of the Ganges River, the site
of Hinduism's famous Char Dham pilgrimage and home to Rishikesh, the
meditation retreat made famous by The Beatles, the India's northern
Uttarakhand state justifies its title of "Land of the Gods."
But environmentalists are warning that rampant development in the Himalayan state is tempting fate.
With roads built on an ad
hoc basis, new hotel developments built on river banks and hydro dams
proposed in the region's steep valleys, environmentalists say the floods
and mudslides that have claimed more than 1,000 lives in the past week
were an ecological catastrophe waiting to happen.
"You've heard of
homicide, well this is ecocide," Devinder Sharma of the Forum for
Biotechnology and Food Security told CNN. "The hills have been shorn of
the forest cover, there's extensive mining taking place in this region
and on top of that the roads that are being constructed are haphazard.
"And the hydro projects
coming are phenomenal -- 70 hydro projects back to back. Obviously there
are tunnels being built, hills being blasted and everything goes
topsy-turvy.
"We are playing with nature but at the same time blaming nature."
He said while a massive
national road-building program had been well received by India's state
governments, routes had been planned through increasingly remote areas
without adequate drainage, exacerbating the problems of coping with
massive run-off from the region's monsoon rains.
A real estate boom in the region has also resulted in new developments going ahead without adequate planning permission.
"It's a classical model
of disaster," he said. "If you want to see globally what can happen in
regions like the Alps or the Rocky Mountains or elsewhere you only have
to take a look at Uttarakhand."
Souparno Banerjee of the Indian advocacy group the Center for Science and Environment
said that despite state government denials, most experts were of the
view that unregulated development and unregulated tourism is responsible
for the scale of the disaster.
"Development is
important but we need to keep in mind the very delicate eco-system that
you're working within," he said. "The Himalayas are the biggest mountain
range in the world but they are also extremely fragile.
"You need to keep that in mind when putting disaster management plans in place."
He said his organization
recommended a certain amount of flow necessary to keep rivers in the
region at a safe level, but that dam projects and river diversions for
roads had backed up with flood waters from torrential rains.
"The drainage in many areas is half-baked," he told CNN.
Uttarakhand's chief minister Vijay Bahuguna told the Times of India newspaper that the floods had set back the state by at least three years in terms of development.
"My people are going to
suffer because tourism is going to be affected. We have to put the
infrastructure back on the rails. I have written to the prime minister
that preliminary reports suggest there is loss of Rs 3,000 crore (US$500
million). This tragedy has broken our economy," he said.
He said that a balance
needed to be struck between the environment and development, adding that
he did not want migration away from Uttarakhand.
"Seventy percent of my
state is forest cover. (If) I am preserving my forests for the nation
then why don't you give me compensation? Let the country compensate us."
He denied that the disaster was man-made and a result of the indiscriminate construction of hotels and houses.
"This is a very childish
argument -- that cloudbursts, earthquakes and tsunamis are caused by
human factors. In the history of hundreds of years of Kedarnath (a
region of the state), no such incident has taken place. In a Himalayan
state, this catastrophe has come about in 37,000 square miles of area.
This cloudburst, 330 millimetres of rain, cannot be anticipated."
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