http://why.travel/asia/rape-of-the-hills/
Rape of the Hills
This summer, don’t go to Manali!
Not the virginal land anymore
When a young friend from IIT Mandi asked casually if I could be a guest speaker at EXODIA 13, their annual fest, I was hesitant. “We could also add in a book-reading and author-signing of your book The Sergeant’s Son,” he suggested. That clinched the deal. There was another reason for agreeing; my weakness for the hills. “Okay, I’ll drive down,’ I told my bewildered host. The decision to drive was something I would deeply regret later. In fact, by the time I reached Mandi every bone in my body had been rattled, every muscle stressed, every nerve frayed.
The horror called NH-21 began immediately on climbing the hills after Ropar. There were craters and manholes on the road, and the lumbering trucks were dangerously lurching from side to side. Moving ahead, the roads were even worse as trucks and lorries dodged the craters raising smokescreens of dust as they raced with each other. I rolled up the windows to keep out the blinding dust raised by the trucks.
This was a national highway? Was this the road to Manali, one of India’s most popular hill destinations? It was as if the road had been carpet bombed for miles and miles together. When the going got a little better, I stopped alongside a tea shop and shouted, “How long is this road like this?” The fellow said philosophically, “The worst is over…it will get better soon.” But soon the ‘bombed out’ stretches began again. By the time I was at Swarghat, it was pure hell. Ironically, Swarghat means ‘valley of heaven’. By now, my mind was made up, I would park my car in some village along the way and do the rest of the journey on a bus.
Soon a two-shop village appears and I halt at a teashop. The village is called PanchPiri, Nikku Ram Sharma tells me as he stirs pakoris in the oil. He keeps dusting his shop all the time. But it’s useless. Everything, even his face, has a coating of dust. I quiz him on the problem as each passing vehicle keeps adding on dust. “Hum to barbad ho gaye! (We’re devastated)” he says throwing up his hands in helplessness. And why have things come to such a sad pass? He says it is because of these cement factories. “Adani, ACC, Jaypee…they have all set up plants here…You see these heavy trucks? They are all headed to these factories,” he says.
Trucks ply all day and there is no respite at night when their numbers actually increase making the craters more accident-prone. Life for people like Nikku Ram has become hellish as shops and homes alongside the NH-21 are blanketed by dust. There’s another economic boom the cement factories and trucks have spawned along the road to Manali. It is the puncture repair shops. The entire road, particularly the bad stretches, is punctuated with these shops. As further testimony, one could see trucks and other vehicles stranded in the middle of the road with flat tires and broken axles. In some places the trucks had keeled over.
Seemingly benign – the ACC plant
While the ACCs, the Adanis and JPs may want us to believe they have brought development to the hills, the locals look on helplessly as their environment gets choked with each passing day. “What can we do?” is a sigh of despair not Nikku Ram’s alone. The havoc that the cement factories and trucks have played with the roads should be seen in the stark contrast to the view I get from the backyard of Nikku Ram’s shop. From behind his shop one witnesses the breathtaking view of snow-clad mountains in the horizon. Below, in the wooded valleys are sheets of clouds stuck in the hills. This heavenly sight, perhaps, gives Swarghat its name. But on the road in front, it is a different reality.
Why in the name of development have we allowed our hills to be raped?
Ravished beauty – the hill in Kandour
On my return from Mandi, between Sundar Nagar and Bilaspur, I stop at a tea shop in Sallaper village. From here, through the lush greenery, you can see the giant ACC cement plant looking gentle and harmless. I ask Devendar Sharma, 45, a resident of Sundar Nagar, if children or adults in the area have respiratory and lung problems. He is unaware. “But till about a five km range around the factory there is a layer of fine cement dust on the leaves of plants and trees. Surely it must be affecting our lungs as well,” he says. This assertion, and the road condition I have seen,forces me to take a different return route to Chandigarh.
On this road, via Una, I come across entire stretches of hills whose bowels and innards have been ripped open revealing just barren stone and rocks. “This is the raw material for the cement factories,” says Dinesh Chauhan a local from the area. “The factories have taken these hills on lease,” he informs pointing to a ravaged hill at Dehlag in Kandour of Bilaspur district. There are many such outraged hills that are changing the face of Himachal into an ugly one. The development paradigm in the fragile ecology of the hills has to be different.The state chief minister and the prime minister need to understand clearly. India Inc. also needs to understand this: we cannot allow the rape of our hills in the name of development.
If the rape of one woman had galvanized the nation, when are we going to going to awaken to the rape and pillage of our hills? Soon might be too late!
Ashim Choudhury is a writer, painter, journalist, cartoonist, cook and gardener (in that order) and 'Hitler' as his children fondly call him. He worked for the UN for a few years, after which he decided to pursue his passions, that is, writing and sketching. He is the author of The Sergeant’s Son (pub. Rupa Publications). Read what else he has to say atashimch13.blogspot.in
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