From locked-away watershed data to a refusal to conduct physical field visits, public custodians are converting predictable geological vulnerabilities into active man-made disasters
Bhushan Parimoo
The devastating summer monsoons of 2025 confirmed the worst fears that the Himalayas are in the midst of an existential crisis, driven by a dangerous combination of climate anomalies and aggressive human intervention that are causing a pronounced ecological and humanitarian crisis. The Himalayas are Asia’s critical ecological backbone, providing vital freshwater, agricultural sustenance, and climate regulation for nearly two billion people. Protecting this fragile “Water Tower of Asia” is an urgent necessity to prevent devastating glacial melt, extreme flooding, and severe downstream water shortages.
Regarded as a living, conscious, spiritual, and ecological entity rather than merely a “heap of stones,” the range is perceived as a soul-filled guardian—a fusion of the physical and the occult. It is a catastrophic error and misconception by proponents, planners, and developers to treat the Himalayas as a solid, permanent, and rigid rock structure. While they are massive, they are technically “young fold mountains” formed by the on-going collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates.
This collision makes the range geologically active, fragile, and unstable, contrary to the popular belief that they are a stable, solid entity. Himalaya means “abode of snow”. Called “Asia’s Water Reservoir” and the home of approximately 15,000 glaciers and mighty rivers, the region holds the world’s third-largest deposit of ice and snow on the planet, with only the Antarctic and Arctic holding more. Altogether, the Himalayas stretch across a total distance of approximately 2,400 to 2,500 kilometers from west to east. The broader Hindu Kush-Himalayan (HKH) mountain system spans across eight nations (India, Nepal, Bhutan, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar), housing approximately 241 million people. The cattle and livestock population numbers in the tens of millions, playing a crucial role in local agricultural economies.
The Indian and Eurasian continental plates collided here nearly 55 million years ago. The Hindu Kush, Karakoram, and Himalayan mountain ranges converge near the town of Jaglot in the Gilgit-Baltistan region. This incredible tectonic junction bears tremendous pressure that forces the Earth’s crust to buckle, continuously raising the towering peaks. The Indian plate is still pushing north into the Eurasian landmass at about five centimeters a year, causing the mountains to rise about seven millimeters annually. From the Tibetan plateau down to the Indian plains, the mountains divide into four distinct parallel physiographic zones:
1. Trans-Himalayas (including the Zaskar and Ladakh ranges).
2. Greater Himalayas (Himadri).
3. Lesser Himalayas (Himachal Range).
4. Shiwaliks (Outer Himalayas).
Treating the young, tectonically active Himalayas as indestructible is a catastrophic mistake. The mountain core is composed of highly faulted sedimentary, metamorphic, and weathered rocks rather than solid bedrock. Aggressive, unchecked infrastructure development de-stabilizes these fragile slopes, leading to severe disasters like landslides and flash floods. Catastrophic monsoon seasons, such as the historic 2023 and 2025 deluges, triggered widespread devastation across the Himalayas. These extreme weather events—driven by repeated cloudbursts and flash floods—claimed hundreds of lives, displaced thousands of residents, and crippled critical infrastructure and agricultural lands throughout Himachal Pradesh and surrounding regions.
These extreme weather events claimed over 300 lives in Himachal Pradesh, displaced over a million people, and inundated more than 25,000 acres of agricultural land. This perspective captures the structural and systemic failures driving Himalayan disasters. By casually labelling all extreme events as “cloudbursts,” authorities oversimplify complex environmental issues and shift the blame to natural variability. This lets unsustainable, man-made interventions continue unchecked. The cardinal error that public custodians have erroneously adopted all along is treating the geologically fragile Himalayas as an indestructible rock mass. Much of the mountain core consists of faulted sedimentary, metamorphic, and weathered rock rather than solid bedrock, making it highly susceptible to erosion and destabilization during heavy construction. Because the range is young, highly active, and constantly shifting, aggressive infrastructure development can trigger severe, cascading ecological disasters like massive landslides, river blockages, and flash floods.
The mighty Himalayas, Karakoram, and Hindu Kush mountain ranges converge at Jaglot in Gilgit-Baltistan. Distinct from this triple junction, the true Pamir Knot sits further northwest as a massive mountain hub where the Himalayas, Karakoram, Hindu Kush, Kunlun, and Tian Shan ranges converge. This entire overarching tectonic framework acts as a massive buffer zone where the colliding Indian and Eurasian plates translate immense pressure, causing continuous seismic disturbances. This collision constantly exerts immense geological pressure as the Indian tectonic plate drives northward into the Eurasian plate. Consequently, the Himalaya and surrounding Tibetan Plateau are called the “Third Pole” because they contain the largest storehouse of frozen water and ice on Earth outside the Arctic and Antarctic. The Himalayas are not merely a geographical barrier; they are a vital lifeline regulating the climate, sustaining agriculture, and providing freshwater for over two billion people. Protecting this fragile ecosystem is an urgent environmental necessity to prevent catastrophic consequences like extreme flooding, glacial retreat, and biodiversity loss.
As regards Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh, these frontier territories are the worst hit, facing a severe ecological crisis where approximately 80% of their geographical area suffers from varying degrees of soil erosion. Over-exploitation and reckless deforestation have triggered rapid topsoil loss, stripping the land of essential nutrients, silting up crucial water reservoirs, and causing a massive environmental imbalance. Detailed context regarding this ecological and geographical data reveals that: (a) fields and pastures lose over 50 tonnes of topsoil per hectare annually; (b) nearly 20% of the affected area has been reduced to wasteland; (c) stripped green cover accelerates runoff into reservoirs; and (d) only 10% of degraded forests are treated for restoration, compounding the issue.
As an Earth Sciences student, watching authorities ignore the Himalayas’ ecological fragility—due to short-term economic gains and political interests—is deeply frustrating. The region’s young, tectonic instability and rapid glacier retreat require extreme caution, yet these warnings are repeatedly bypassed for rapid commercial and strategic development. Operating in departmental silos is an endemic challenge in the Himalayan region, where fragmented approaches to tourism, forestry, and road construction directly undermine ecological resilience. Without a cohesive, multi-sectoral strategy, infrastructure projects often trigger severe, compounding disasters such as accelerated soil erosion, landslides, and habitat degradation. It is quite intriguing that the Department of Soil Conservation and Water, Jammu and Kashmir, has, as per the guidelines of the All India Soil and Land Use Survey Organization (Govt of India), delineated and codified Watershed data to its minutest details. The catchments of the Indus basin, on this side of the border—including the Sindh, Sindh (Ladakh), Krishna Ganga, Chenab, Jhelum, and Ravi basins—were mapped and assessed right down from catchment, sub-catchment, and watershed to micro-watershed and mini-micro-watershed levels. Tragically, this vital data has barely seen the light of day outside of an iron almirah (cabinet); most personnel, even within the department itself, remain completely unaware of its existence.
Meanwhile, the Himalayan deterioration is happening day by day, a status before everyone to see. Warnings about this crisis started as early as 1952 by Mirabehn. Decades before modern environmentalism took root, Madeleine Slade (known as Mirabehn), a visionary disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, noticed the mindless fiddling with the Himalayas and launched an awareness campaign. She warned the nation through her writings in her 1952 essay, captioned “Something Wrong in the Himalaya.” There, she correctly pinpointed how replacing indigenous broad-leaved, moisture-retaining oak forests with commercial pine monocultures ruined the local ecosystem, exacerbating severe soil erosion, massive siltation, and catastrophic downstream flooding across the Gangetic plains. Her concerns were brushed aside by administrators, despite her bold warnings that stripping the “water towers” of their native canopy deprived local peasantry of essential fodder and fuel. Decades later, this very ecological insight sparked the historic Chipko Movement of the 1970s and 1980s. This legendary nonviolent resistance, led by prominent Gandhians like Sunderlal Bahuguna and Chandi Prasad Bhatt, successfully mobilized grassroots activists and rural women who physically embraced trees to halt destructive timber felling, validating the prescient environmental alarms first raised by Mirabehn.
Subsequent assessments, such as the 1987 observations by IFS officer R.K. Mattoo, continued to highlight the dangers of rapid ecological degradation. Mattoo’s warnings were highly prophetic; he foretold that without immediate afforestation and earnest public efforts to restore the existing green cover, the entire Himalayan region would face extreme topsoil depletion, turning it into an ecological “mud bowl.” Today, this vision of a mud bowl has materialized as a pressing local reality, made worse by explosive infrastructure blasting, unchecked urbanization, and rampant deforestation.
The Supreme Court of India officially declared that the entire Himalayan range is facing an ecological and existential crisis. The court noted that unregulated mass tourism, aggressive hydropower projects, and unchecked deforestation have turned recurring natural hazards into man-made disasters. Thereafter, since 2012, this writer—who heads the Environment Awareness Forum (EAF), an NGO—has mobilized volunteers to spearhead the “Save Himalaya, Save Subcontinent” campaign. We launched a massive public advocacy drive across Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh, writing analytical articles and leading a mass-contact social movement to impress upon society the existential necessity of environmental conservation. Unfortunately, the operational response from administrative authorities has been consistently uncooperative and dismissive.
While this writer and close associates kept regular tabs on virtually every stream of news pouring in, we systematically gathered and analyzed empirical parameters to assess the true quantum of ecological and human damage. Keeping in view nearly ninety years of documented mountain behavior—and banking on well-preserved regional historical memories—we factored every dimension into consideration. Our definitive findings indicate a systemic act of Ecocide perpetrated directly by the public custodians officially mandated to protect this range. It requires urgent emphasis that, to date, deep inquiries reveal that the responsible departments have failed to consolidate comprehensive damage data or execute physical field visits to evaluate ground realities. When confronted, these agencies rely blindly on remote computer imagery, remaining utterly detached from actual physical ground conditions. This writer stands fully prepared to defend this indictment against any official challenge.
- (The author is a Jammu based Environmentalist)
