Tuesday 22 March 2011

Building Roads .....and destroying Mountains?

We are shocked to see how the Himalayan Range is being impacted by the road improvement going on.

Early this month, we had gone to Gangtok. While the trip was otherwise excellent, we also had the opportunity of driving to Tsomgo (Changu) Lake and observed that the road was being repaired / widened. Appeared to be a good thing but on our return we were stunned to see the destruction this was causing. While widening the roads, the resultant boulders and large stones had to be removed – the easy way adopted was merely to drop them along the side of the mountains causing rivulets of forest destruction along their paths. Several such areas could be seen, a photograph of the largest one we saw is enclosed. The wide scale destruction caused can be easily seen in this photograph; there were several other “streams of destruction. I wonder who is overseeing this.


Impact of road widening - Enroute to Tsomgo (Changu) Lake
 
The movement of debris appeared to have led to severe environmental degradation with huge risks for landslides. Greater efforts towards environment protection appear essential.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is a worrying and increasingly escalating ecological problem. Awareness I suppose is the key step. Maybe, with the right kind of movement, this problem can go the route of the defacing of mountains and its stoppage.

vibha said...

it's a lack in our national character. no foresight, no consideration for anything but one's own interest, at all levels. the contractor, the concerned departments are all interested only in what they can make from these contracts. they don't care what damage they do to the environment, or to the future of our country, or what we leave/don't leave for our next generations.

varsha said...

absolutely resonates -and it is happening all over the country -
great ancient trees,virgin forests being mindlessly destroyed;
http://poeticbreak.blogspot.com/2011/01/blog-post_23.html