Choose slopes, not cliffs: Environmentalist on building structures in hills

Environmentalist Major General (Retd) Atul Kaushik said that no government can make everyone recoup after repeated disasters and it cannot be said that the re-built structures would not be washed away next year.

Shimla: In the wake of recurring disasters, particularly in hill areas, environmentalist Major General (Retd) Atul Kaushik has given a call for drawing hard lines on "no-build zones" in floodways along fast-flowing mountain streams and unstable slopes, and advised people and planners to choose the slope and not the cliff to survive a more fierce impact of climate change in the future.

"We built prosperity on a narrow metric -- Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at all costs and never-ending consumerism -- making lives perilously uncertain, especially in our mountains, where cloudbursts turn paths into torrents, slopes shear away without warning and rivers reclaim the floodplains," Kaushik said.

No government can make everyone recoup after repeated disasters and it cannot be said that the re-built structures would not be washed away next year, he was quoted as saying in a statement issued here on Tuesday.

Cautioning that "adapting to climate change will be expensive but not as expensive as doing nothing", he said adaptation now means tangible change, fitting infrastructure to mountains, honest warning systems and evacuations that arrive in time, managing forests, slopes and rivers as living systems and not as obstacles to be tamed.

"Build for the terrain we have, replace one-size-fits-all standards with mountain-specific design codes, deep-rooted slope stabilisation, debris-flow channels, permeable surfaces, stepped drainage and bridges anchored for scouring flows," Kaushik told PTI.

He stressed the need for a climate-stress test for every road, hospital, power line and water system, and pleaded for keeping funds and equipment ready for landslide clearance and building community shelters with backup power and clean water.

"Work with water and not against it, restore floodplains and riparian buffers instead of bottling rivers into concrete channels, re-forest headwaters and protect catchments, besides creating multi-stakeholder water committees to set and enforce quotas during scarcity," Kaushik added.

He called for real-time hazard mapping to ensure transparent post-disaster audits to halt unsafe projects and make town-planning bodies and real-estate regulators answerable to the public and equipped with teeth, penalties, firings and prosecutions, where negligence or corruption is detected.

Asserting that only avoidance and relocation can truly remove risk while other measures can buy time, leave residual danger and create costly legacy traps, he suggested reusing vacated land for buffers, parks, reforestation and water storage.

"We still have a choice and can turn this transition from a cliff into a survivable slope, build where the land will hold and restore the systems that protect us. And stop pretending that yesterday's map can guide us through tomorrow's storms," Kaushik concluded.