Special Report: How Uttarakhand Dug Its Own Grave?

By M H Ahssan / Hyderabad

On the afternoon of 16 June, local resident Manav Bisht watched dozens of constables leaving the paramilitary Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) Academy, which stood between his house in Shakti Vihar, a locality in Uttarakhand’s Srinagar town, and the Alaknanda river that had started swelling from 10 am. The waters threatened to enter the academy building after 5 pm and more jawans were shifted to Pauri, the district headquarters.

SSB IG S Bandhopadhyay was aware of the torrential rainfall up in the hills. There was also the flood warning issued by the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD). As night fell, the Alaknanda breached the meagre embankment and ravaged the academy building. Sometime after midnight, after drowning the 500-metre stretch of the SSB campus, the torrent rose above the 10-feet-high boundary wall on the other side and entered Shakti Vihar.
Bandhopadhyay’s timely action saved many lives. But busy evacuating his men, he did not inform the district administration. “I didn’t need to tell anyone. They could see what was happening. Everyone had information about the heavy rainfall,” says Bandhopadhyay. But nobody thought it necessary to warn the residents of Srinagar.

So, Bisht, much like his neighbours, was caught unawares when the river entered his house around 1.30 am. Suddenly, there was panic everywhere. Within an hour or so, the entire neighbourhood had gone under the roiling waters. Few managed to get hold of any valuables. Bisht’s family barely managed to escape in the clothes they were sleeping in.

About 100 km away, further up in the hills, another river was also in spate. While the Alaknanda was engulfing parts of Srinagar, the Mandakini began battering the temple town of Kedarnath in the early hours of 17 June. Soon after pilgrims and residents of the pilgrimage centre woke up to sights of devastation, a massive landslide sent huge mounds of rock into the Charbari lake, 6 km upstream of Kedarnath.

Binod Mantri, a pilgrim from West Bengal’s Hooghly, was uneasy since 16 June. With no let-up in the rain, worried locals advised him to shift closer to the Kedarnath temple from his hotel by the river. So he checked into the Rajasthan guesthouse with 16 family members and stayed indoors as landslides, rain and howling wind battered the town. Next morning, the family was preparing to venture out for a quick breakfast when the torrent entered the room. Mantri and his brother-in-law survived by clinging on to the window grill. Everyone else in the family, all 14 of them, climbed onto beds and were swept away within minutes.

“The landslide caused a giant splash like a brick dropped in a bucket of water,” recalls one of the four Indian Army jawans posted at Kedarnath. The mass of rock smashed against the sand and boulders, giving the river momentum to sweep up more rocks on its way to become the destructive force that wiped clean everything in its path. By nine in the morning, Kedarnath had become a ghost town. Rambara, a settlement downstream, simply disappeared.

By 18 June, the magnitude of the disaster became clear. Across 37,000 sq km of the Himalayan state, landslide and floods trapped more than 80,000 tourists, triggering one of the biggest rescue operations by the armed forces and the biggest by helicopters so far. The race against time took its toll even on those who toiled round the clock to save lives. On 20 June, 

Rudraprayag District Magistrate Vijay Dhaundiyal suffered a heart attack. At least 20 rescue personnel perished, adding to the official death toll of 5,000, which, locals and eyewitnesses claim, will be in the range of 10-20,000 if those who have gone missing are also accounted for.