The Beautiful and the Damned

There is a pattern of natural disasters in the Himalayas, which leaves the local population caught in a cycle of construction and destruction

- Annanya Mahajan

KUNALCHAND is not harvesting the ready crop of cauliflower this year. “My potato and pea crop was completely destroyed. Gobi (cauliflower) survived but it will all be thrown away. The loss is 80,000 rupees’’ he says. Kunalchand is a resident of Shoja, a village near Kullu valley. Roads on both sides of the village were washed away in the recent floods, cutting the village off from the local mandi (wholesale market). He was still lucky because his land did not get damaged. Panki Sood, another Kullu resident, was not as fortunate. He owns a piece of land close to the Beas River. During the flood, the Beas changed its course, and the land is now the path of the river. 

Most politicians throw up their hands and blame these disasters on climate change. They aren’t wrong; the climate is definitely changing. An 84-year-old man in Kullu claims that he has never seen such concentrated rain and hail in his lifetime.

“The unseasonal hailstorms in May wiped out most of the apple crop in the region this year. This is peak apple season and there are no apples.” says Shantanu Kulesh, who runs a hostel in an apple orchard in Shoja. The