THEY HAD US FOOLED

“We sold our land to the Rishiganga hydropower plant because we needed money. But it turns out that we paid for the dam with my sister’s life. The Chamoli flash flood just wiped out everything that came in its way”

- ASHA DEVI RANA

THE RESIDENTS of Uttarakhand’s Raini village are seething with anger. “We kept warning the government about the damage being caused to our houses and our fragile region by the Rishiganga dam, but no one paid heed to us. Now, see what has happened,” says Asha Devi Rana. The sexagenarian was referring to the flash floods in the upper reaches of the Himalayas that battered Chamoli district on February 7.

“At about 10:00 in the morning that day, a deafening roar came out of nowhere,” recalls her 32-year-old niece Godavari Devi. Nestled on both sides of a deep gorge in the Himalayas, with three footbridges connecting the settlements, her village overlooks the Rishiganga hydroelectric power project. At a distance, Nanda Devi, the second-highest mountain in India after Kangchenjunga, stands tall. “It was the loudest and most ferocious noise I have heard in my life, as if hundreds of aeroplanes were flying together in the valley. Within seconds, there were gusts of extremely strong winds. The valley, which was glistening in the morning sun till then, got filled with fog. Then a massive wall of water emerged from the riverbend and gushed towards us,” she says.

That wall of water was the Rishiganga river in spate. A glacier had broken off along with its bedrock at around 5,600 m above the sea level from the Ronti mountain peak, causing flood and landslide (see ‘Snowball effect’ on p24), first in the Rishiganga and then in the Dhauliganga (of which the Rishiganga is a tributary). The deluge wiped out the Rishiganga hydropower plant and choked the Tapovan-Vishnugad hydropower project on the Dhauliganga, killing nearly 70 people; 204 were still missing, as per multiple firs filed at the Joshimath police station between February 7 and 21.