Pune Landslide: A Result of Ecological Insensitivity?

D. Raghunandan of the Delhi Science Forum talks to Newsclick about the Pune Landslide of 30th July. He argues that besides natural causes, various “developmental activities” also contribute heavily to the scale of natural disasters, especially in hilly areas. In Pune’s case, these factors were deforestation, use of heavy machinery for leveling, and ignoring the natural course of water drainage while quarrying. While advocating the need for regulations for “developmental work” on the one hand, he also questions whether there can be any development at the cost of ecological insensitivity.

Transcript:

Rishab Bailey (RB): Hello and welcome to Newsclick. Just a few days ago on July 30th, a small village called Malin in the Pune District of Maharashtra, was wiped away in a landslide. Between 80 to a 100 villagers are reported dead and about a hundred & thirty(130) are still feared missing. To discuss this tragedy, the reasons behind it and what we can learn from this, we have with us D. Raghunandan from the Delhi Science Forum.

Hi, Raghu and thanks for joining us today. Now to start with, experts appear to be divided over whether this was a freak phenomenon caused by the weather and the geographic conditions or whether it's a result of deforestation and levelling work which is being carried out to increase road works and for various other projects in the sensitive Sahyadri hills. What do you think actually caused this incident?

D. Raghunandan (DR): When firstly the rainfall, this year in that region, has not been anomalous. it's followed the usual pattern where in this part of the western ghats, you do get heavy rainfall during the monsoon period and this time you've had rainfall somewhere around 170 centimeters or so ,which is high but not particularly unusual for this time of year during the monsoons and in that region. So it's not anomalous rainfall. Clearly, landslips occur as a result of very heavy or prolonged rainfall which will then loosen the soil and cause it to slip. But there are huge contributory factors which in this case are precisely what you said huge extent of deforestation, of land levelling and methods used for land levelling have also been such which have contributed further to these landslides.

R.B: It's been reported that this area has seen smaller landslides in the past, no action has been taken and this is despite a notification of the Ministry of Environment and Forest saying that this is an ecologically sensitive area and that quarrying and flattening of hilltops should be avoided. So surely the government could have done more to enforce its own notifications or regulations.

D.R: Well, you know Rishab frankly these notifications are I think ignored more than they are observed. And we all know that Madhav Gadgil's report on the western ghats was given short shrift by the government who appointed the Kasturirangan Committee to dilute the Madhav Gadgil report's recommendations and even the Kasturirangan Committee's recommendations have been further diluted under pressure from different state governments and local lobbies and so on. The fact is, that there are all sorts of developmental activities, so called, particularly real estate development, accommodation, residential development, commercial development taking place in hill areas throughout the country. We've all seen what happened in Uttarakhand last year and to which the contribution of so called developmental activities was very large in contributing to the scale and nature of the disaster so it's the same thing here. But to me apart from the broad question of what kind of developmental activities take place and how much they contribute to this. Very clearly these are ecologically sensitive areas and therefore any form of construction, or physical intervention should be done with care and not only with care but with precautions regarding the kinds of interventions you do and how they are done.

R.B: Also I presume the side issue of who this development is actually helping, is it actually helping any of the locals, are these residential projects as you mentioned, are they there for the locals or are they meant for people from outside the area?

D. R: See, if you take this particular case, the activities taking place due to which the hill sides were being cut, was supposedly to benefit the local population who are mostly tribal people and the idea behind the state government scheme was to level the hill slopes, to prepare flat agricultural lands, which would then be given to the tribal populations. So, in a sense it is of course meant to be to the benefit of the tribals. The question is, do you level the hills, if so how do you do it, where do you do it, have you taken precautions against land slips and other such things which you know is going to happen and the extent of deforestation. Official figures show that in this region, there have been more than 38,000 trees cut, these are official figures, unofficially and many local NGOs and other community organizations say, more than 300,000 trees may have been cut. Now what happens when you cut trees on sensitive slopes is that the tree roots would've held the soil together, when you cut the tree and you lop off the tree, there's nothing left to hold the soil together so you loosen the soil and then obviously increase the possibility of a landslide.

Second thing what they have done in this area is, in the course of levelling, they have virtually, as you may imagine it as a hill slope, where you've cut off half the hill due to levelling, so the entire stability of the hill slope has been undermined and they' have used very heavy machinery to level this, they could have used light machinery, human labour so that you do it gently, rather than shake up the whole.... they have not done that, they have used very heavy machinery, bulldozers, earth moving equipment in order to do the levelling.

Thirdly, they have not done anything to follow lines of natural water drainage, the geological survey in their quick report after rapid survey which they did in the area, has reported seen cracks on the hill slopes which are clear evidence of imbalances in water holding, so you have not drained the water properly, which means there are areas which have held more water, areas which hold less water, which means the chances of land slips then increase. I would add one thing which I think the media has commented very little about, we have seen many instances in the past few weeks even of buildings collapsing, in Delhi and Chennai, Mumbai and so on... And then after that there is a big hue and cry, and then the building contractor will get arrested, may be some corporation official will also get.... so the people who have actually done the construction work can become targets but the people who are supposed to regulate them are rarely the targets and the people sitting on top of that the political leadership, the high bureaucracy who make the policies to govern are never touched. We have seen that in Uttarakhand as well. All the development and construction which took place along the river due to which entire towns were wiped out, no civil administrator, politician, minister was ever punished for doing that. Not even a lowly builder or a contractor was targeted as at least happened during the Delhi or Mumbai or Chennai building collapses. Who are you going to target here?

R.B: Forget for a second the issue of punishment but what about learning lessons, I mean, given that we've had the incident in Uttarakhand last year, I mean, which was really a big incident, which everyone in the country was so concerned about, have we taken any steps to learn whether it's deforestation, whether it's planning these sort of projects.

D. R: Clearly not and that is precisely what I was saying, the question is not of punishment, question is do you have any rules, regulations in place? And do you take action, number one, to enforce these rules, and if by chance the enforcement has not been done properly, then the question of responsibility and punishment arises. The point that I'm making is, while you at least have some regulations in urban areas, you have a building code, you have zoning, you have some planning taking place. In semi-rural areas, in semi-urban areas, in fully rural areas, you've no regulations at all. So the question of enforcing them, the question of then policing that enforcement, and then punishing those who have not enforced it properly will come later. My complaint right now is, for example, when during the Uttarakhand episode, you had bad procedures followed in road building, there are internationally codes for road building in sensitive hill areas. Have you followed any codes or procedures for earth works in Pune? I don't think so at all. Because there's nobody there, no authority who has conducted this. I have read press reports that there are some local agricultural officer who's now being targeted. What does the agricultural officer know about clearing of land on a hill slope? There should be some civil engineer or geologist who is held responsible not for the execution of the work alone but for laying down principles, guidelines and then then with regard to enforcement of these things. No such thing has taken place.

R.B: One more thing that principles and policies should come from even a higher level, ideally the central government at a point...

D. R: Central Government, State Government, there should be codes laid down, there are codes laid down for road building in hill slopes, there is no code for this. Nobody has said, we are sitting here talking about use of heavy machinery, is there or is there not a rule regarding what kind of a machinery you should use for what and even here, the same thing that we witnessed in Uttarakhand last year has been observed where in Uttarakhand they built the roads, cut the hill side, and all the residue which collects is just dumped callously into the river, even though there are rules against it. In this case where there were probably no rules in Pune, debris from this construction work and other construction projects in that area have been found in the catchment down the Krishna on the various tributaries as well as reservoirs of that, all this debris has been dumped there again. So clearly, we have not learnt any lessons, we continue to do exactly what we had done before which is callous construction activity and so called developmental projects on the other, without any consideration given for how you do it in a manner which minimises damage locally and which prevents damage for the future.

R.B: Now with the new government coming in and promising to speed up environmental clearances amongst other changes that they plan to make, do you think that we'll only see actually more incidents like this as environmental clearances are given the go by in some cases and in some cases you know, you don't have proper planning for developmental activities, so are we lacking to see even more reduced concern for the environment?

D. R: I am afraid so. I am afraid so because even the environment minister has gone on record to say that as minister for the environment, while he's concerned about the environment he says, but it should not be at the cost of the development. So the priority for this government clearly would be development over the environment. The question I think to be asked is, not whether the prioritisation of development over environment is correct, but, if you ignore the environment, will you have development at all? Or can you call ecologically insensitive activity development in any sense? If what you have witnessed in Pune today or the constructions that we have witnessed in Uttarakhand in terms of road building or town construction or having buildings on the river front, can you at all call all that development when it has resulted as we've seen in so much destruction and loss of life?

R.B: Now to slightly switch tracks a little bit, now the surviving villagers of Malin have been asked to leave their homes or their village is perceived to be unsafe. Now what sort of relocation package, if any, can they actually expect? So does the Government of India actually has in place, a policy for relocation of families affected by disasters of this sort?

D. R: No, there is no rehabilitation policies from natural disasters. There is a re-situation or rehabilitation policy as a result of developmental projects which are undertaken where you know in advance that people are going to be displaced because of this but a natural disaster being an unforeseen event, there is no preplanned policy for rehabilitation and certainly not what is envisaged in many large developmental projects which is a land for land policy for rehabilitation, there is no such thing. At best, they will award some kind of cash compensation for this. And in this particular case in Pune, these are tribal populations who, as you know, are much more dependent on the land and closely wedded to the habitat than our other populations.

R.B: So just another issue to consider, now that's all the time we have today on Newsclick. Do join us again for another episode. Thank you for watching.