Himalayan Peril: A Region on the Brink

The 2025 monsoon has eloquently highlighted the augmentation in the dispositions to disaster in Himalayas. The pattern of increased natural hazards as a result of climate change and uncontrolled development is quite disturbing following a continuous succession of devastating cloudbursts, flash floods, and landslides in Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir resulting in death and destruction on a massive scale.

A Perfect Storm of Risks

There are two main factors that make the region so vulnerable:

• Geological Fragility:  The young, unstable mountains are of course predisposed to the landslides and earthquakes. Glaciers are losing mass much faster than at any time in the past 3,000 years, due primarily to the intensified warming trends in the regions they occupy and less snow accumulation in cold times and places (eg, GLOF)negative impacts (Bernhardt 23).

• Human Activities:  The building with no planning of construction on fragile slopes and clearing of forests due to conducting various projects and non-strictness in enforcement of safety measures has also weakened the ecology. Earlier calamities like the Kedarnath calamity of 2013 have been ignored.

The High Cost of Inaction

The impact is enormous - from the loss of precious lives to migration of populations to fatalities in thousands of crores of abandoned infrastructure. The environmental cost — deforestation, river modification, loss of biodiversity — is just as great, and can sometimes be irreversible.

A Call for a New Approach

The existing disaster response is unsuited to the peculiar characteristics of the Himalayan region. 35 A sustainable development paradigm that balances: a non-urban focus with the informal sector and rural development is required to incorporate:

• Strict enforcement of environmental safeguards and hazard zoning.

• Nature-based solutions like reforestation and wetland protection.

• Advanced technology like satellite monitoring and AI for early warnings.

One of the proposals is the development of Himalayan Climate and Disaster Monitoring Response Centre (HCDMRC). Then an agency of a central type would be in charge of the enforcement of the rules, clear direction of safe infrastructure building, the identification of the areas of greatest risk, and of planning actions in special rescue and thus provide unified, scientific break on the safety of the area.