By Hugh & Colleen Gantzer
We are writing this on Sunday, 19th November. Exactly one week ago we were told that 40 of our fellow Indian citizens were trapped in a tunnel that they were cutting into our fragile mountains. We are now told that there are 41: one human life could be just another statistic though it should be a matter of great concern to every government of the people, by the people and for the people.
We have stopped imagining the conditions in which these fellow citizens are surviving. When they came to work in Uttarakhand, they reposed their faith in us. We let them down. Or rather, our netas let them down. There is absolutely no doubt that those netas who decided without the exercise of due diligence committed a grave error. Due diligence is a legal term defined as “the process of gathering and analysing information before making a decision or entering into a transaction”. This is where we hit our first road block.
Why was the contract to excavate the tunnel given to a particular company? What was their experience? What was their track record? Was this one of the companies with whom our netas signed a contract in London away from the prying eyes of the Indian media? Such rumours smear not only our state government but also the Big Engine in our much-trumpeted Double Engine Sarkar.
Moving on from there we ask, did our state government realise that they had commissioned a construction company to bore a tunnel through rubble. This term “rubble” is defined as “broken pieces of stone, brick or other solid material”. The most reliable way of making a tunnel through such unstable material is to pre-fabricate it, prepare a firm concrete base, and after that base has been established, to rest the prefabricated tunnel on it. That is extremely expensive and takes a long time. So, we ask our netas, “What was the hurry to build an unstable tunnel through rubble?”
Quite apart from the instability of rubble, our entire Himalayan system is unstable. Our great mountain range is the youngest in the world. It is still growing. Earth tremors and quakes are a natural part of this geological growing process. Every time you cut into our mountains you destabilise structures that have taken centuries to establish. A tunnel hollows out these structures and weakens them. In addition to the man-made hazards created by the indiscriminate use of earth-moving machinery are the natural hazards inherent in our mountains. We refer to glacial lakes, which we have written about in an earlier column.
Global warming is a subject which very few of our netas ever refer to even though “climate change” is part of the title of the Ministries of Environment, both, at the Centre and in our State. Do our Mantris believe that by hiding their heads under pillows the ogre of global warming will go away? It will not. And by destabilising our mountains by boring through them, building high rises and encouraging the growth of cable cars our netas do a great disservice to the spread of sustainable industry. Sustainable industries are those which bring their benefits to the widest spectrum of the social strata. Tourists travelling by tunnels and cable cars do not interact with the people they bypass. A tourist in a cable car in the Dehra-Mussoorie Ropeway will not spend any money in Kulukhet, or Bhatta. Those who invested in the cable car project are rich. The small property owners in Kuluket and Bhatta are poor by comparison. When the cable car bypasses Kuluket and Bhatta, it makes the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Is this the hidden agenda of the Powers-That-Be?
These Powers obviously include the Big Engine. Without the active intervention of the Big Engine the following scene reported by Aroon Deep, correspondent of The Hindu on 19th November would not have occurred: “Motorcades of officials from the State government crowded the narrow highways, helicopters touched down nearby with senior officers like an officer on special duty and a foreign official from Australia visited to provide counsel.”
But we all know that: TOO MANY COOKS SPOIL THE BROTH!
(Hugh & Colleen Gantzer hold the National Lifetime Achievement Award for Tourism among other National and International awards. Their credits include over 52 halfhour documentaries on national TV under their joint names, 26 published books in 6 genres, and over 1,500 first-person articles, about every Indian state, UT and 34 other countries. Hugh was a Commander in the Indian Navy and the Judge Advocate, Southern Naval Command. Colleen is the only travel writer who was a member of the Travel Agents Association of India.) (The opinions and thoughts expressed here reflect only the authors’ views!).
