By: Ganesh Saili
‘Stand still for five minutes and they will build a hotel around you!’ quipped a friend in 1990.
Thirty years later, the shoe still fits. Let me reveal our best kept secret: an unholy nexus of property agents, contractors and businessmen operates in our hills in broad daylight. It begins by buying any small bungalow; then you get a fabricated plinth certificate and hey presto! Permissions are sought by using a well-oiled machine of favours and bribes whereby the original bungalow is converted into high rise apartments to be sold at a premium.
‘Why lock the stables after the horses have bolted?’ is the common cynical response to the announcement that a nine member team, headed by the Chief Secretary under the National Green Tribunal, is due to visit Mussoorie. They will discover what everyone has known for decades: ‘We are stretched way beyond our carrying capacity!’
The much-pilloried Mussoorie Dehra Development Authority usually has its hands full, with properties where maps were submitted and passed for residential purposes and then converted into hotels, illegal homestays or Airbnbs. Even in private forest areas laws and guidelines of the Department of Environment and Forests are flouted. Rapidly, these areas are being converted into commercial ventures.
I’m told that bogus old plinth certificates are available at a price. Everybody knows about that old cottage with a plinth of less than I54 square meters which has new permissions for over 6000 square meters! Small wonder that our quaint homes are being swallowed up and replaced by concrete monsters built in the middle of prime forests.
An advocate shows me his file, four inches thick. It has copies of complaints made to the authorities over the past ten years for opening the culverts on the road from Masonic Lodge to Big Bend. Presently, when it rains, the water has nowhere to go and turns into a river in spate that rips up the road.
‘Koi nahin sunta!’ (No one listens!) he says, putting away his file in disgust.
‘Civilizations are known by their drainage systems. Look at our old excavations!’ says Vinod Kumar, an antique shop owner near Clock Tower. And look us at now. At this rate we will end up looking like a Latin American slum with tenements stacked upon each other as far as the eye can see!’
‘Development turned destructive around 1986!’ remembers an old timer. A trend that has continued for the last thirty years and more. This cancerous growth is not restricted to just one area. Drive down to Kempty Fall and you will notice that roadside hotels have come up without any permissions. During a surprise raid one of our larger hotels was found to have been operating without a licence for the past three years.
At sunset a delicious peach haze envelopes Barlowganj and Jharipani. This is dust from building sites that stretch along the old Brewery Road where prime oak forests are being cleared to make paths through virgin hillsides.
Much has been said and written about the Carrying Capacity of this hill station. Briefly, there are three reports: 1998, 2011 and 2018, that warn us that we are stretched way beyond the limit in terms of water supply, sewage disposal and garbage collection.
These calcified hills are the aquifers of the Doon valley. But one look at the scarred face of the mountain at Kishkinda (the old Tullamore Estate) above Tara Hall reveals the destruction we have caused to the delicate limestone through which the water once percolated. This has been hacked, blasted and drilled through to build sawdust hotels.
Those who refuse to take heed from the recent subsidence in Joshimath need to refer to the fact that we are in Zone 5 of an earthquake prone area. We need to remember the Kangra Earthquake of 1905 that levelled many buildings and caused havoc all around. For a few years, lightweight jaffery – a combination of bamboo and lime-plaster was the mandatory medium of construction in the hill station. Concrete is simply too heavy.
Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. A systemic change is necessary. No Band-aids will do.
Ganesh Saili born and home-grown in the hills belongs to those select few whose words are illustrated by their own pictures. Author of two dozen books; some translated into twenty languages, his work has found recognition world-wide.
