Joshimath: Work at two major work sites in Uttarakhand’s Joshimath district has been suspended. Earlier this month, the district administration had called for all large development projects to temporarily stop construction following the appearance of cracks in houses and roads.
Speaking at a press conference here Thursday, activists said NTPC Ltd is culpable in creating the crisis that is causing Joshimath in Uttarakhand to sink.
India’s top power producer NTPC’s Tapovan Vishnugad Hydro Power Plant is one of two large development projects being blamed for the sinking of the Himalayan town. The project consists of a 520 megawatt (MW) hydro power plant, a barrage and a tunnel around 12 km long, stretching from Selang to Tapovan.
The other is the central government’s Char Dham Pariyojana, being carried out by the Ministry of Road Transport & Highways, which aims to improve connectivity between a set of four Hindu pilgrimage sites — Yamunotri, Gangotri, Badrinath and Kedarnath — by widening 889 km of hill roads by 10 metres to create a two-lane highway, among other things. A bypass for the project is being constructed through Joshimath, from Helang to Marwari, but work is currently stopped due to land subsidence, or sinking of the ground due to subsurface movement.
Teams of researchers and scientists from state and Central institutions are studying the possible triggers for the accelerated subsidence that hit the town over a week ago.
According to geologists and other experts, the town sits on top of landslide debris, which made it unstable to begin with. Unabated construction work and lack of sewerage systems have likely exacerbated the problem.
According to data with the National Remote Sensing Centre of the Indian Space Research Organisation (NRSC-ISRO), Joshimath sank by 9 centimetres between April and November last year. However, between 28 December, 2022, and 8 January, 2023, the town sank by 5 centimeters, indicating that a “rapid subsidence event was triggered”.
Speaking at the press conference in Joshimath, Local activist Atul Sati and development expert Dr Ravi Chopra said the NTPC could not absolve itself of the situation affecting Joshimath. Chopra was chair of a 2013 Supreme Court appointed committee that examined the role of hydro power plants on flooding in Uttarakhand.
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NTPC’s Tapovan Vishnugad Hydro Power Plant project
Since the district administration called for all large development projects to temporarily stop construction on 5 January, life at NTPC’s power plant in Selang has come to a standstill.
“No one has been coming here since the work was stopped,” said a guard at the entrance of the plant, who stopped ThePrint from entering the complex.
Citing a 2015 paper by Austrian geologists Bernard Millen et al, Chopra said there were at least three instances of a tunnel boring machine (TBM) getting stuck during construction of the tunnel, fracturing the walls and causing the cracks to get bigger with each subsequent time the machine got stuck.
In 2009, the first instance the TBM got stuck, it punctured a stratum of rock that released water at the rate of 700 liters per second. Geologists have said the sheer volume of water lost risked causing land subsidence in the area.
“The paper says the rocks in this area are very weak. In other words, they are faulted, jointed and fissured,” said Chopra. “It is my understanding that when the 2021 Chamoli disaster struck and water gushed into the tunnel, it widened those existing cracks and created new ones. There is adequate reason to believe that what we are witnessing today is a result of the tunnelling exercise conducted by NTPC.”
In 2021, when an avalanche led to a deluge in the Dhauliganga river, water surged into the tunnel, destroying part of the power plant and killing over 200 people. It’s after the 2021 flood that cracks started appearing in people’s homes, said Atul Sati.
The NTPC denies any fault in the matter. In a statement issued on 5 January, it said the tunnel “has nothing to do with the land subsidence happening in Joshimath”, adding, “the tunnel does not pass under Joshimath city. This tunnel has been constructed using tunnel boring machines and, at present, no blasting is being done”.
According to geologist Navin Juyal, teams looking into the causes for the accelerated subsidence should examine the cracks in the NTPC tunnel.
“As a geologist or scientist, we cannot implicate the tunnel without adequate examination. Since the rocks inside the tunnel were already fractured, it is not unlikely that a gush of water into the tunnel facilitated the widening of cracks,” he said. “Second, the 2021 disaster eroded the Dhauliganga slope, and this could have activated creeping from Tapovan to Marwari. It should have been looked into more seriously at that time.”
Char Dham project
In Joshimath’s Marwari village, the construction site of the Char Dham bypass road has been cordoned off using a sheet of asbestos. Behind it stands an idle bulldozer.
Environmentalists have opposed parts of the Char Dham project, arguing that widening the roads could destabilise the fragile Himalayan ecology and geology further. The process will lead to the felling of trees, blasting across the hill, and dumping muck.
“These rocks are called crystalline rocks, and are considered to be quite competent (essentially meaning resistant). In that sense, the stability is there. But if the rocks are faulted, as they are in this region, then they may not be as solid,” said Navin Juyal, who was also part of the Supreme Court’s High Powered Committee (HPC) for the Char Dham project.
“As part of the HPC, we had recommended the road be constructed along the hard rock course, provided a geotechnical report on this segment be done. But it never was. This geotechnical report would have allowed us to check the stability of the terrain, but we don’t have that information,” he added.
(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)
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