‘Living in constant fear’: A cliff that creeps closer to homes in Nainital | Latest News India - Hindustan Times
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‘Living in constant fear’: A cliff that creeps closer to homes in Nainital

By, Dehradun/nainital
Aug 13, 2022 04:26 AM IST

The Baliyanala is located in Hari Nagar, at a height of over 6,000 feet, on the outskirts of Nainital, less than a kilometre away from the Naini Lake.

The trepidation is now routine. Every morning, 45-year-old Mohammad Tayyab wakes up, walks out of a house he has rented, and climbs down the slope to the residence he actually owns. He does not stop at the four-room structure, long-practised strides navigating the descent without trouble. Five minutes later, he arrives at the sight he does not want to see, but must check every day, inching ever closer, threatening his house and the town of Nainital that he has always called home.

 (HT Photos)
(HT Photos)

In front of him is the Baliyanala cliff, now an ever-growing slope of loose rubble and rock. Tayyab points and says, “In 2018, the landslide point was 40 to 50 metres away from my house. Then, another one took place on August 3 this year, and the cliff caved in barely 25 metres away. I was worried about the safety of my family, so we shifted to a rented one room flat, where I pay 7,000 a month. I will return in September when the rains end. But I still come to check every day, because I do not know whether I will have a home to come back to at all.”

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The Baliyanala is located in Hari Nagar, at a height of over 6,000 feet, on the outskirts of Nainital, less than a kilometre away from the Naini Lake. There are 150 families that live on the mountainside, and every year, for the past four years, there have been landslides. Fearing being washed away, at least 40 of these families now relocate every year to other parts of Nainital, or government schools for shelter.

Except, it isn’t just about Baliyanala. Every landslide — they have moved closer to Nainital’s urban sprawl — is warning of a crisis in waiting. “The landslides are now nearing the homes. The one which fell earlier this month has left everyone in panic, and if tragedy comes, nobody should be surprised,” said Mukhtar Ali Khan, head of the Baliyanala Sangharsh Samiti.

A history of fragility

It has always been known that Nainital is one of the most landslide-prone areas in Uttarakhand. In 1880 for instance, 151 people were killed in a major landslide in Nainital’s Sher Ka Danda. Beginning 2018 though, these fears have been renewed afresh. That year, a 25 metre stretch of the busy Mall Road, lined with shopping arcades, hotels and restaurants caved into the lake. In August 2021, the other side of the water body, Thandi Sadak also witnessed a landslide, massive boulders falling into the water.

Sandeep Singh, an IIT Roorkee professor said that after the Baliyanala landslide in 2018, the state government engaged experts from the college to look into the matter. “Many experts from IIT Roorkee, including myself, carried out geophysical investigations in the Baliyanala area between October 2019 to March 2020.”

Singh said that the investigations found that there was sub-surface water gushing out in the area, leading to a weakening of the mountainside. “This is one primary factor. An analysis carried out by the National Institute of Hydrology showed that this water is not from the Naini Lake, but from within the hills itself.”

Vishal Singh, executive director, Centre for Ecology, Development and Research (CEDAR), Dehradun said that though the Nainital area falls in Zone IV of the Earthquake Zoning Map of India, geological disturbances have been further aggravated by increasing population and concretization. “Not too long ago — if one considers the formation of the Himalayas 60 million years ago — two major landslides occurred in this area between 1867 and 1880, followed by incessant landslides in 1893, 1898, 1924, 1989, 1998, 2018, 2021 and 2022. Today, Nainital is densely populated, with multi-storey buildings and flat concrete rooftops, which adds to the pressure on the slopes,” he said.

The director said that the storm drains in the town, built by the British to stabilise the slopes lie choked with debris, garbage and concrete. “After 1880, the British developed a 79km drain network on the hill slopes around Nainital to make them stable and divided Nainital into safe and prohibited zones for construction,” he said.

But the town has grown since.

The numbers are staggering. The mango-shaped Nainital lake is situated at an elevation of 1,938 metres, 360 metres wide and 1,442 metres long. Around it is Nainital, an area of 11.83 square kilometres, with a population that has grown from 7,589 in 1881 to 41,337 in the 2011 census, to over 48,000 according to current government estimates. The number of buildings in Nainital has increased from 520 in 1901-02 to over 7,000 now including over 150 hotels and resorts, state government data shows.

What is at risk

Experts said the increase in the number of buildings means that the fragile slopes are susceptible to major damage in case an earthquake rocks the area, or there is a major landslide triggered by rains during the monsoons. Professor RK Pandey, who heads the department of geography at Kumaon University said: “There is far too much pressure on the slopes that the construction and population is putting, because of which cracks and the caving in of roads are common. The fact is that even though no new constructions are allowed in Nainital since 1994, people have increased the concrete cover in the name of renovations. The green cover has lessened, which reduces the grip on the soil, and the encroachment on the drains means the slopes are now unstable. You have to allow nature to heal Nainital but that is not happening with the increase in anthropogenic activities.”

Geologist CC Pant, former head of the geology department at Kumaon University said Nainital has a special geology that makes it vulnerable. “The slopes here are mainly made of slate, which have a splintery nature, and carbonate rocks — limestone and dolomite which react with water. These are ridden with large faults. The rocks in Nainital are moving slowly. Studies have shown that over the last 80 years, some rocks have dipped by 80cm to 1m in some areas, which adds to slope instability, bulging and slips in some areas. Nainital Lake itself owes its origin to tectonic movement, which means large landmass movement created this lake. So geologically the lake area and slopes around it will always remain fragile,” Pant said.

Pant said that a fault line called the Nainital Lake Fault runs beneath the lake, through Naina Chungi (2km from the lake), Naini Lake, Baliyanala, up to Ranibagh and Kathgodam, rendering the entire area vulnerable to tectonic activity. “Studies of the lake sediments have shown activity in this fault, evidenced by the deformation of some sediment layers. The Nainital Lake Fault results in stress, shearing and pulverising of the rock formations beneath Nainital and as such there will be always danger of major geological disturbances here. If small earthquakes occur regularly, they release stress. But here the seismic gap is increasing as is the potential of a major earthquake,” a worried Pant said.

Government steps

Senior government officials said that they have identified two landslide-prone slopes at Baliyanala in the Hari Nagar area. In 2001, IIT Roorkee conducted a landslide vulnerability study of the slopes following which a 15 crore treatment plan was framed and approved by the state government, which resulted in the creation of embankments on the hills. Officials, however, said that this work was rendered useless by successive landslides.

After three landslides hit Nainital in 2018, the administration approached the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) for assistance. In the same year, the Uttarakhand high court emphasised the need to find a permanent solution for Baliyanala, constituting a high-power committee to study the area and suggest a treatment plan. Senior Uttarakhand government officials said that JICA did not take up the work during the two years of the Covid pandemic.

Over four years ago, IIT Roorkee conducted a study on the vulnerability of the slopes and roads around Nainital Lake, especially the section of the Mall Road adjoining it. Based on the report, the public works department sent a detailed project report worth 41 crore to the state government. The report identified a patch 200m high and 165m long on the slope above Mall Road as highly fragile and vulnerable, and recommended immediate enforcement.

Here too, however, very little was actually done. “Many recommendations and suggestions have been made by various experts on Nainital and Baliyanala over the years. All are sent to the state government which has to take a final call on them,” said a senior official, not wishing to be named.

Piyoosh Rautela, executive director Uttarakhand Disaster Management and Mitigation Centre (DMCC) said, “The main cause of the landslide at Baliyanala is erosion due to water flow on the slope. Till the 1970s, there was a power station near Baliyanala at Hari Nagar which used to get excess water from the Nainital lake through a piped network. But after the 1970s, this power station was disbanded and all the excess water from the Nainital Lake is now flowing through Baliyanala mountainside. Also there are water seepages on the mountainside from household discharges,” he said.

Sarita Arya, MLA Nainital admitted that the danger of landslides is threatening homes increasingly since 2018. “Given the seriousness of the matter, I took up the matter with the chief minister, district magistrate and commissioner Kumaon. I also wrote to them that a permanent solution needs to be found. I was apprised that 300 crore detailed project report is being prepared by a Pune-based company for the treatment of the Baliyanala mountainside,” she said.

Anil Kumar Verma, executive engineer at the irrigation department said Genstru Consultants, the company Arya is referring to, is in charge of the DPR and will likely submit it to the state government within a month. “After JICA didn’t return due to COVID, an MoU was signed with this company for preparing a treatment plan for Baliyanala,” he said.

Rahul Sah, sub-divisional magistrate Nainital, said that the district administration is working on a two-prong strategy. “First, we have identified 56 families living close to the Baliyanala cliff who need to be shifted elsewhere for safety. We have served them notices and have given them three choices: they can shift to the nearby school, take a rented accommodation for which the government will provide the monthly rent and third, and move to Vijaypur, where there are around there 60 accommodations. But this area is around 3.5km from their homes by foot and around 18-20km by road, so these families are reluctant to move.”

In Hari Nagar, 40-year-old Gulshan Qureshi sits in the corridor of the Shaheed Junior Captain Ramesh Singh primary school, where she has been living with her two young children for the last nine months. The family has to share a common toilet and sleep in the same room as others in the same predicament. But there is some sense of relative safety that schools’ four walls provide that her home in Baliyanala simply doesn’t anymore. “With landslides happening constantly, I didn’t want to live in constant fear. Here at least we can sleep in peace,” she said.

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  • ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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    He is principal correspondent based at Bhopal. He covers environment and wildlife, state administration, BJP and other saffron organisations. He has special interest in social issues based stories.

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