Darjeeling hills have witnessed devastating disasters over the decades — from landslides to earthquakes — but green activists maintain that neither the government nor the public has learnt any lesson from the past.
The Sunday deluge has claimed 33 lives, 11 in Mirik alone. Thousands are bearing the brunt of landslides and floods.
When the 2009 Cyclone Aila triggered landslides in Darjeeling, 27 people lost their lives. The then Darjeeling MP, Jaswant Singh, strongly advocated for a national centre for landslide research, studies and management in Darjeeling.
“Establishing a centre in Darjeeling would be the appropriate choice,” Singh wrote to Bijoy Krishna Handique, then minister of mines and development of northeastern region (DONER).
However, that centre remained a pipe dream.
In the past, Amar Singh Rai, former Darjeeling MLA and the Darjeeling municipality chair, requested the state government for its intervention to set up a Doppler Weather Radar (DWR) station and automatic weather stations in all major urban centres and even blocks.
“A DWR would be able to give more precise warnings on the quickly changing mountain weather and enable accurate NOWCASTs. The early warning would go a long way in saving lives,” Rai had written. Nowcasting is weather forecasting for a very short period.
Doppler weather radar is an instrument that sends pulses of electromagnetic energy into the atmosphere to find precipitation, determine its motion and intensity, and identify the precipitation type such as rain, snow or hail.
“The DWR system would give early warnings and this would be extremely helpful for nowcasting in the fast-changing mountain system,” said Wing Commander (retd) Praful Rao, founder, Save The Hills (STH), which is a group formed by experts to work on disaster management.
Rao said that the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) had in principle agreed to set up a DWR in the entire region, and more specifically in Sikkim, around eight to 10 years ago.
“Everyone failed to follow-up on the proposal,” said Rao.
Weather experts maintained that even the demand for setting up automatic weather stations in all major urban centres would be beneficial.
“The AWS provides and records the amount of rainfall, temperature and atmospheric pressure, which will be very helpful for the local area,” said a weatherman.
An AWS machine costs a little more than ₹1 lakh.
Environment experts refused to blame only the government.
“Have we as citizens acted responsibly?” an expert asked.
Although Darjeeling-Sikkim region lies near the convergent boundary of the Indian and the Eurasian tectonic plates with Darjeeling falling under seismic zone IV, making it prone to earthquakes, leaders as well as residents seemed unconcerned, an architect said.
“For some reason, both the government and the general residents of the region are burying their heads like ostrich on this issue,” said the architect.
The US Geological Survey has stated that in the past century there have been 10 earthquakes of magnitude 6 in this region.
A 2015 earthquake near Nepal had resulted in 8,669 fatalities and widespread damage. While the damages were mostly in Nepal, Darjeeling and Sikkim also bore the brunt.
On September 18, 2011, Sikkim recorded a 6.9 magnitude earthquake that had left more than 100 dead.
“Despite the scare, high-rises continue unabated in Darjeeling hills. Neither is the government concerned to stop high rises nor is the public fearing the outcome of this violation,” said the architect.
Under Rule 162 of the West Bengal Municipality Building Rule 2007, hill municipalities can sanction building plans up to a height of 11.5 metres. Civic bodies have to get prior approval of the state government for construction up to 13.5 metres.
Experts say 11.5 metres roughly translates into a four-storey building.
In 2015, the Darjeeling civic body identified 337 illegal high rises in eight of 32 wards in Darjeeling, a pointer to the scale of which building norms have been flouted.
More highrises are coming up, some with faulty construction methods for the hills.
“In the hills people have the tendency to construct buildings on stilts. This is dangerous. Stilts tend to have a domino effect during tremors,” said the architect.
By stilts, he was referring to the practice of completing two storeys, followed by pillars, and then again adding two more floors so that the houses come up to the road level.