Lucknow: Villagers of Yertha in Chamoli district had to carry Gomti Devi, 38, about 5km on a chair to admit her to the Dewal primary health centre when she complained of labour pain on Sunday.
"This isn’t new for us. An 8km road was sanctioned for our village in 2021 but never built," village panchayat chief Prem Devi said.
PWD assistant engineer J.K. Tamta said: "Some residents of adjoining Padmala village had opposed (land acquisition for) the road, so the file didn’t proceed further."
But Prem Devi alleged the funds had been diverted. "We have learnt that the PWD has sent a report to the government saying the villagers here have no problems," she said.
State government sources said Uttarakhand, where Assembly elections are due early next year, has at least 100 road-less hill villages.
"The government is ready to build roads but the local public representatives don’t give us the correct picture of their areas," a senior official claimed, requesting anonymity.
He didn’t explain why the administration depended on feedback when it had a list of such villages.
The situation is ironic: While the BJP, ruling Uttarakhand since March 2017, has ignored villagers' road connectivity needs, it stands accused of recklessly widening highways without scientific planning in the Himalayan state's ecologically fragile mountains.
This infrastructure-building spree — mainly for the BJP’s showpiece Chardham Yatra pilgrimage project that burnishes its Hindutva credentials — has led to deforestation and climate change, causing more cloudbursts, floods and landslides that have killed hundreds of villagers and tourists in recent years, scientists say.
More than 200 tourists and local people were believed killed in Dharali, Uttarkashi, on August 5 last year as flash floods destroyed an entire market area.
When farmer Ranjeet Singh, 36, fell ill on Saturday in Pandav village, 3km from Yertha, people carried him on a rope cot to the nearest road in Khetgadera, 6km away. There, they put him in an ambulance.
"We gave over 50 representations to chief ministers, ministers and officers in the last 20 years, seeking a road," Deepak Malgudi, a resident, said, adding the village had enough land for a road.
"Our children walk 5km through dense forests to their school."
Prem Ram, father of 14-year-old Karan who had to be carried 5km from Bachchigaon in Bageshwar district to the nearest road in Harsila on his way to hospital, expressed frustration with successive governments.
"We feel hurt when we hear the speeches of big politicians saying Uttarakhand is developing fast. They have built roads up to the China border but ignored the people in the villages," he said.
On Friday, Pushkar Singh Dhami, chief minister since July 2021, repeated the decades-old promise about giving every village a road soon.
"We are working very fast to link every village with roads," Dhami told reporters who had referred to the villagers’ plight.
The state government claims 5,700km of rural roads are being renovated under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana. Union road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari recently said the government had built 2,969km of highways in Uttarakhand between 2014 and 2025.
But Rashtravadi Regional Party leader Shivprasad Semwal told reporters on June 2 that of the 74 ongoing PMGSY projects he had reviewed across the state, full payment had been made to the construction companies against 20 projects. Yet, most of the roads were incomplete or had never been started, he said.
In Pinau, a few kilometres from Yertha, people have themselves built a 40-metre wooden bridge on a rivulet but have to carry patients 8km to the nearest road.
In Nagal, Uttarkashi, panchayat chief Lalita Devi said: "We met all the politicians and officers last year. Work too began. They levelled the earth to build a concrete road but didn’t lay it."
She added: "We later saw a government report saying the road had been completed. We are now struggling to prove that the road was never built."
