India ignored repeated warnings before the tunnel trapped 41 men

When the trapped workers emerged from the under-construction road tunnel after 17 days, the happy ending to a rescue operation that had gripped India sparked celebrations across the country.

For the time being, questions about why the 41 men were at risk of being buried in the tunnel in the first place disappeared. Instead, the television crews outdid each other in excitement and volume, showering praise on the officials involved in the rescue, who lined up Tuesday with streamers for the workers. Cameras focused on local representatives of India’s ruling party, who appreciated Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership.

“Modi makes it possible!” they sang in Hindi.

While activists and environmentalists also looked on with relief, the scenes had a different, very different meaning for them. They had long warned in pointless lawsuits and failed court hearings that the $1.5 billion road widening project was dangerously destabilizing the already fragile Himalayan landscape. For them, the fact that the work went ahead anyway and ultimately caused a disastrous landslide was a fresh reminder of how Mr. Modi has removed almost every obstacle to getting his way.

“The focus is on rescue and not on the reasons for it,” said Mallika Bhanot, an environmentalist in Uttarakhand, the northern state where the tunnel is located. “They don’t want to draw attention to it.”

The construction project, which largely widens more than 500 miles of roads to connect four major stops on a Hindu pilgrimage route, brings together two pillars of the image Mr. Modi has built: as an ambitious infrastructure developer and a champion of Hindu interests.

The prime minister personally inaugurated the highway project in 2016. In front of tens of thousands of people, Mr. Modi said the improved highways would make travel between the pilgrimage sites so easy that “people will remember the work that went into the project over the next 100 years. ”

He dedicated it “to all those who died in the Kedarnath tragedy of 2013,” when flash floods killed more than 6,000 people in the state – inadvertently pointing to an example of the increased risk of natural disasters in the Himalayas as the planet is getting warmer. More recently, in another vivid case, the city of Joshimath began to sink rapidly, with hundreds of buildings and houses showing cracks.

Mr Modi is credited with increasing investment in India’s terrible infrastructure, hoping it will help unlock the country’s vast economic potential. But in the case of the highway projectHis government has simply squashed the concerns of activists and scientists, they say.

India’s Ministry of Road Transport and Highways sought comment on Wednesday and asked for written questions about the project, but did not immediately respond after they were submitted.

While scientists have warned about the impact of major construction work on the fragile Himalayas, it remains unclear whether additional controls, or a less ambitious program, could have prevented the landslide that trapped workers in Uttarakhand.

In 2018, a citizens’ group appealed to India’s environmental court, the National Green Tribunal, asking for work to be halted because an environmental impact assessment had not been carried out. Widening the road would be impossible without increasing the risk of disaster, the group argued, and the project would require removing tens of thousands of trees.

The tribunal ruled that it had little power to act. The government had divided the project into 53 parts, each under the 100 kilometer requirement for mandatory environmental impact assessments.

As the group escalated its complaint to the country’s Supreme Court, judges in 2019 ordered the government to convene an expert committee to assess the project and its impact on the Himalayan landscape and provide advice on how to proceed to go.

The committee, led by environmentalist Ravi Chopra, discovered that the project had already damaged the Himalayan ecosystem due to ‘unscientific and unplanned implementation’.

Her assessments based on site visits showed that, without sufficient prior analysis, hillside mowing had been favored over less damaging approaches. The panel found that more than half of the new slopes were disaster-prone and that dozens of slope failures had already occurred. The project was also not properly planned for waste management, even in landslide-prone areas, threatening the flow of natural streams.

A majority of the committee members, many of whom were government officials, approved the government’s road widening plan anyway. A minority, including Mr Chopra, said the government had violated its own latest guidelines that limit the width of roads in hilly areas to reduce ecological damage.

The court supported the minority opinion and ruled in September 2020 that the road should be made narrower.

But for months the work continued unchanged. Mr. Chopra wrote letter after letter to the court, complaining that the government was not following its orders.

The government then amended road construction guidelines once more, with one exception: regions of strategic importance were exempt. Then it went back to the court with a new argument focused on national security.

The government said the roads in question were important for transporting military supplies to the border with China, even though the army chief had said the narrower width was not a problem for the army, and that the benefit of wider roads to defense readiness could be lost due to an increased risk of landslides.

In December 2021, the court — part of a judiciary seen as the final hurdle in Modi’s consolidation of power — changed its order, allowing the government to continue taking the broader path.

Mr. Chopra resigned a few months later.

“During that one year, the government was simply unwilling to listen,” he said. “They were in a hurry to get the job done, they had a very tight deadline and they took shortcuts. So disasters were inevitable.”

In July 2022, an opposition leader in Parliament asked Nitin Gadkari, India’s road minister, about the environmental issues surrounding the project. She asked for confirmation whether the project, billed as one giant initiative, had indeed been divided into many segments, and whether that was to avoid an environmental impact assessment.

Mr Gadkari, in his written response, which is a staple of the parliamentary system, confirmed that the project had been divided into 53 segments. His three-word response to the next part, about whether that was done to avoid the environmental review, was more telling.

“Doesn’t happen.”