The river in northern India being hollowed out for concrete -Monika Mondal

-TheThirdPole.net

The plight of a small Himalayan river is echoed all over Asia, as communities lose lives and property to the ‘unscientific and unsustainable’ mining of riverbeds

It was around 5 AM on 19 October 2021, dark, drizzling and cold in the foothills of the Himalayas. “A noise woke up my wife,” says farmer Gopal Datt Sharma in Indirapuri village, near the city of Haldwani in Uttarakhand, northern India. She went out to the porch and saw that farms adjacent to their 1.6-hectare patch of wheat had vanished overnight. As she watched, the Sharma family’s farmland collapsed into the Gaula River.

That day, the Sharmas and four other Indirapuri families lost their homes to a flash flood. A part of the Gaula bridge in Haldwani collapsed the same day. Many smaller bridges fell down after incessant and unseasonal rainfall, which blocked the main road from the north Indian plains to Nainital city up in the mountains.

According to government reports, the flood that washed away farms and bridges on 19 October was a natural calamity. In the past five years, more than 37 bridges are reported to have collapsed in Uttarakhand, and more are on the brink.

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