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By Bhaswati Sengupta
“The government has sealed our hotel. We have faced heavy losses worth several crores. I am not in a position to talk more,” said Thakur Singh Rana, handing over the phone to his son. His voice was still trembling at the unexpected turn of events. Rana owns Hotel Malari Inn in Joshimath. The government has banned the hotel’s operations along with Hotel Mount View under the Disaster Management Act 2005.
Thakur Singh Rana’s son Kamlesh Rana says most people in the region knew how vulnerable the area was. “Everybody knew how dangerous the situation was. But all chose to do nothing about it. We received a notice from the government on 27 December, which said that we cannot run our operations, and immediately we stopped our operations.”
Speaking about the precarious situation, Rana says their hotel’s condition entirely depends on an adjacent hotel that has developed cracks and is now leaning towards their hotel. “There is another property next to our hotel called Hotel Mount View. There are cracks in the foundational structure of that building, because of which that hotel is leaning towards our hotel. Anything can happen anytime, and we are all distraught.”
The Joshimath area of Uttarakhand has been declared disaster-prone because of the rising cases of land subsidence. Over 600 buildings have developed cracks in Joshimath so far. However, experts have told The Probe that successive governments should have declared Joshimath a ‘sinking zone’ decades ago.
Professor DM Banerjee, Emeritus scientist at the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), says that years ago in 1938, in the book The Throne of The Gods – an account of the first Swiss expedition to the Himalayas – by Arnold Heim and August Gansser, the vulnerability of the geological plains of the area have been explained. “Multiple warnings were sounded. Way back in 1938, Professor Heim and Professor Gansser had studied the entire region and beyond, and they had reported that this area was unstable and should not be subjected to major construction. But nobody took them seriously, and they thought these were just foreign geologists speaking.”
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