By Bhawesh Pant
A tremor jolts her awake. As she watches closely, the mountains in the distance seem to move; a part of the slope breaks away and crashes into the Dhauliganga River flowing below. She freezes. It reminds her of August 5, 2025 when a cloudburst in Dharali triggered flash floods that took the lives of many she knew; some still remain missing.
Such tragedies have become almost ordinary for her. When she recalls 2023, she remembers that around a hundred people lost their lives in landslides, with nearly 1,800 such incidents reported that year. Even now, she wakes up suddenly at night, haunted by memories of 2013, when the floods in Kedarnath washed away nearly 6,000 people from her own land. Studies, such as ISRO’s Landslide Atlas 2023, show that many districts of Uttarakhand fall within the highest landslide-density zones. Reading such reports only heightens her anxiety.
Her sleep is disturbed by the daily sound of explosives tearing the mountains apart. To meet the electricity demands of surrounding states, twelve hydel projects have been sanctioned. To facilitate pilgrimages, the Char Dham highway project has undertaken unprecedented construction across the fragile Himalayan terrain. Without adequate environmental assessment and context-sensitive planning, these infrastructural expansions have weakened the Himalaya and frightened her further, as she watches her trembling mountains crumble before her eyes.
Gradually, her friends started leaving one by one. Those who once attended school with her, ate kaafal berries and shaped ghughutiya sweets, were compelled to leave their villages for Haldwani, Dehradun, Lucknow or cities across northern India. She was left alone. The neighbouring village where her school was situated is now completely deserted. The media refers to such places as ‘ghost villages.’ Across Uttarakhand, over 1,700 villages have become silent, abandoned settlements. Locks hanging from doors and unkempt verandahs mourn their own desolation. Official estimates suggest that over 70,000 hectares of agricultural land have become barren, although independent assessments place the number closer to 100,000 hectares.
Government records show that 1,671 schools have closed down, and more than 3,000 have fewer than ten students; they are on the verge of closure. Poor roads, hilly terrain, and the shortage of health professionals make rural healthcare nearly impossible. Her grandmother, too, died without treatment; the nearest facility that could have saved her was 180 kilometres away, and the connecting road had been washed away by the monsoon rains.
Such daily exclusions push people into Mahindra Maxx jeeps, Alto cars, and UTC buses, each journey a gamble with destiny.
Not long ago, a tailor she knew, Master Sahab, ran a well-known tailoring shop in the local bazaar. For decades, he had also stitched Ramlila costumes for the village performers—a craft he took quiet pride in. During the recently held Uttarakhand Panchayat elections, a group of men shouting anti-Muslim slurs outside his shop forced him to lock it up for several days. When Master Sahab returned, he found that his customer base had visibly reduced, and the atmosphere around the market was slightly tense. The longstanding insider–outsider discourse that once divided pahadi and plainsfolk now takes the form of Hindu–Muslim hostility. Whether it is a Ram Navami procession or a political rally, when she hears anti-Muslim slogans, her body shudders.
She often thinks about her rajya’s condition. Was this the destiny envisioned by those who fought for decades and gave their lives for the creation of a new state? Mining has hollowed her mountains, majoritarianism has poisoned the air of coexistence, addiction has consumed her known ones, and migration has left her villages orphaned. Hope for rejuvenation, meanwhile, feels increasingly distant.
All she carries are a few gentle wishes: that her friends return; that when her mother falls ill, she will not have to travel hundreds of kilometres for medical help; that when the monsoon comes, she can enjoy the greening hills instead of reading death tolls in the local newspaper. She longs for the loud waves of majoritarianism to subside, and for the calm breeze of harmony to return to her hills.
Ah! I almost forgot to tell you her name.
The name of that twenty-five-year-old soul is Devbhoomi.
Bhawesh Pant is a research scholar at the TISS, Mumbai. Email: bhaweshpant09@gmail.com
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