Read the article by FutureDAMS Postdoctoral researcher, Shruti Jain, on the recent dam disasters in the Himalaya, published in Economics and Political Weekly – Construction of Calamities in the Uttarakhand Himalaya.
Hydropower projects on the Uttarakhand rivers have proven to aggravate the severity of floods, making them calamitous. In addition, these projects have also increased the vulnerability of the mountain villagers towards disasters, while giving these an unsettling everydayness and a spiralling effect. Projects have evaded accountability and responsibility for such disasters by opportunistically deeming these as devi aapda, or natural calamities, even as the line between natural and human-made calamities has become more blurred than ever.
Shruti Jain