No Longer a Glacial Pace...

by Rupin Dang

The English language has always referred to slow moving change as change that took place at a glacial pace. This may no longer be true, and while the verdict is out on the real state of accelerated glacial melt in the Himalaya and elsewhere around the world, the evidence is clear. The likes of the Environment Ministry and TERI are sparring over differing findings in terms of the pace at which this potentially accelerated glacial melt is happening. But Europe seems to have lost many of its glaciers, and entire valleys now have no permanent ice cover through the year… The situation in the Himalaya may not be so bad, but the evidence points to some examples that are particular distressing...

A camera crew from Wilderness Films India, a documentary production company based out of New Delhi, has been filming the Ganga for the past nineteen years, in an effort to replicate locations over time, thus gathering a visual record of the flow of the river. While I have been an occasional member of this crew, I have spent more time actually climbing the higher points around the Gangotri glacier and the larger region.

Over the past two and a half decades, I have walked up and about some of the more prominent peaks in the region, starting from Swargarohini and Black Peak, also known Bandarpunch in the Yamuna valley, situated at the watershed divide between the Ganga and the Yamuna. (Swargarohini is the peak that the Pandavas apparently used to ascend to heaven from!) I’ve climbed up the Lamkhaga valley, through the Jallandhri Garh, above Harsil and Bagori village. I’ve climbed up the Rudragaira garh, on the true left bank of the Ganga, climbed the peak of Rudragaira and peered down to the Gangotri peaks, and across to the peaks of Jogin and Thelaysagar, standing tall over Kedar Tal. I’ve been up the Raktavarn bamak (bamak is a glacier in Garhwal) towards Sri Kailash, over the glacial shelf of Tapovan and across major chunks of the Gangotri glacier.

While there are no high-altitude inhabitants in these regions, the highest villages lie around Mukhba below Gangotri where the idol of the Gangotri temple descends for the winter months. The villagers at Mukhba look after their apple trees and save them not only from the vagaries of the weather and early snowfall, but also from the depredations from visiting Himalayan Black Bear! It’s a tough life, for a lost season of apple crop translates into a year of zero savings, with only the output of rajma (similar to garbanzo beans) and peas from their fields to take them through the year. And while there is ample water during the monsoons, the flow of the smaller springs and ravines is low if not altogether absent in the summer months, and water must be manually fetched from the river for the apple trees and peas in the fields, during the summer months.

The changes I have seen are more than mere geographical and weather/season related ones. The lives of the people residing in high altitude Garhwal are changing. Tourism inflows invariably get concentrated in small areas, and the impact is seen not only on the physical environment but also on the people. Changes in precipitation are causing agricultural patterns to get altered and livestock populations stand greatly affected. The crop from the apple trees of Harsil now skip entire seasons thanks to late snowfall, frost and hail damage, or due to unseasonal or insufficient rains.

During the course of these walks, in different seasons, I have seen the effects of excess rainfall or early snow-melt which often results in increased flow in the torrents, leading to abrasion of the banks of the streams. The water turns a turbid brown in colour, as it carries down silt, mud and boulders, often causing destruction to agricultural fields and habitations as well. At other times, a poor season of rainfall has delivered other woes to the people of the high altitude valleys around the Ganga. In the Jallandhri Garh, shepherds from Bagori village bring their sheep up the valley, towards the Lamkhaga pass which crosses over into Himachal, in search of pasturage at Kiarkoti and in the upper meadows. Poor snowfall in the winter or low rainfall in the monsoon has a direct bearing on the forage for their sheep, and their ascent to the pastures at 14, 000 to 16, 000 feet often yields poor results, with the sheep coming back with their ribs showing through their newly-cut fleece!

The irony shows through when some of the “smaller” streams joining the Ganga actually look the same size as the main river itself, as the Ganga itself is comprised of glacial melt, while the smaller streams bring in a combination of glacial melt and meadow spring water run-off (grassy meadows act as a sponge and release water slowly).

When we filmed the Ganga as it emanated from the glacial snout at Gaumukh in May 2007, the nascent river flowed strong and wide, and one could never have imagined trying to cross it without getting into clear trouble! But the story was very different in April 2009. When our crew was filming the migration of the Gangotri temple idol from Mukhba village back to the main temple, they went upstream to Gaumukh and found the river so narrow and bereft of water, that they were able to hop from one side to the other, over the occasional boulder, without even getting their feet wet.

When we saw this footage and compared it to the footage from the same season in 2007, we were alarmed. The river now looked more like a little streamlet. The waters which once swept the stone banks below the temple were a good two hundred feet away, slinking past the far embankment, through a narrow passage, with no volume of waterflow worth the name. There were plastic packets and the ubiquitous wafer wrappers strewn across the riverbank, with no sign of the fury of the Ganga past!

If this is a sign of things to come, there could conceivably be a time when the flow altogether disappears, for if it can reduce by 75%, it can just as well disappear, even if only in a seasonal fashion. Although these figures may not be backed by scientific evidence, and may just be hints from our own ad hoc filming work, clearly we can ascertain a trend from all this. I can just about see downstream developers in Uttar Pradesh getting excited at the prospect of constructing group housing societies and SEZ’s on the Ganga’s riverbed. Imagine the amount of real estate that would get freed up! This could well be the boon that India 2009 was waiting for, in the form of fresh opportunity… A river that flows seasonally, a seasonal drain that empties out excess rainfall from the mountains in the summer months, with a wide swathe of open land for seasonal use. Maybe we could even use the entire river’s stretch to make shaadi ghars for north India during the peak wedding season in the winter months!

Perhaps glacial melt has been taking place for a long time, and is part of the larger scheme of things, and that everything is cyclical and maybe this is just one big aberration. Maybe this is true, but then maybe it isn’t. For the longest time, American scientists didn’t catch on to the hole in the Ozone layer, as their computers were programmed to remove abnormal data that was widely off the standard range, as it was likely to be erroneous. When they went back and checked this data, years later, they found the hugely variant statistics which later confirmed the presence of a hole in the Ozone layer!

So while we cannot afford to ignore a range of studies that may be currently occurring, we also cannot ignore what we see before our eyes – sights such as the “mighty” Ganga flowing like a small drain in a place where it ought to be a raging torrent! It is tough to imagine irrigating the plains of north India and providing drinking water to the masses of Uttar Pradesh based out of this tiny little trickle!

And the new state of Uttarakhand (all right, we’re still familiar with it as Uttaranchal!), has a big climate-based challenge on its hands, and it’s going to spread from the high altitudes reaches right down to the plains, and the Tehri dam is not going to be able to provide the answers or the solution! At the same time, there is an imminent threat from the many run-of-the-river and traditional dams that are now coming up on the Ganga, threatening to further obstruct the course of the river. In some places, the entire flow of water has been diverted to allow the construction of these dams. So where once flowed a mighty torrent at the point where the Jaonli garh meets the Ganga is now just a bed or large riverine stones. So many changes – this is India 2009. And while we in the cities can adapt to the onslaught of flyovers, malls, traffic and more, our Himalayan rivers may not be used to such treatment, and we may just have rude surprises ahead of us!