By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR, India, Feb 11 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Environmentalists have urged the Indian government to review its policy of building hydropower dams in fast-warming mountain regions, after an apparent glacier collapse this week led to flooding that swept away one dam and left at least 26 people dead.
The Sunday flash flood in India’s northern Uttarakhand state, triggered by what scientists said they believed was a large avalanche of glacier ice and rock, left up to 200 people missing in the Himalaya region.
Rescuers this week were racing to try to free dozens of dam construction workers trapped in a tunnel by debris carried by the wave of floodwater.
Scientists said the disaster was difficult to directly link to climate change in a region where landslides are common – though temperatures are rising faster in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya mountains than in other parts of the region.
But Anil Kulkarni, a glacier expert at the Bengaluru-based Indian Institute of Science, said global warming and “local factors such as deforestation for developmental projects and large-scale construction activities could have contributed to the disaster”.
