“Balancing heritage and development: Saving the temple town of Bageshwar”, First Post, August 24, 2025:
“Recent weeks have seen tragedy strike multiple Himalayan villages. On August 5, Dharali in Uttarakhand was hit by a cloudburst. On the 14th, it was Chasoti in Jammu & Kashmir’s Kishtwar that was struck. In both places, people, houses, commercial establishments, mandirs and orchards vanished within minutes.
With an economy heavily dependent on pilgrim and tourist traffic, Uttarakhand has long witnessed a debate between development and environment preservation. Large scale construction activity in the sensitive Himalayan state is causing land subsidence.
Towns such as Jyotirmath (formerly Joshimath) have become almost uninhabitable. And the same fear now looms over the mandir town of Bageshwar. Here, unregulated mining – involving unsafe excavation practices and dumping of debris into drainage channels – has made the place vulnerable to rockfalls and landslides. In a zone that is among the country’s most prone to earthquakes, this is a disaster in the making…….”
Read the full article at Firstpost.com
