Presentation short abstract

Large-scale infrastructure expansion in fragile Himalayan terrain has turned Uttarakhand into a landscape of chronic, human-made disasters. Weak disaster governance and haphazard development deepen disaster risk, demanding urgent, community-centred and ecologically grounded reforms.

Presentation long abstract

Uttarakhand, a visually spectacular Himalayan state in northern India, has become a site where disaster is produced through the everyday workings of development and weak governance. Over the last two decades, the Bhagirathi–Alaknanda river basin has been transformed by a combination of infrastructure and extractive projects such as dams, tunnels, river diversions, riverbed mining, slope cutting, and blasting. These projects, justified through narratives of clean energy, national security, and regional modernisation, have disrupted livelihoods, destabilised slopes, and intensified subsidence, landslides, tunnel collapses, and flash floods during extreme climatic events.

Using a political ecology approach, this paper examines how development in Uttarakhand has produced disaster rather than mitigating it. Using evidence drawn from interviews with civil society organisations, non-profits, local communities, and activists, alongside Right to Information (RTI) responses in which state departments openly acknowledge the absence of a functional disaster management system, effective governance, and meaningful disaster risk reduction, the paper reveals how institutional weakness compounds disaster, deepening both ecological and social vulnerability in the state.

For residents of towns such as Joshimath and villages across Uttarkashi, disaster is not an episodic event but an ongoing condition that shapes mobility, livelihoods, water access, and trust in the state. The paper argues that Uttarakhand’s experience reveals how development polices centred on economic growth and geopolitical dominance, produce new forms of vulnerability in mountain regions already experiencing climate stress. It calls for re-imagining Himalayan development through relational, ecologically grounded, and community-centred approaches that challenge the political drivers of risk.