A handout photo made available by the Indian Army on June 24 shows an aerial view of the destruction caused by the floods in the Guptkashi area of the Kedarnath valley in Uttrakhand, India. Photo: CFP

For Abhaya Misra, the hours he spent trapped by recent flash floods in the Himalayan foot hills of Uttarakhand state in northern India will haunt him for the rest of his life. The 40-year-old found himself hanging for dear life when tons of water fell on him as it ripped through the revered ancient Kedarnath Temple. He hung precariously onto a temple bell for nearly nine hours on June 16-17, balancing himself on floating corpses below with his feet and trying to secure support with his lacerated hands on the bell's ancient metal. Misra survived to tell the tale. "The divine and the dead saved me," he told the Global Times.

But for 65-year-old Anjul Tomar, the pilgrimage had left her body and mind broken. At Rudraprayag, another place struck by the disaster in Uttarakhand, the raging waters engulfed her two sons, Ashwin aged 18, and Sanjay, 16, and her husband Ajay. Her husband's body was found a couple of days later. But for the clothes she would not have been able to identify the decomposed corpse. The sons have been added to the missing list.

"The thunder of the noise was followed by columns of water that tore down the lodge and pulled away my sons and husband,'' a still dazed Anjul told the Global Times.

"I know my sons will return one day. They are safe somewhere in the hills," she said.

Unparalleled disaster

Thousands of others were not that lucky. Many met their watery graves as the wrath of nature descended on these hills mostly frequented by pilgrim-tourists and transformed these hills into a ghastly graveyard strewn with corpses. Many were seasonal pilgrims and tourists who flock to these hills. Others were local villagers who have lost their centuries-old livelihood in a single stroke.

"The ferocity of the flash floods and the death toll is unparalleled in recent memory of this place," Dr Subhash Pandey, who runs the Bugyal at Srinagar, Garhwal district of Uttarakhand, an environmental protection NGO, told the Global Times.

Working in the Srinagar area as an environmental activist, Pandey said the areas around Srinagar, Kedarnath and Rudraprayag just cannot sustain tourists. "Their ecology is too fragile for the onslaught of visitors who bring with them plastics and other debris,'' he said.

Counting the dead itself has become an onerous task, and so has rescue work, with the water and incessant rains continuing to play havoc. The death toll has become a matter of dispute as the state government of Uttarakhand pegged it at 5,360 while many of those missing and presumed dead have yet to be included. Unofficial figures claim the death toll has crossed 10,000, which could make the Uttarakhand floods the worst natural disaster in India, nearly topping a similar number in the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004.

The disaster took its pound of flesh, but its intensity could have been avoided and many lives could have been saved.

"Official estimates indicate that 1,227 children are still missing in Uttarakhand post the flashfloods in June and nearly 25 lakh (250,000) children are currently out of school because while many schools have been entirely washed away, others have been transformed into shelters,'' Dinesh Joshi, who heads the Foundation for Rural Reconstruction and Community Empowerment (FORRCE) serving the vulnerable sections of the community in these hills, told the Global Times. He said the river bed has risen due to the huge amount of debris discarded by those living on the edges of the rivers flowing in these areas, especially near the Mandakini River.

Pushed to the brink

The mushrooming of structures like dams, hydroelectric projects, buildings, roads and the pressure of tourism has pushed this fragile Himalayan ecosystem toward the brink of a disaster where only one trigger is needed for its ultimate collapse, Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, told the Global Times. Then there is the illegal mining activity going on in several pockets.

"Nature has its own ways. It can tolerate to an extent the havoc that is being played. But when you stretch the extremes, it has its ways of striking back. Uttarakhand just witnessed nature's backlash," Devender Sharma, of the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security, told the Global Times.

It is not as if the warnings had not been sounded. A widely published report in April had been sent to the parliament one month before the calamity hit. The report, prepared by India's top audit body, said the state of Uttarakhand was badly unprepared for disasters.

"In this audit we have found that despite considerable progress in the setting up of institutions and creating funding arrangements, there are critical gaps in the preparedness levels for various disasters,'' the Comptroller and Auditor General report stated.

"While rainfall is natural, the root causes which have increased this great human tragedy include unregulated, unsafe and unplanned infrastructure development along the rivers and development of a large number of hydel projects in the fragile zone without proper checks and balances, lack of transparent studies and democratic decision-making processes. Flouting of rules is rampant in Uttarakhand, but the tragedy has shown that nature does not take bribes," Thakkar said.

Thakkar said roads come up overnight as the pressure of traffic increases. The age-old methods of walking or using ponies have given way to motor vehicles, be it trucks to maintain supplies or passenger vehicles to ferry the rising number of tourists or even the local population.

Data with the Uttarakhand State Transport Department confirms this. In 2005-06, roughly 83,000 vehicles were registered in the state. The figure rose to 176,000 in 2012-13. It is an established fact that there is a straight correlation between the increase in tourism and higher incidence of landslides, said Joshi.

Thakkar says that there are over 200 hydropower projects of various sizes at different levels of implementation, with some in operation, some under construction and others in the clearance and planning stage.

"Once the relief operations are over, the rains and the floods recede, this huge tragedy of the Himalayas will be all but forgotten. We will once again begin exploiting the hills, make our money and leave the poor hapless millions to face the fury of nature whenever it decides to strike back," Sharma said.