Road to hell
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It is a classic example of unsustainable development. What should have been a mean to progress and prosperity is rather inviting environmental degradations and increasing natural disasters. This is what happens when you drive down the wrong road.
A soon-to-be launched official report on the state of forests across the country has several interesting findings. But what catches one’s imagination the most perhaps is this: A bird’s eye-view of the forests in Chure region offers you what appears to be “fishbone.”
The main road constructed in several forested parts of the region looks like the lateral line of a fish while the cleared up stretches of forests on both the sides of the road resemble its bones.
“We call it the ‘fishbone structure’ in forest degradation term,” says Chudamani Joshi, the coordinator of the Forest Resource Assessment in Nepal project. “This can be seen in both satellite and aerial pictures.”
A fascinating analogy of the anatomy of the fish indeed — but a sad sight of land and forest degradation.
The trouble is the number of such “fishbone” is rising rapidly across the Chure region as roads are built and the forests on both the sides see unsustainable human encroachments and illegal timber smuggling.
Experts working in the area say no sooner roads are built in the region, the first activity to be seen is the movement of timber smugglers because transporting logs then becomes lot easier.
As patches of forests get cleared like that, people find it convenient to settle in such places, putting further pressure on the forest resources.
“Unless agencies working for the protection and conservation of forests and their stakeholders do something about it, the situation is going to get worse,” says Joshi, also a program coordinator with the Embassy of Finland that has helped the government in preparing the forest assessment report.
The news of newly built roads leading to deforestation comes hot on the heels of uncontrolled and widespread collection of boulders and sands from the beds and sides of rivers in the region.
Thinning out forests leading to loosening soil, and at the same time unsustainable collection of boulders and sand allowing rivers to overrun their banks — a double trouble lurks in the Chure region.
To the north, it’s even worse. Rampant road construction in the Mahabharata range has not only led to massive loss of vegetation but has also seen sharp rise in landslides.
Bulldozers, rollers, and excavators are making their way even at near-impossible heights — all in the name of reaching development to the remote and unconnected areas.
Not to talk about the government and communities’ projects, roads are being built even by individuals, households and the private sector.
“Without the knowledge and permission of the authorities both at the local and the central level, individuals are excavating the mountain sides to reach roads to their fields and even cowsheds,” says chief engineer Shankar Prasad Pandit with the District Technological Office in Kaski.
“This is happening in most of the hilly areas across the country and this unsustainable use of the land is sure to invite disasters.”
Kaski, where Pandit works, for instance, has seen significant rise in mudslides in recent years. Last monsoon, the district was one of the most severely hit by landslides killing locals and displacing many families.
While the district has seen haphazard construction of roads on mountain slopes, the lakes below have had to bear the brunt of huge load of sediments from human activity-triggered
landslides.
“Many lakes have disappeared from our district because of such environmental degradation,” says Pandit.
Other districts have also seen an increase in the number of landslides.
Records with the newly established Natural Emergency Operations Centre of the Home Ministry shows there were 120 incidents of landslides across the country between January and September this year.
As extreme weather events continue to rise, erratic rainfalls like torrential rains in short span of time have begun to cause soil erosions that set the stage for landslides.
These are the regions that already have fragile ecology and are more susceptible to climatic changes.
And these are where roads are being built all over without conducting the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA), a legally mandatory process to assess what impacts would construction projects have in the local environment.
As if the law did not exist, even local government bodies in many places have been constructing rural roads wherever they wanted to.
More than 80 percent of the budget of local bodies like district development committees has been going to transportation sector, of which road building is the major component.
Although official data shows around 35,000 kilometres of rural road has been built across the country so far, knowledgeable development experts say the actual figure is nearly double than that.
If true, that would certainly have been good news had there been no ecological losses and increasing incidents of disasters. Or, at least if there were safeguards and preventions to minimise the impacts.
But when road access leads to land degradation resulting into people’s deaths and their displacement and when it causes deforestation weakening the ecosystem, it becomes a striking example of unsustainable development.
A road, particularly least developed and climatically vulnerable country like Nepal should never take.
Khadka is a BBC journalist based in London
navin.khadka@gmail.com
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