Western Himalayas

As Hari Singh led me towards his fields, I wondered if he was trying to play a joke on me. Large rocks were scattered in the area and there was no sight of any arable land, neither was there any clue of the irrigation channel which Singh claimed ran through his farm.

Ranjit Singh is elated that someone has come to his village enquiring about his work. He says not many people recognise the worth of traditional occupations like his. “This is especially true of government officials and policy makers who feel everything old is useless”, he points out.

Ranjit is the kohli of Mjately village in Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh.

When Basanti Devi entered the village of Bachwadi in Uttarakhand's Takula block on one of her routine visits, she knew that something was wrong. Instead of the normal hustle, groups of men stood about talking quietly. She asked them what the matter was.

I could just about see a small makeshift shelter with a yellow canopy. As I made my way through the small stream and climbed uphill, I saw a JCB machine trying to clear a path. Further up the road, female voices speaking the local dialect started to emerge. A small hearth surrounded by utensils and jars of tea, sugar and lentils greeted me at the entrance.

 Visitors and the Uttarakhand Tourism Department liken the mountain to 'devbhoomi' or the heavens but it isn't often that a villager of the area echoes those sentiments. Most of them are weary of the unending struggle to live in harmony with those steep slopes that make all manner of infrastructure difficult.

That is why the villagers of Indwal Grampanchayat come as a welcome change. 'Yeh to Jannat hain' one of them told me. "This is heaven".

"We did everything ourselves", said the ebuillent Bhuvaneshwari Devi. "We took the cement up, carried the sand, everything! And we even told them where to place the tank"! She went on to narrate how the women's group of which she is a member, taught the men of the village that siting a tank in the stream will place it in danger of being washed away. It is better, they said, to place it beside the stream and further protect it with walls of rock.

The Himalayas were born of continental shift when the Indian subcontinent challenged the larger Asian landmass. This tortured birth still continues making the region susceptible to landslides and earthquakes. In addition to this geological fact, climate change is altering rainfall patterns and leading to more instances of very intense rainfall, which further increases the problem of landslides.