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The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) directed all departments and organisations associated with survey and data collection in Joshimath, which has been hit by land subsidence, not to interact with the media or share any data on social media.
The direction came after the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said in a report that the town in Uttarakhand sank 5.4 cm between December 27 and January 8. The report and the satellite images were later withdrawn from the ISRO website.
It is observed that various government institutions are releasing data related to the subject matter (Joshimath) on social media platforms and they are interacting with media with their own interpretations of the situation. It is creating confusion not only among the affected residents but also among the citizens of the country.
It said the issue of institutions talking to the media was highlighted during a meeting with Union Home Minister Amit Shah, and added that an expert group had been formed to assess the situation on the ground in Joshimath.
The communication by the NDMA was directed to the officials of Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Dehradun; Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee; Central Building Research Institute; Roorkee; Geological Survey of India, Kolkata; National Remote Sensing Centre of the Indian Space Research Organisation; National institute Of Disaster Management, New Delhi; Indian Institute Of Remote Sensing, Dehradun; National Geographical Research Institute, Hyderabad; Central Ground Water Board, New Delhi; and Surveyor General Of India, among others.
You are requested to sensitise the organisation about this matter and refrain from posting anything on social media until the final report of the expert group is released.
The satellite images released by the National Remote Sensing Centre of the ISRO showed that the central part of Joshimath town, Army helipad and Narsingh Mandir – the winter seat of Lord Badrinath – had witnessed rapid subsidence.
The kind of sentiments being created across the world that entire Uttarakhand is in danger. This is not right. I understand that development is happening very speedily in the State, as said by some people.
States
Neelakurinji sanctuary stays on paper (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
Though the Union government has included Neelakurinji (Strobilanthes kunthiana) on the list of protected plants from the State, the proposal for a Neelakurinji sanctuary in Idukki still remains a distant dream.
On October 6, 2006, former forest minister Benoy Viswom had announced a 32-sq km Neelakurinji sanctuary at the Kottakamboor-Vattavada area in Devikulam taluk, Munnar. The park aimed at protecting Neelakurinji plants. But after 16 years, the proposed sanctuary is still on paper.
Certain portions in the Vattavada panchayat have been included in the sanctuary. The residents are unable to even procure possession certificates for their lands.
Vattavada panchayat vice-president K. Velayudhan said that the delay in fixing the sanctuary’s boundaries had impacted the lives of the local residents.
The official said that without a government order, he cannot begin the settlement process, which is the demarcation of the sanctuary area and human habitations.
Without fixing the boundaries, we can’t finalise the buffer zone boundaries in the panchayat. The settlement officer must complete the process immediately.
K. Jayaprakash, a resident of Vattavada, said the farmers had been living in the village for hundreds of years. As per the government order, the proposed sanctuary is in 3,200 hectares of land. But, the actual area is only around some 2,900 hectares.
To start the process, the government should issue an order for empowering an official to conduct the settlement process. I hope the order will be issued soon.
A Forest department official said that the sanctuary was a continuum of the Neelakurinji plants from the Eravikulam National Park.
News
U.S. official slams China’s aggressive moves on LAC (Page no. 7)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
The U.S. feels China has not taken any “good faith steps” to resolve the conflict along the Line of Actual Control and is continuing its “aggressive moves”, said senior U.S. official Donald Lu, during a visit to Delhi where he held talks with officials of the Ministry of External Affairs.
Although the U.S. has said that India and China should resolve through direct negotiations the “border conflict” that has been escalating since China amassed troops along the LAC in April 2020.
It was the U.S. assessment that China has not made positive moves in that direction, referring specifically to the recently attempted incursions by PLA soldiers in Arunachal Pradesh’s Tawang region in December.
Mr. Lu, who addressed the India-U.S. Forum during the visit, also disclosed that National Security Advisor Ajit Doval will travel to the U.S. later this month for high-level talks on critical and emerging technology, including Indo-U.S. cooperation on quantum computing, artificial intelligence (AI), 5G-telecommunication networks and bio-technology. Mr. Lu’s talks in Delhi was in preparation for the NSA talks as well as the upcoming visit of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to India in March to attend the G-20 Foreign Minister’s meeting and the annual Raisina Dialogue conference hosted by the MEA.
PRC (People’s Republic of China) has taken good faith steps to resolve the border conflict. Quite the opposite, we have seen aggressive Chinese moves along India’s border, most recently in India’s North Eastern States.
In 2020, when the Chinese military attacked an Indian border post in the Galwan valley, the U.S. was the first to criticise Chinese aggression and to offer support to India.
The comments also come months after China reacted sharply to similar comments by the Commander of U.S. Army Pacific General Charles A. Flynn, who had referred to PLA moves in its region as “destabilising and coercive behaviour” on an “incremental and insidious path”.
The then-Chinese MFA spokesperson Zhao Lijian, who has since been posted as Deputy Director General of Border Affairs, had said that the U.S. was “trying to add fuel to fire” and called Gen. Flynn’s comments “despicable”.
EIA must be done before sanction of urban projects: SC (Page no. 7)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
The Supreme Court has urged legislators and policy experts to ensure that Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) studies are done before giving the green signal for urban development projects in India’s cities.
In a judgment, a Bench of Justices B.R. Gavai and B.V. Nagarathna referred to media reports of how haphazard urban development has ruined the ‘Garden City’ of Bengaluru as witnessed during a major spell of rain in September 2022.
The judgment came in regard to a proposal to convert independent residential units into apartments in Chandigarh Phase
It is high time that the legislature, the executive and policymakers at the Centre as well as at the State levels take note of the damage to the environment on account of haphazard developments and take a call to take necessary measures to ensure that the development does not damage the environment. It is necessary that a proper balance is struck between sustainable development and environmental protection.
It said that the legislature, the governments and experts should put their heads together “to make necessary provisions for carrying out Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) studies before permitting urban development”.
The apex court directed the copies of the judgment to be forwarded to the Cabinet Secretary to the Union of India and to the Chief Secretaries of all the States to take note of it. “We hope that the Union of India as well as the State governments will take earnest steps in that regard.
The judgment referred to a publication by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which underscored that more than half of the world’s population was now living in urban areas.
The publication further noted that by the year 2050, more than half of Africa and Asia’s population would live in towns and cities.
It recognised that City Development Strategies (CDSs) have shown how to integrate environmental concerns in long-term city visioning exercises.
The publication defines EIA to be an analytical process or procedure that systematically examines the possible environmental consequences of the implementation of a given activity (project).
It is aimed to ensure that the environmental implications of decisions related to a given activity are taken into account before the decisions are made.
World
China and Bhutan agree to ‘push forward’ border talks (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
Officials from China and Bhutan on, January 13, 2022 agreed to “push forward” a three-step roadmap as an expert group meeting held boundary talks in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming.
A joint release said the two sides “had an in-depth exchange of views on implementing the MOU on the Three-Step Roadmap for Expediting the China-Bhutan Boundary Negotiations, and reached positive consensus.”
The Bhutan delegation, led by Dasho Letho Tobdhen Tangbi, Secretary of the International Boundaries of Bhutan, met with a Chinese delegation led by Hong Liang, Director General of the Department of Boundary and Ocean Affairs of the Foreign Ministry.
Both sides “agreed to simultaneously push forward the implementation of all the steps of the Three-Step Roadmap” as well as increase the frequency of the expert group meetings and to keep contact through diplomatic channels on holding the 25th Round of China-Bhutan Boundary talks as soon as possible.
Bhutan and China in October 2021 signed an agreement on a “Three-Step Roadmap For Expediting the Bhutan-China Boundary Negotiations”. Bhutan’s Foreign Ministry said then the MoU on the Three-Step Roadmap would “provide a fresh impetus to the Boundary Talks.”
Negotiations in the 24 rounds have focused broadly on two areas of dispute – Doklam and areas along the western borders of Bhutan and near the India-China-Bhutan trijunction, and the Jakarlung and Pasamlung valleys along Bhutan’s northern borders.
However, China has recently appeared to broaden the scope of the dispute by also bringing in areas along Bhutan’s eastern borders in Sakteng wildlife sanctuary, which borders India’s state of Arunachal Pradesh. The Chinese Foreign Ministry subsequently referred to disputes in “western, middle and eastern” sections.
Some observers viewed that move as a pressure tactic to push Bhutan to accept China’s earlier reported offer of a swap of Doklam in the west, which Beijing views strategically, in exchange for Bhutan to retain its northern territories.
The western areas, measuring 269 sq km, are a particularly sensitive bone of contention given the proximity to India, especially after the 2017 stand-off between Indian and Chinese troops in Doklam. Since the stand-off, China has stepped up its military presence in the disputed plateau.
Science
Reconstructing past deep-water circulations of Indian Ocean (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Tech)
Global overturning circulation — the equatorward transport of cold, deep waters and the poleward transport of warm, near-surface waters — controls ocean heat distribution and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, thus playing a critical role in global climate.
Studies have indicated that tectonically driven changes in the ocean gateways such as the closure of the Central American Seaway, a body of water that once separated North America from South America, since the late Miocene period, had a dramatic impact on the circulation.
It is thought that tectonic changes might have led to the formation of two separate water bodies — northern component water in the North Atlantic and Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) in the Southern Ocean.
Consequently, it is also hypothesised that there would have been large-scale changes in the Deep Water Circulation (DWC) in the oceans across the world, thus impacting global climate through ocean-atmosphere carbon dioxide and heat exchanges.
But these formulations have remained untested due to lack of adequate data. Some records that are available are from near the deep-water formation regions mostly from the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans. Hence, they might not necessarily reflect the impact and change in deep water circulation.
Now, the Indian Ocean does not have any major deep-water formations of its own. It acts only as a host for NCW and AABW.
Further, the northern parts of the Indian Ocean are located at one of the terminal ends of the GOC, far away from the deep-water formation regions and oceanic seaways. These specific features could make the northern Indian Ocean an ideal basin to do this.
Few studies have been carried out in the Indian Ocean to reconstruct past deep water circulations based on iron-manganese crust records and authigenic neodymium isotope composition of sediment cores.
But iron-manganese crusts are situated at deeper depths and are bathed only by AABW, making it suitable only for the reconstruction of the history of AABW, and authigenic neodymium isotope records are available only from the Bay of Bengal region.
Joshimath: a victim of the Himalayan development model (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Tech)
It is now clear that all warnings in the Mishra Committee report almost 50 years back went unheeded in the race to develop Joshimath by successive governments since 2001.
It was clearly pointed out that Joshimath township is situated on debris of earlier landslides and would slip someday.
But development continued at a rapid pace with heavy construction activities such as initiating small hydro power projects at Tapovan and Rishi Ganga, tunnelling, road widening and mushrooming of buildings with scant regard to safety to accommodate increased tourist inflow, and disappearance of the green cover in the region. All elements of a disaster were primed and only a trigger was needed to initiate the crisis.
That trigger was provided by nature in February 2021 when a catastrophic flow of rock and glacier ice mass descended into Rishiganga and Dhauliganga valleys and flowed into Alaknanda river at Joshimath.
This extraordinary mass flow of mobile debris that contained boulders greater than 20 metres, scoured the valley walls up to 200 metres.
On the way, the half-finished Tapovan dam was washed away and the tunnel was inundated with water. The strong and violent flow sufficiently eroded the base of hill slopes in Alaknanda valley in Joshimath.
In a recent study, scientists from the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, Dehradun, observed that Joshimath and the surrounding areas have been sinking at a rate of 6.5 cm (2.5 inches) per year based on satellite data from July 2020 to March 2022. Their findings correlate well with the base erosion of Joshimath slope along the Alaknanda river.
The impact of the event was such that at Kanpur, at a distance of about 900 km from Joshimath, an unprecedented spike (80 times higher) in suspended sediment (turbidity) was observed in a canal that draws directly from the Ganga, making this event the most likely candidate for triggering the present subsidence in Joshimath.
Only two events in the past can rival this incident — the 1970 Huascarán avalanche in Peru and the 2013 Kedarnath flash flood in Uttarakhand.
Land subsidence along slopes happens due to displacement of underground material under the influence of two important factors of gravity and water action.
It is a geohazard in the mountainous region controlled by a variety of subsurface displacement mechanisms that are not very well understood.
FAQ
What does Centre want in Bhopal gas case? (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 2, Governance)
The Union of India calls the Bhopal gas leak tragedy the world’s largest industrial disaster. On the intervening night of December 2-3, 1984, methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas escaped from the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, leading to hundreds of deaths.
Thirty-nine years after the incident, a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court led by Justice S. K. Kaul has reserved its judgment on a curative petition filed by the Centre in November 2010 to enhance the $470 million (about ₹725 crore at the then exchange rate) compensation fixed in a 1989 settlement reached with Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), now a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow Chemicals, with the imprimatur of the apex court.
The government has sought an additional amount of ₹675.96 crore in compensation from the pesticide company. The UCC has refused to pay a “farthing more”. The court made it clear that it would not “try” the curative petition like an ordinary suit and reopen the settlement.
The basis of the $470 million settlement reached on May 4, 1989 was that there were only around 3,000 death cases in the gas leak incident.
The government’s curative petition in 2010 said the actual figure is 5,295 deaths. However, a fortnightly report submitted by the Welfare Commissioner, Bhopal Gas Victims, and which is a part of the case records in the Supreme Court, shows the number of deaths have increased to 5,479 as on December 15, 2022.
The Commissioner’s report further said the number of cases of cancer and renal failure were 16,739 and 6,711, respectively.
Likewise, the curative petition said the estimated numbers for temporary disability and minor injury cases were 20,000 and 50,000, respectively, in 1989.
But they are actually 35,455 and 5,27,894. The government’s chart in the apex court shows that the total number of cases of deaths, disability, injuries, loss of property and livestock have increased to 5,74,376 from the 2,05,000 “assumed” on May 4, 1989.
The Bhopal Gas Peedith Mahila Udyog Sanghathan, a body formed by the gas leak victims, and Bhopal Gas Peedith Sangharsh Sahayog Samiti, composed of responsible citizens, both represented by senior advocate Sanjay Parikh, have told the court that the Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Centre has medical records of over 4.5 lakh gas victims spanning 22 years.
Where do Indian cities stand on toxic air? (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
Four years since the Centre launched the National Clean Air Campaign (NCAP), analysts found that progress has been slow and pollution only incrementally reduced in most cities.
Following years of evidence that many Indian cities were among the most polluted in the world, the government launched the NCAP that committed funds as well as set targets for 131 of India’s most polluted cities on January 10, 2019.
The 131 cities are called non-attainment cities, as they did not meet the national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for the period of 2011-15 under the National Air Quality Monitoring Programme (NAMP).
The country’s current, annual average prescribed limits for the two main classes of particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10) are 40 micrograms/per cubic metre (ug/m3) and 60 micrograms/per cubic metre.
The NCAP initially set a target of reducing key air pollutants PM10 and PM2.5 by 20-30% in 2024, taking the pollution levels in 2017 as the base year to improve upon.
In September 2022, however, the Centre moved the goalposts and set a new target of a 40% reduction in particulate matter concentration, but by 2026.
To meet these targets, approximately ₹6,897.06 crore has been disbursed to the cities by the government. For administering funds, the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), which coordinates the programme, looks at a city’s PM10 levels — the relatively larger, coarser particles.
However, PM2.5, the smaller, more dangerous particles, aren’t monitored as robustly in all cities, mostly due to the lack of equipment. Cities were required to quantify improvement starting from 2020-21, which requires 15% and more reduction in the annual average PM10 concentration and a concurrent increase in “good air” days to at least 200. Anything fewer will be considered ‘low’ and the funding, provided by the Centre via the Environment Ministry, consequently reduced.
An analysis of the four-year performance of the NCAP by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), found that only 38 of the 131 cities that were given annual pollution reduction targets under agreements signed between State Pollution Control Boards (SPCBs), Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) and the Centre managed to meet the targets for FY21-22.