Jahan ped apni bhasha mein bolte the, jahan nadiyan bina saaz ke gaati thi, aaj woh dhaal pehle jaisi nahi rahi.(Where the trees once spoke in their own tongue, where the rivers sang without an instrument, those slopes are no longer what they once were.)
Nature rarely reacts without warning. It gives repeated signals, but those warnings often go unheeded until the consequences become difficult to ignore. Uttarakhand has been sending those signals for years. I am not sure we have truly listened.
Right now, forests in Dehradun are coming down. The Rajaji landscape, one of the last remaining elephant corridors in North India, is being cut through for the 4-laning of the ₹743-crore Rishikesh–Bhaniawala highway, a 20-km stretch that has already cost thousands of trees.Citizens and lawyers have been standing outside the NHAI office asking a simple question: Why is this deforestation taking place during the monsoon, the very season when we are supposed to be planting trees?
There was also the widely shared video from Khalanga Forest in Dehradun showing trees being felled in broad daylight for what was reportedly VIP convenience.Many concerned citizens have called for observing "Black Harela," turning a festival meant to celebrate greenery into a protest against its destruction.
These are not an isolated incidents.
RTI data show that more than 46,000 hectares of forest land have been diverted for "development" since Uttarakhand became a state.
36 people have already lost their lives this year in human-wildlife conflict, and that number continues to rise as shrinking forests leave animals with less space to survive.
I keep coming back to this question, and I never really find an answer. Does the government sitting in Dehradun actually understand what Devbhoomi means? Not as a line on a tourism poster. Not as a hashtag during election season. But as a word our grandparents spoke with the same reverence they reserved for their own elders.
A land of gods is not simply a place with many temples. It is a place where the mountain, the river, the tree, and the person were never separate entities. For generations, people understood how much they could take from nature without upsetting that balance.
That understanding seems to be missing today. Or perhaps it is not missing, it is simply being ignored. Master plans are violated, illegal colonies quietly regularised, and roads carved through wildlife corridors that few people ever asked for. These are policy choices, repeated over time. A government that continues making such choices after repeated disasters must also accept responsibility for their consequences.
After all, this is the state that gave India the Chipko Andolan. In 1973, the women of Chamoli wrapped their arms around trees so that the axe would have to pass through them first. It reflected a worldview in which forests were seen not simply as resources, but as an essential part of community life and survival.
More than 50 years later, people are openly asking why Uttarakhand needs another Chipko movement. Why are citizens once again forced to defend forests through protests instead of relying on sound public policy and environmental governance?
This is not the first warning.
In June 2013, Kedarnath witnessed one of India's worst Himalayan disasters, claiming nearly 6,000 lives as extreme rainfall, a glacial lake breach, and construction along the riverbed combined into a catastrophic event.
In February 2021, a glacier burst near Chamoli claimed nearly 200 more lives. Then, on 5 August 2025, Dharali, a small village on the route to Gangotri, was devastated within minutes. A wall of water, mud, and boulders swept through the Kheer Ganga, destroying homes, hotels, an Army camp, and other infrastructure.
Scientists continue to debate whether Dharali was triggered by a cloudburst or the failure of a landslide-dammed lake. But geologists broadly agree on one point: much of the destroyed market had been built directly on the river's historical floodplain.
Kedarnath. Chamoli. Dharali. Different valleys, but a familiar pattern. Riverbeds encroached upon. Slopes tunnelled through. Forests cleared for roads that often serve tourism more than the communities living there. These events are often described as natural disasters, yet growing evidence suggests that land-use decisions and infrastructure development have increasingly shaped their impacts. Once the debris is cleared and public attention fades, the cycle begins again somewhere else.
I want to be careful about what's actually being taken here, because "the environment" can sound abstract: trees in a ledger, hectares in an RTI reply. It isn't abstract.
It is the leopard that has nowhere left to go except into a village. It is the elephant that once crossed a quiet forest but now has to cross a busy highway, increasing the risks for both wildlife and people. It is the farmer whose spring has dried up because the forest that once stored and slowly released water no longer exists.
Every tree removed for infrastructure carries trade-offs that extend beyond travel time, affecting water security, wildlife habitat, and the livelihoods of nearby communities.
This is where the story stops being just an ecological problem and becomes something far more personal.
When the ground beneath you no longer feels stable, when landslides wash away roads every monsoon, springs dry up, jobs disappear, and there is little left to depend on, people leave. Not because they want to, but because the mountains have become increasingly difficult places to build secure lives.
The numbers are difficult to ignore. The 2011 Census recorded 1,048 villages in Uttarakhand with no remaining residents. The state's Rural Development and Migration Commission found that another 734 villages were abandoned between 2011 and 2018. Current estimates suggest that the number of fully abandoned villages has crossed 1,700, while a 2018 CAG audit identified nearly 3,946 villages with fewer than 10 households remaining.
The Migration Commission also reported that more than 1.19 lakh people left their villages over a single decade, about half in search of stable employment, while the rest were driven by the lack of schools, healthcare, and other essential services.
In Pauri Garhwal, election officials eventually stopped sending polling teams to more than 1,500 villages because there was nobody left to vote.
Kholi ka taala jang kha gaya; chaukhat par sirf dhool baithi hai. Ghar ab bhi khada hai, lekin usmein zindagi nahi rahi.
(Rust has eaten away the lock on the door. The house still stands, but life has quietly moved away.)
This is how Uttarakhand gradually filled up with what people now call "ghost villages," locked houses, empty homes scattered across entire hillsides, and terraced fields slowly returning to the wild. People moved to Dehradun, Haldwani, Delhi, or wherever they could find work and more secure lives.
Then comes the quieter reality.
The same homes, and the same land that families held onto through generations of hardship, are sold, often for far less than they are worth, to people with no relationship to them at all. No memory of the deodar tree an old man planted decades ago. No understanding of what that land meant to those who lived there. Just another plot. Another resort. Another investment.
I am writing this from a distance, as someone who now knows these hills mostly through news alerts and photographs shared by those who never left. And it still feels personal in a way only home can.
I remember what Devbhoomi used to feel like, tedhi sadak aur sidhe log (crooked roads and straight-hearted people). It was never perfect. But it carried a sense of balance that is becoming harder to find.
Watching local people stand outside government offices once again, asking that forests not be cut unnecessarily and that environmental rules be followed, is to watch communities demand that existing safeguards and planning norms are respected.
Every year, the challenges become more visible. Every year, Devbhoomi moves a little further away from the ideals that gave it its name.
Sumitranandan Pant, our own poet from Kausani, spent a lifetime writing about the Himalayas not as scenery, but as living landscapes woven into everyday life.
That is the inheritance at stake: not only land, but also a way of understanding and living with the Himalayas.
Hum jo chale gaye, woh bhi pahad ke the. Jo reh gaye, woh bhi pahad ke hain. Sawal sirf itna hai ki pahad kis disha mein ja raha hai.
(Those of us who left still belong to the mountains. Those who stayed do too. The question is where the mountains are heading from here.)
The warnings have been clear, repeated, and well documented. What happens next will depend less on nature than on the choices we make about development, planning, and conservation.
Barkha Manral is a working professional focused on policymaking and development at India Internet Research Organisation (iiro.in).
