The northeast region is highly susceptible to devastating landslides, but its mitigation continues to be the elephant in the room.
Massive landslides left over 1200 tourists stranded in the Lachung area of Mangan district in Sikkim and claimed nine lives in the state. Landslides in Mizoram triggered by heavy downpours when cyclone Remal hit the state left 27 people dead last month. Landslides cutting off connectivity to the Barak valley at Sonapur on the Guwahati-Silchar road are a recurring event. All these are pointers to the increasing vulnerability of life and property in the region due to landslides. The problem is forgotten soon after the rainy season is over, as the primary focus is on rescue operations but less on averting the disaster. Kamrup (Metropolitan) District administration issuing warnings to residents living in hilly areas in Guwahati against potential landslide events is never pursued post-monsoon season, and it has become a ritualistic annual exercise. Public indifference to repeated warnings compounds the problem. Measures by the district authorities to prevent earth cutting remain on paper, and the required efforts to enforce the prohibition are not visible. The absence of drastic action or enforcement of prohibitions on earth-cutting emboldens encroachers to settle in new areas without any fear of the law. This results in the indiscriminate cutting of hill slopes and increases landslide susceptibility. Enough data on landslides is available in the NE states, as a lot of scientific studies and surveys on landslides in the region have been done, and experts have also recommended mitigation strategies. If the states do not utilize the data to initiate an actionable agenda to address the problem in time, some of the available data will soon become obsolete and will require fresh scientific studies to be conducted. The mitigation process also gets delayed as a result. An increase in extreme weather event like very heavy rainfall within a short window period on account of climate change impact has further aggravated landslide incidents in the region. Disruption in connectivity on account of landslides adversely affects life and livelihoods in the development-deficit region. The construction of highways, roads, and bridges in the region has helped create a business-friendly and investment-friendly environment. Disruption in connectivity and long delays in restoration affect business, trade, commerce, and industrial investment and lower the confidence of investors. It also poses the risk of affecting the tourism industry in the long run, as people travelling to the region for leisure and relaxation would not like to be trapped in uncertainty during the travel period. It has become an urgent necessity for the NE states to carefully scrutinise the proposals of infrastructure project developers to ascertain if landslide susceptibility in the project area has been adequately studied and addressed to reduce vulnerabilities. The National Disaster Management Authority lists learning lessons from previous landslide events in an area, early warning, and retrofitting solutions to manage slopes susceptible to landslides as some of the measures to mitigate landslide risk. The NDMA, in its “Compendium of Task Force Subgroup Reports on National Landslide Risk Management Strategy,” places emphasis on focusing on prevention in disaster management at all levels. “The culture of awareness generation and preparedness must be disseminated so that all people in society can become alert and aware in case of an emergency or before a disaster strikes to take some preventive measures,” it adds. Another key recommendation by the NDMA that has great relevance for the northeastern region is “a paradigm shift from post-disaster response to pre-disaster prevention, preparedness, and mitigation strategy.” Such recommendations can bear fruit only when states in the region prioritise them not only on policy papers but also in action on the ground. Raising awareness among people can make a difference in the approach of the states and focus on preventive measures, as the collective voice of the people can influence policy decisions. The enlarging scale of devastation in the region due to landslides also requires the states to quickly build their capacities to undertake faster rescue operations to manage things on a larger scale and restore damaged infrastructure to reduce economic losses. Capacity building for human resources deployed in disaster management is a continuous process, while augmenting restoration capacity requires substantial funding for procuring advanced equipment. States in the region cannot entirely depend on central government funding to meet these requirements, and they should also plan resource allocations in such a way that wasteful and unproductive expenditures are cut and reallocated to meet fund requirements for landslide risk mitigation and other disaster risk prevention on a massive scale. Weighing the economic losses due to long delays in the restoration of landslide-affected infrastructure and compensating for the loss of lives and properties with identifiable unproductive expenditures can help the states prioritise an increasing amount of resource allocations for landslide risk prevention. It is time for the states to go back to the drawing board to articulate a better response.