Landslide Havoc: Is Dispur Serious?

GUWAHATI: With the monsoon approaching, residents of Guwahati are in for the perennial shock – landslides claiming lives.

There are 19 hillocks in and around the city, and all of them have been encroached upon. Ten years back, the Soil Conservation Department found that 24 percent area of the hillocks here had human habitation, leading to the damage of 32 percent forest cover. Obviously, with an increase in the encroachment of the hillocks in the past decade, the percentage of areas covered under human habitation on the hillocks must have gone up much.

People have been losing life due to landslides in Guwahati – six people were killed in 2017 and three in 2018. Strangely enough, nothing tangible is done to arrest the menace – neither from the State government nor from the district administration.

When there were a hue and cry following deaths due of landslides some four years back, Dispur entrusted Assam Engineering College (AEC) to conduct a survey on the menace of the landslide in Guwahati. AEC was prompt enough to submit its report. In its report, AEC identified 351 city areas as landslide-prone sites. AEC also recommended some measures to arrest the menace. However, the recommendations are in cold storage, as usual. Some of the reasons for landslides pointed out in the AEC survey are “unscientific construction of houses, random earth-cutting and lack of plantation”.

With the monsoon barely a few days away, the Kamrup (M) district administration has served notice to some 200 landslide-prone households to vacate. The one-month time given for vacating the houses has been over, but none of the households paid heed to the notice.

Based on past experience, official sources say that any forcible eviction by the administration is lethal enough to become an issue. They also feel that most of the people living on such landslide-prone areas are temporary ones who have no alternative places to live in. They don’t pay any heed to the notices because they have no alternative dwellings, nor can the administration give them alternative places with roofs overhead, the officials say. Thus, despite danger lurking over them, such people stay put in landslide-prone areas. Sometimes, it so happens that a few people erect their houses atop hills with scientific safety measures, but due to unscientific and unscrupulous earth-cutting by their neighbours such houses may come under threat.

The problem needs political will for its just solution. This will lead to eviction of many families and a total halt to random earth-cutting. Now the problem hinges over the political will of the government – whether it wants to make the hillocks free from encroachment or simply let people encroach them and allow the situation to aggravate.

Also Read: NRC Sewa Kendra of Dispur Staff Caught Accepting Bribe At Ganeshguri