Continuity of waste and cyclic catastrophe: The Himalayan rivers’ not-so-natural fury

GUEST COLUMN

Arunima Naithani and Ayush Joshi

There is a paradox at the heart of Himalayan development – a region that is now facing what the Supreme Court has recently called a ‘serious existential crisis’. For decades, mountain people demanded better houses, roads, hospitals and tourist stays in fragile mountain valleys – and governments, aided by private investors, delivered in the name of growth. But when rivers breach their banks, the very same people invoke the language of experts who had long warned against unplanned construction on the landscape. What began as a collective aspiration for development has become a collective reality of devastation – driven by local ambitions, political facilitation, and mounting ecological costs. And when disaster strikes, the river does not pause to distinguish between an informal settlement, a family-run homestay, a tea shop or a star resort. The way of the river is always impartial: it carries forward what we have chosen to neglect.

The continuity of waste

The La Nina-driven catastrophe of 2025 that we just witnessed massively across in the Ganga Himalayan basin exemplifies this paradox. Primarily due to higher rates of warming and increase in Land Surface Temperature (LST) there are now reduced gaps in these now frequent natural disasters like Uttarkashi 2002, Kedarnath 2013, Rishiganga 2021, Jyotirmath 2023 and Dharali 2025. The typically stronger and above-average monsoon did not just create disaster. What turned heavy rains into mayhem was also the aggravated waste due to unprecedented construction already layered onto the fragile river flood plain zone.

It did not just transport the debris alone, but also anything else that comes on the way that hinders the natural flow which raises serious concerns on the threats to biodiversity as these places are mostly used by tourists where all sorts of garbage is generated.  It is not just the problem of high rainfall intensity but also the continuous layering of human discards – wet waste from hotels, solid waste, plastic bags from roadside stalls, broken foundations of abandoned projects and hills of demolition rubble which in these geographies have interestingly no solutions whatsoever.

India cites an estimate of 62 billion tonnes of waste, but that figure reflects only the urban scale. As monsoons every year in the Himalayan region become both a hazard and a conveyor for uncollected waste – turning every flood into a recycling of the past decade’s garbage, what about the unaccounted debris from rural roads, guesthouses and small towns erased in every flood? Where does it go? What silently accumulates in silt beds, waiting to resurface? Each flashflood does not just sweep down rocks and mud. It ferries back decades of discarded human choices, visible and invisible, into rivers that never forget.

The cyclic catastrophe

From a technical standpoint, the mechanism is simple yet brutal. Flood pulses extrapolate sediment and contaminants stored for years in riverbeds, turning what had been a distributed, manageable problem into an acute, high-concentration torrent downstream. In both Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, turbidity levels spiked far beyond the capacity of treatment plants, forcing shutdowns and cutting urban water supplies. In the absence of engineered solutions, the monsoon becomes the default waste-disposal mechanism – one that exports local problems downstream. Is it then an incidental engineering failure? Or is it a predictable outcome of designing urban water systems around average conditions while ignoring upstream pulses.

The biggest technological design failure has started to appear broadly, for instance, in Uttarakhand while upgradation on planning, implementation and operationalising has been delayed and the outcome is impacting the overall growth as well as development of the State. The greater amount of economic loss in the ecosystem services by retaining the vegetation loss and weighing it with infrastructure and concrete reflects in the increased runoff and thus aggravating further the overall rate of flow. This eventually enhances the floating waste to pass on to damaging aquatic life. When rivers ensure it is a basin-wide hazard, we still treat Himalayan waste as a civic/municipal, local governance problem like in Nagrota, Dharali, Manali or Sikkim. Do we know how much disaster debris and garbage from past events still lies unaccounted for, waiting to be remobilised? Are we willing to accept the fact that each flood is not a fresh event but also a recycling of old waste plus new rainfall?

The consequences further extend far downstream, towards the cost of contamination or infrastructure repair. This year alone in Uttarakhand, we witnessed disasters in places including Uttarkashi, Pauri, Chamoli, Dehradun, Bageshwar, Almora and all the way till Pithoragarh and with hundreds of landslides, road washed away and sinking events. Each historical catastrophe echoes as “nature’s fury,” yet each reflects the same cycle – “press and pulse” interactions, neglect and catastrophe, profit and displacement. The Himalayan tributaries are not isolated streams but pipelines of untreated sewage, plastics and disaster debris into the Ganga. When two treatment plants in Noida and Ghaziabad shut down this year because of Himalayan silt surges, it became clear that a waste heap in a mountain hamlet can become a metropolitan public health crisis within days. 

Shared risk and shared responsibility

Finally, what happened in the mountainous regions is the question of shared risk and shared responsibility. Whose waste is being carried, and who bears the cost when it resurfaces? As witnessed, marginalised families lost homes, small hoteliers lost livelihoods and investors saw assets washed away. Yet official discourse still reduces it all to “local negligence”. The fact is that the damage is undeniably collective – economic, social, ecological, psychological, but the responsibility is not equally shouldered. A new ‘politics of rivers’ is long overdue be it basin-level planning, regulation of fragile floodplains, resilient water systems, and above all, recognition that rivers like Ganga and Yamuna are ‘living entities’ and not waste pipes. Yet these don’t whisper along countless layers of administration.

Protecting Himalayan rivers is not a mere sentiment, but a matter of survival. The Himalayan geography still holds forests and vegetation that can buffer these shocks.We are still fortunate to have the remaining amount left especially around the riverine body that needs conserving efforts not for the sake of tree lovers but for conservation of the civilisation. We need to set precedented solutions and implement strategised plans that are not limited to mere economic growth but to an overall development. For if rivers remember, then each monsoon will return with what we choose to forget. So if development was our collective aspiration, then resilience must be our collective responsibility, for the rivers will not forget what we leave behind.

(Naithani is a social science researcher and Joshi is an environmental technologist; views expressed are personal)