Located on the river banks at the confluence of Rishi Ganga and Dhauli Ganga rivers, Raini is the birth place of the ‘Chipko Movement’ that was started by Gaura Devi in 1973. The village falls in the Chamoli District of Uttarakhand.
A year after the village was struck by flash floods on February 7 last year, it is still waiting to be shifted elsewhere. The residents fear that their village will be washed away if it rains. While Raini lost two of its residents to the flash floods on 7th February 2021, the village itself is sinking with each passing day as the geologists found the slope on which the village stands, to be unstable and has been declared unfit for habitation in the wake of the disaster.
The Flash Floods
Exactly a year ago, on the 7th of February 2021, at around 11 am, Raini village in Chamoli district of Uttarakhand was hit by a flash flood, a flash flood triggered after a massive glacier broke off in Joshimath, located on the upper parts of the hill state. The Dhauliganga River had turned into a torrent of glacial water carrying heaps and heaps of mud and rocks with it.
The flash flood swept away the Rishiganga Hydel Power Project and National Thermal Power Corporation’s Tapovan Vishnugad Hydel Project while killing around 200 people. Five bridges of the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) was washed away by the flash flood, thus cutting off the access to around 13 villages in Tapovan.
Overlooking the Nanda Devi range stands the Raini Village just above the concrete ruins. The ruins which was the under-construction Rishiganga Hydro Power Project before the flash flood hit; the project, which vanished within seconds when the unrestrained waters of Dhauliganga hit the concrete structures.
A team of geological experts had marked the village as not safe for any settlements as they had found high saturation in the slope forming material, due to incessant rainfall. But even after being marked unsafe and a year after the flash floods, the residents of Raini are yet to be rehabilitated by the state government.
What Caused the Disaster
The flash flood in Raini was caused by a temporary lake that was formed as a result of an avalanche, says YP Sundriyal, the Professor in the Geology Department of Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna Garhwal University, who extensively studied the 2021 disaster.
He says that the Rishiganga flash floods were triggered by a huge avalanche, which had blocked the Ronthi stream and the Rishiganga River, leading to the creation of a dam at its confluence with the Ronthi stream. The water flow could have been blocked for up to 8 to 13 hours. Following the blockage and the accumulation of water, the debris that had held the Ronthi stream and Rishiganga River till now, broke under pressure from the accumulated water. As it broke open, the water collected more debris on the way down and completely destroyed the hydropower project that fell in its path.
The Sinking Village
The 2021 flash floods had killed over 200 people, most of who were working at the twin NTPC projects, as labourers. Along with that, the floods also disturbed the slope on which Raini village stands.
In August 2021, a team of geological experts had advised that residents of Raini should be rehabilitated somewhere else as it had become unstable and vulnerable. The geologists observed that the material that forms the slope is highly saturated due to incessant rain. Already weakened by the flash floods, the slope showed further signs of trouble later on, when the villagers discovered large cracks on their walls, in their fields and on the roads.
Bacchan Singh Rana, a retired SSB personnel said that when it rained heavily in October, the slope started sinking and cracks started appearing almost everywhere in the house. They fear that the land may slide if there’s an earthquake or some other calamity.
While the residents of Raini complain that the government has done very little to rehabilitate the people of the village, the district administration says that the shortage of government land has led to the delays in shifting residents from the Raini village, which is now affected by erosion too. Himanshu Khurana, the District Magistrate of Chamoli said that till the government finds suitable land, the villagers can buy their own land within Uttarakhand. They will receive a subsidy on the land according to the state’s rehabilitation policy.
