View of the road from the outskirts of Kurseong town. Earlier you wouldn't be able to see the road for the trees.

Yes it was an earthquake, epicentre in Sikkim, intensity 6.8 on the Richter scale. I was in Kurseong recently, visiting with Professor C.B. Rai and Sumitra Rai, and I was shocked to see how bare the hills were since my childhood when I visitied them regularly. I felt a mixture of horror and anger when I read about the damage the earthquake caused there and saw the pictures on the net.

This is a tragedy exacerbated by human negligence which has nibbled away at the forests of the Eastern Himalayas for decades. The hill on which Kurseong sits slows regular ridges (so called 'sheep paths') which are caused by slippages of the unanchored soil, obeying gravity and moving steadily downhill. A good shaking is all it needs to come loose.

The question of how to save the hill forests is one that ought to cut across political parties and affiliations in the hills because earthquakes don't discriminate when they destroy.  Finding out whose pockets have been lined by the proceeds from the carcasses of the ancient trees is a lesser though important issue. If we start NOW, we might be able to restore the forest cover within a human lifetime.

Without the trees the hills are doomed to face this kind of punishment whenever the subduction zone wants to let off steam. Tree roots hold the soil in place and prevent weakening of the surface by water runoff and falling rocks. There will always be some landslides because the surface of India is being scraped off while the tectonic plate slowly disappears under Asia: no one knows how long that process is going to continue. The surface builds up into the Himalayas: a rather unromantic explanation for landscapes of breathtaking and mind-altering beauty. Keeping the forest cover won't entirely protect human settlements in the hills, but they will certainly minimise the damage from both landslides and earthquakes.

Flat roofed house provides multistorey parking

It's notable that bricks-and-mortar houses actually suffered worse than less permanent structures. The way houses were traditionally built in the hills was to lay down a brick foundation and build the superstructure with wood. This made for a low centre of gravity and less load on the ground. Now that people have become more prosperous, they're opting to build houses in the style of the plains: with reinforced concrete shells and flat cast concrete roofs. Concrete roofs put enormous strain on the sloping ground, and they also tempt people to add more storeys as funds increase. Given the scarcity of usable real estate in the hills, it's almost a miracle that everyone isn't doing it. Yet.

These changes have happened because we plains people have bombarded the hills with our advertising, our K serials, our propaganda, our selling of the good life. Then when government bodies and NGOs try to tell the hills people that plains-type  living isn't practicable in the hills, they get a dusty answer. They are told the hills want 'development', which seems to mean transplanting Gurgaon to somewhere on Pankhabari Road. It is our fault for not allowing people who are 'not like us' to live the way that is right for them.

The way it was

The same reason is why Jangal Mahal is a war zone: timber and minerals become money and flow away because there is no discourse powerful enough to stop them, and the people of the region are faced with a choice: resist and become 'terrorists', or capitulate and buy a Maruti van or at least a BSA cycle and become 'just like us' while the ground burns or moves under your feet. The third option, protest and make your own way, is only possible with education and self respect, both of which we have denied to people who are 'marginal' to our world. Of course, from their point of view, we are the ones who are marginal and their world is central, or was before we got into the act.

The 'marginal' people have no way to force us to listen to them without taking up arms. Is it any wonder that violence and marginality are such fast friends? But unless we find a way to give them a voice, the killing will go on. We can't do that without fighting the mafias: the coal mafia, the timber mafia., who get rich on our needs and desires. We need a thousand Binayak Sens willing to go to jail for their beliefs before we see any light under this stone.