The Slide

Columns stick out of the roof of the Narayani Guest House like ruins that no archaeologist has bothered to preserve. Blue, chewed-up tarps flutter in gusts of wind like the flags of a nation at the end of a lost battle. Inside the front door is a reception desk that is still tended by the caretaker, Anil Sharma, though a purple-brown futon in the lobby releases poofs of dust that give away just how long it’s been since anyone has come looking for a room. Beyond the lobby is a staircase and not much else, just pillars holding up the vacant floor above.

On a Wednesday in August, Sharma was in the middle of saying that the elderly woman who owns the place had left for the morning when he looked out the front window and spotted her walking back. She was crossing a muddy stretch that links this little alley with the main road, right around where her son, a co-owner of Narayani Guest House, shot and killed a woman from the state government four years before.

The hotel and the unchanged muddy strip outside now act as an unwitting memorial, not just to the killing, but to a deeper violence cutting through Kasauli and other hill towns in Himachal Pradesh. It’s the result of politicians realising they can sell the scenery of these places at the cost of the scenery itself.

The newly flush tourists needed places to stay, and there were plenty of forested slopes in the Himalayas that could be mowed down, levelled off, and turned into hotels.

The state body in charge of approving or turning down those hotels was the Town and Country Planning Department. In the 1990s, its engineers and draughtsmen sifted through stacks of paperwork, ranging from floor plans to revenue forms, before a senior town planner took a final call. As the decade advanced toward the new millennium, the department’s office was overflowing with applications, and politicians began to hound officials about why so many things needed to be approved in the first place.

“The staff was limited,” said Rajinder Chauhan, a retired town planner who worked at the department in the 1990s. “The officers were very busy, very busy, no time for even family.” After the planners gave developers the go-ahead, the lack of staff made it nearly impossible to monitor those building sites for illegal additions. With no one dropping in on them, builders could do what they liked.

Amid all this, in August 1997, the Town and Country Planning Department approved an application for the property that would become Narayani Guest House.

In April, the Supreme Court had upheld a National Green Tribunal decision calling for the tearing down of 13 properties around Kasauli, whose additions were in violation of environmental laws. “You just demolish it. What is going on? You are admitting that you were supposed to make only (a) two-storeyed building,” the judges told a group of hoteliers who appealed the initial ruling. The owners of Narayani Guest House weren’t among the appellants, but their property was one of the 13 on the list.

Officers who tried to do something about illegal buildings were “pressurised” and “threatened with transfer,” said Chauhan, the retired official. The Town and Country Planning Department began to “buckle under the pressure,” and the state’s dependence on unregulated tourism started to eat at its own foundation.

Smoke and dust clouded air that had been pristine just years before. Construction crews levelled so many trees and sliced into so many slopes that the ground began to slip. Groups of tourists shed plastic bags and bottles like loose change. All that trash started sliding into streams that provided the hill towns with water.

“People don’t understand that, ultimately, they are deteriorating themselves,” said Ghulam Jeelani, a professor of earth sciences at the University of Kashmir who has studied similar problems in the region. “You will be hit back by those mountains.”

A backlash began to build, not just in the environment, but within the corridors of government, too. There were no more blanket legalisations after 2008, yet developers kept at it as if there would be. Thakur and his mother did the same, constructing additional floors of the Narayani Guest House that the Town and Country Planning Department never objected to, but also never approved.

Kasauli looked as though it had been washed clean that day. There were no wet lumps of cardboard, plastic bags, and chicken bones stewing in potholes or at the end of low-lying streets, but anyone who followed the flow of rain runoff would see where it all wound up.

Just outside town, a bright, shiny wedge of slope spreads down from the road and reflects each ray of sun that manages to sneak through the clouds. Every bit of translucent trash ever tossed aside in Kasauli seemed to have travelled like a toy boat along the currents of runoff, spilling over the mountain at this exact spot: so much plastic that it looked like a new kind of organic growth.

Despite all the police who had been standing outside the hotel that day, Thakur disappeared into a thick line of trees.

Akshit Mehta, a planning officer with the Town and Country Planning Department, told me that environmental legislation started to carry more authority in the wake of the 2016 High Court judgement, but caveats still allow developers to undermine it. For instance, a National Green Tribunal ruling in 2017 outlawed construction inside Shimla’s core area, but that didn’t apply to any building that was already underway, even if workers had only laid the foundation after they heard a ban was coming.

The state government was also ordered to produce a development plan for the city instead of continuing to riff off a few interim documents from 1979, which had allowed buildings to pack Shimla’s downtown and come up in places without access to water and electricity. (The new plan is currently hung up on a jumble of competing interests.)

After Sharma’s murder, a quiet shock fell over the field workers charged with overseeing demolitions. They had expected hotel owners to be upset, but the possibility of losing their lives would have seemed absurd. Tense and afraid, they demanded protection from their superiors in the Town and Country Planning Department.

In response, the department created three enforcement divisions to continuously sweep the state for illegal constructions. But when I met with officials this August, they told me that none of those positions had been filled.

Karam Chand Nanta, a senior officer in the department, said that staff drive around looking for unauthorised buildings two or three times a week. “They can randomly carry out inspections,” he said, no different from the way things had been done before Sharma’s death.

Though it’s not clear whether he ever reached Delhi, he did head in that direction. Thakur crossed into Uttar Pradesh and made his way to the city of Mathura, a three-hour drive from the capital. In the meantime, his mother hoped her son would turn himself in.

“I know what he had done is not right,” she told The New Indian Express. “It should not have happened at all. Now, I fear he might kill himself or someone else.”

Vacationers flock to hillsides with sights like this, but the flaws are obvious once the wonder wears off. Hotels, homes, and shops are all jammed up next to each other. Forget alleys to walk between buildings; there’s hardly any room for water to run downhill. If one building collapses, it could easily drag down a few more.

Seemingly everything built in Himachal rests on slopes that are constantly disintegrating. The road up from Chandigarh is twice as wide as it needs to be, because the half closest to the hillside is blocked off to make way for rocks that are always dropping and shattering against the asphalt. On that side of the road, mounds of fallen red-brown earth clump together like someone has started sculpting the mountains in miniature.

The Himalayas are young, and they get a little taller each year as the subcontinent crunches into the Eurasian tectonic plate, sending shivers down slopes that loosen a few rocks at a time.

Landslides are a constant threat, and videos of them in Himachal are everywhere. They begin after the person behind the camera has heard a low rumble, or maybe they’d been watching skull-sized rocks tumble down the hillside and figured something more was about to happen. The cliff face looks like any other for a few seconds, until a portion of it separates from the rest and liquifies. The mountain is suddenly more wave than earth, a waterfall of mud, rock, and dust storming down to the street.

These are little ripples within the scope of what’s possible. In 1905, the Kangra earthquake pulverised whole towns, sending up their remnants in hazy clouds. At least 20,000 people died, and some 100,000 buildings toppled. Aqueducts that fed water to the hill stations were obliterated. People felt tremors as far as Lahore.

Much of Himachal lies within a category four or five earthquake risk zone, the two most dangerous brackets, but hotel construction has carried on as if that threat is theoretical. Hard hat crews mow down trees whose roots hold the soil in place, and they level off mountainsides like the top of a cake, freeing up land for roads and new vacation spots.

“Such constructions are closely connected with landslide risk in the mountain regions,” Pawan Joshi, a professor at the Special Centre for Disaster Research at Jawaharlal Nehru University, wrote in an email. “These are precursors of slope destabilisation.”

Himachal Pradesh does have rules about where things can be built and how. Hotels can’t be erected on a slope where the angle is too sharp, and a 2017 National Green Tribunal order declared that no new building around Shimla is allowed to have more than two-and-a-half storeys unless it’s a public utility such as a hospital or a school.

It’s the job of the Town and Country Planning Department to enforce these things, but they don’t have jurisdiction over every kind of work. The Forest Department decides what trees get sliced. The Public Works Department collaborates with the Road and Infrastructure Development Corporation to oversee any hill-flattening.

Even when something falls within their realm, it can be difficult to keep up with the builders’ workarounds, Akshit Mehta told me. Developers will level off a slope so that its altered angle falls under the legal limit for construction, then they’ll submit plans with a modified slope gradient that government workers won’t always catch.

If property owners simply want to hurry things along without bothering to alter their ground or their paperwork, they can always offer a bribe. “It is not a problem with the Town and Country Planning Department,” Nanta told me. “It is a problem with the Indian government.”

Nanta said he’s turned down money before, and Mehta is in the middle of defending himself against charges of bribe-taking at a previous post in the town of Nahan. He told me he was framed after refusing a land owner’s request to overdevelop his property.

A new road or an ill-advised building, a tremor here and a falling rock there—none of it increases the chance of a massive earthquake by a measurable percentage. But small things pile up, and there is now a broader danger hanging over the Himalayas that Joshi says amplifies the threat of every cut.

Gulab Singh, Sharma’s colleague who was shot just moments after her, died 10 days later. Officers sent Thakur back to Himachal. He remains in jail.

Mountain soil can absorb regular rainfall, but the flood from these storms flies downhill so quickly that it turns the ground into liquid. Tree roots help keep the earth locked in place, but forests have been ripped out of so many hillsides that much of the soil underneath guest houses and above roadways is little more than loose dirt.

All that water rushing below sleeping tourists could one day “wash away many hotels,” said Jeelani, the University of Kashmir professor. “These areas are very vulnerable to cloud bursts.” Rainfall intensity has ramped up across Himachal Pradesh since 2011, and a report produced by the state’s Department of Environment, Science, and Technology said that much of it is subject to “intense soil erosion.”

On 30 September 2021, an eight-storey residential building in Shimla crumpled because of a combination of these problems. Rain had dampened the loose earth into a muddy slush that could no longer support something that tall. The building smashed into two others on its way down, disintegrating into an eruption of dust. Officials had evacuated everyone in the hours before. No one was injured.

Devi and her son had expanded their hotel beyond its legal limit, putting pressure on the hillside that could have collapsed more than what the government demolished, but the guest house and the dozen other properties listed in the Supreme Court ruling were also far from Himachal’s only illegal constructions. At the time, in April 2018, there were around 25,000 of them.

The court made an example of those 13 properties, sending a message to developers and politicians that the state could no longer sacrifice its environment for cash and expect to avoid catastrophe.

But Himachal’s turn toward environmentalism might prove to be more of an anomaly than a trend. Some officials in the Town and Country Planning Department believe that much of the state can only be pulled back from the precipice by many years of limited development, and yet the department’s court-directed path may always be threatened by the political push to normalise another batch of illegal buildings.

“Legalisations are usually brought up during election years,” Nanta said. “It is a political gimmick. They try to appease the vote bank.”

When asked whether the state government might try to pull off this gimmick again anytime soon, Town and Country Planning Director Kamal Kant Saroch chuckled. “You have asked us a very difficult question,” he said. “Honestly, I cannot answer fully. It is a very slippery question.”

Colin Daileda is a freelance journalist in Bengaluru, India. He has written for The Atlantic, Longreads, The News Minute, and many others, and now often writes about climate change and environmental degradation. When he is not doing that, he is maybe playing basketball or eating a doughnut.