1,000 houses damaged due to Uttarakhand railway project work: Locals

Residents of around 1,000 houses in four districts of Uttarakhand have complained of damages due to the ongoing construction of Rishikesh-Karnaprayag railway line, officials at Rail Vikas Nigam Limited (RVNL), the agency which is executing the project, said.

“We have received complaints from around 1,000 houses about damages and cracks in their houses allegedly due to blasting,” Vinod Bisht, liaison officer with RVNL, said.

Bisht said, “Committees are surveying villages in four districts which were affected by the project. The survey work has been completed in Pauri and Tehri Garhwal districts. Their report is awaited. We will take action on the basis of the report.”

The 125.20 km-long Rishikesh-Karnaprayag broad gauge rail line is an ambitious project of the Narendra Modi government, estimated to cost more than ₹16,200 crore. The project, which will involve 12 stations, aims to connect Rishikesh and Karnaprayag and also ease access to pilgrimage centres, mainly Kedarnath and Badrinath.

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The project passes through five districts – Dehradun, Tehri Garhwal, Pauri Garhwal, Rudraprayag and Chamoli. The Railways acquired 164.9 hectares of private land in 45 villages, which is 20% of the total acquired land (788 hectares) for the project. The remaining is forest land, according to RVNL.

The entire land acquisition affected 355 houses and 5,513 families, RVNL said. The work on the project began in 2017 and is aimed to be completed by December 2024.

In January, the Indian Railways tweeted that around 33% of the project has been completed.

In Pauri Garhwal district, Anil Dutt Tiwari is among 224 families in Sweeth village waiting to get compensated for the damages to his house. “I have spent ₹ 4 lakh to repair my house. I don’t even remember how many hours or days we spent visiting government offices with our grievances,” he said.

He said that ever since the blasting began in 2019, he has filed several RTI applicationsto know about details for blasting on the complete construction routeand even staged protests but the construction did not stop.

He claimed the construction work has also led to pollution in water bodies as the waste generated due to tunnel digging was being released into a ‘gadhera’ (small river tributaries), which eventually meets Alaknanda (one of the two headstreams of Ganga).

Tiwari said it was not until villagers forcefully stalled the construction work that the district administration constituted a five-member committee to look into the damages in 2021. The panel, he alleged, however, did not include all the affected families.

According to him, the committee recommended a payout of ₹1.50 crore to 224 affected families and sent a proposal to RVNL. The families are yet to be compensated.

Sardar Singh Pundir, central secretary of Uttarakhand Kranti Dal (UKD) from Byasi village in Pauri Garhwal, said: “The blasting done for the tunnel work at Baldya Khan village above Gular has led to cracks in houses of around 10 families. Incidents of land subsidence have also occurred at Byasi village for which villagers have been assured of compensation but have received nothing as of yet.”

“We wake up with every blast, fearing that our house will cave in any time. Our children cannot sleep properly,” Vimla Devi, a resident of Baldya Khan village, said.

Suman Rana from Lachmoli village said: “Our house has also developed several cracks that are widening further due to the tunnel blasting that continues unabated day and night. One of the walls has already caved in. When we complained, we were offered a sack of cement which we returned and repaired the wall at our own expense.”

In Rudraprayag’s Mawana village, cracks have appeared in around 200 houses due to blasting and excavation activities for the railway project, gram pradhan Birendra Singh Rana said.

“We have written to authorities on numerous occasions but they are not ready to accept that the cracks appeared due to blasting. Even a committee was constituted that denied us compensation for the damages,” he said.

An RVNL official said a total of ₹869 crore was already paid as compensation to people during acquisition of private land.

Anand Srivastava, additional secretary, disaster management said the government doesn’t have any data on the damages to houses in the wake of the project.

At Atali village in Tehri Garhwal district, the Railways said there was concrete failure in the wall of a tunnel and the shotcrete showed signs of cracks. Shotcrete is high-performance concrete or mortar that is passed on through a hose of pipe and with the help of pressure, it is projected at a higher velocity onto the backing surface.

The Railways also said a geological survey was carried out to ascertain the hazards and mitigation measures for the project. An airborne electromagnetic survey was also carried out by CSIR National Geophysical Research Institute, Hyderabad, to find out the water bodies above the tunnel alignment to preserve groundwater and the environment, it said.

“Tunneling in the fragile ground is also being executed by adopting control blasting – minimum charge per blast – leaving dummy holes all along the profile of the tunnel and introducing delays to prevent the transmission of ground vibrations around the tunnel which are much lower than the permissible limits set by the directorate general of mines safety. For underground excavation, where the ground is weak, the excavation is being carried out by mechanical means, ensuring the stability of the tunnel and its surrounding ground,” said a senior RVNL official on condition of anonymity.

“We have been regularly monitoring the cracks being reported in houses and other buildings. We have documentary evidence like photographs and videography. We also installed crack metres in houses which showed no change in size even during control blasting,” the official added.

Joshimath is also in the grip of a land subsidence, which experts said, is due to rampant construction, including several hydropower projects, in the sensitive western Himalayan terrain.