Save The Hills: raising awareness on impact of landslides on rural communities

Long time readers of this blog will be aware of my admiration of a wonderful NGO, Save The Hills, which is a group of concerned citizens who seek to raise awareness of landslides in the Darjeeling-Sikkim Himalaya.  I have been privileged to be in regular contact for many years with the founder, Praful Rao, and many other landslide experts have worked with the group too.  They run a wonderful blog about landslides in this region.  This is grass roots activism as its very finest.

As part of their efforts to raise awareness of landslides, Save The Hills has produced two short but powerful documentaries about the impact of landslides in a remote village, Pathing.  The first video was made in November 2022, highlighting the way in which the large Gaguney Landslide is steadily and systematically destroying the loves of this rural community.  The video combines testimony from the local people with stunning drone footage:-

.

Whilst this landslide has been active for two decades or more, in recent months it has become more active, spalling rocks almost continually.  The debris has inundated land and blocked roads, as well as representing a major hazard for the local residents.    The still from the video below shows the scale of the problem at Pathing:-

The landslide at Pathing in northern India. Still from a video posted to Youtube by Save The Hills.

.

Tragically, Save The Hills visited the site a week later to find that the situation had deteriorated desperately.  The footage was collected at the end of November, when the landslide had become much more active.  The government ordered evacuation of the village.

The issue appears to be that the crown of the landslide has expanded, putting many more houses at risk.  The second video provides a graphic and powerful account of the scale of the problem:-

.

One key element of this second video is that it highlights the desperate plight of people being forced from their homes.  Relocation is rarely simple, trading one problem for many others.

This image shows the scale of the new landslide source area, where the rock mass is clearly undergoing extensive raveling:-

The crown of the landslide at Pathing in northern India. Still from a video posted to Youtube by Save The Hills.

.

Save The Hills also has a blog post online that highlights the challenges at Pathing, illustrated by multiple photographs.  Pathing is at 27.295, 88.392, and is well captured on Google Earth.

Pathing is of course not alone in this problem, which is replicated in many other locations across the Himalayas.  In Nepal for example, Khabar featured another example on Saturday, this time the village of Maya in Pachaljharana Rural Municipality-8 in Kalikot district.