Char Dham Panel Chief Resigns

Veteran environmentalist Ravi Chopra has resigned as chairman of the Supreme Court’s High Powered Committee (HPC) on the Char Dham project, saying that his “belief that the HPC could protect this fragile (Himalayan) ecology has been shattered”. In his resignation letter to the secretary-general of the Supreme Court on January 27, Chopra referred to the apex court’s December 2021 order that accepted the wider road configuration to meet defense needs, instead of what the HPC had recommended and the SC accepted in its earlier order in September 2020.

“The judgment has also confined the role of the HPC to overseeing the two Non-Defence roads only, the directions and recommendations made by the HPC in the past have either been ignored or tardily responded to by MoRTH (Ministry of Road Transport and Highways). This experience does not inspire confidence that the response of MoRTH will be much different even in relation to the two Non-Defence roads,” Chopra wrote in the letter. “The Honourable Court has also permitted the respondents to seek legal relief for the widening of the Non-Defence highways. In the circumstances, I do not see any purpose in continuing to head the HPC or indeed, even to be a part of it,” he wrote.

While talking to The Indian Express, Chopra said: “I feel I’ll be able to do more without the constraints of being part of an official committee — perhaps engage more meaningfully in public education, and also monitor closely and write about how the (Char Dham) project carries on — particularly in the Bhagirathi Eco-Sensitive zone where the HPC put precise conditions for roads and the SC asked the MoRTH to follow those unanimous recommendations.” 75-year-old Chopra, in his letter, recalled how he was “compelled to accept” the responsibility in September 2019, despite his age, “by an inner voice born out of a 40-year commitment to help restore the degraded Himalayan environment and the livelihoods of its people”.

“That same inner voice now compels me to move out. The belief that the HPC could protect this fragile ecology has been shattered. I can do no more. I, therefore, choose to resign,” he wrote.

When asked whether he felt disheartened, Chopra said: “While traveling through villages until a decade ago, I would be amazed at how little people remembered about the Chipko movement. Today, we have youngsters in Dehradun opposing tree felling. These are straws in the wind. One has to keep sowing, the rain will come.” Describing the Himalayas as a marvel of nature, Chopra wrote in his resignation letter: “Sustainable development demands approaches that are both geologically and ecologically sound. Such development also enhances disaster resilience and hence national security, especially when climate challenges to slope stability are becoming far more unpredictable. “As a member of the HPC, however, I saw at close quarters the desecration of the once impregnable Himalayas… I have seen engineers armed with modern technological weapons assaulting the Himalayas… The engineers exult and circulate photographs proving their conquest of Nature, little realizing that they too are a part of Nature and cannot survive if their own natural environment is destroyed.

“Nature, however, neither forgets nor forgives such wilful wrongs inflicted on her treasures. Already we have witnessed stretches of roads disappear that have later taken months to repair. Nature sounded warning bells in June 2013 and February 2021 with disastrous consequences.”

A flagship initiative of the Centre, the Rs 12,000-crore highway expansion project was envisaged in 2016 to widen 889 km of hill roads to provide all-weather connectivity in the Char Dham circuit — Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri, and Yamunotri — in the upper Himalayas.

In 2018, the project was challenged by an NGO for its potential impact on the Himalayan ecology due to felling trees, cutting hills, and dumping excavated material. In 2019, the SC formed the HPC Chopra to examine the issues, and in September 2020, accepted his recommendation on road width, etc. In November 2020, the Ministry of Defence sought wider roads to meet the requirement of the Army. In December 2021, the SC modified its September 2020 order on the ground that the court could not “interrogate the policy choice of the establishment which is entrusted by law with the defense of the nation”.

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Aashi Harita