Seeking Future: Reflections on young people in Lahaul

We see the tangible impacts of climate change in the retreating glaciers, depleting rivers and shifting agricultural patterns of the Himalayan region. The much reiterated call for sustainability – the need for a sustainable present for a sustainable future – underpins multiple climate change reports. But is this understanding reaching the common Himalayan people, or are sustainable solutions presupposed as emerging only from scientific expertise? If the latter is the case, the “solutions” ignore the value of local knowledge and skills in triggering bottom up climate change solutions. Today, the ‘remote’ borderlands of the Indian Himalayas are emerging as central sites of different socio-environmental conflicts due to an increasing dissonance between institutional and local understanding of sustainable development. The Trans Himalayan valley of Lahaul (Lahaul and Spiti district) in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh – and my ancestral home – is one such frontier where unfortunately development solutions are unfolding in a similar fashion.

The article was originally published on thethirdpole.net

Why Jispa?

The sangam (confluence) of Chandra and Bhaga river at Tandi village in Lahaul valley is an auspicious mark “on the map of Buddhist and Hindu sacred geography”.i For the Himalayan yogis of the past, this sangam signified the “sacred triangle of the Mother of all Buddhas, from which all the phenomena originate”ii; whereas the economic logic of our times have reduced this living entity “into hydrologic data, cash flow statements, political will and truckloads of concrete.” iii Cast in this dominant vision is the state of Himachal Pradesh that wants to lead the hydropower race in the Himalayas- as a laboratory of renewable energy production. The hydropower extraction frontier here is expanding into the remote territories of the state, rather aggressively. The 130 kms of relatively undammed Chandrabhaga or Chenab river meandering through the districts of Lahaul-Spiti and Chamba of Himachal is a crucial coordinate on the energy map of this “hydropower state of the country” where close to fifty hydropower projects are proposed in a cascade, with majority allotted in Lahaul valley.iv But how are these grand visions of a hydropower future coming to life, as they “proliferate across different physical and human geographies” of Himachal? v

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