As part of our ongoing series on Gender and Infrastructure in Lahul, the multimedia piece Tandal: A Feminist Archive of an Infrastructure in the Making was recently published on Roadsides, an open access scholar led journal devoted to exploring the social, cultural and political life of infrastructures.
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
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