By: Rakesh Lohumi ( Sr. Editor-ICN Group)
SHIMLA: While the plains of northern India are shivering under thick fog, the hills of Himachal and adjoining Himalayan states are experiencing a warm winter. The paradoxical scenario provides an indication of the severe environmental degradation that the region has suffered in recent years due to wrong development policies.
It is peak winter and normally the high and mid mountain ranges should have been wrapped in snow. However, there is hardly any snow and the weather in all the hill stations is pleasant like spring with mercury hovering 6 C to 8 C above normal.
The token snowfall on Christmas brought just a dusting of white on the hills which melted away instantly. While melting of Himalayan glaciers due to global warming has been in focus for long, the more important issue of receding seasonal snow cover has not attracted much attention. Reckless development is causing more harm to the fragile Himalayan mountain ecosystem that caters to the largest chunk of human population in the world.
The unregulated, excessive and often unwarranted construction activity on precipitous hills is accentuating the impact of global warming. Unbridled urbanisation, particularly around hill stations like Shimla, Dhramsala, Manali , Mussourie and Nainital, is causing severe damage to environment and, in turn, leading to irreversible changes in the microclimate. There has been a spurt in real estate development following the entry of private colonisers, making things worse.
Housing projects are being allowed even as here are no takers for flats and the most of the existing ones purchased by people from plains are unoccupied. Census data reveals that the number of unoccupied houses in Solan and Shimla districts of Himachal, where most of the housing and industrial projects have been permitted, has shot up from 11 percent in 2001 to 25 percent in 2011.
Concrete monsters have gobbled up large tracts of lush green forests making the hills virtually impervious. Forested hills play an important role in maintaining the vertical temperature gradient and serve as a natural cloud seeders. Until two decades ago Shimla and other hill towns used have frequent local rains throughout the year, even during peak summer mainly because hills wore an impeccable green mantle.
With multi-storeyed concrete structures coming up virtually one over the other the hills have been concretised. They no longer serve as could seeders and rather warm up the atmosphere by absorbing heat during day time. There is less precipitation as temperature gradient has been disturbed, particularly in the mid hills, and condensation is not taking place as earlier. The clouds pass over to the high hills without or with minimal precipitation.
The impact of excessive urbanisation is discernible in declining precipitation, both snow and rain. There are no local rains and the springs, streams and other sources of water are drying up and as a result people have to contend with an acute shortage of water during summer.
As per the studies conducted by scientists of meteorological department SC Bhan and Manmohan Singh the snow season in the erstwhile British summer capital has been shrinking at an alarming rate of 11 days per decade since 1991. The overall winter precipitation (December to March) has also been declining with the decadal average coming down from 283.9 mm (1991-92 to 2000-01) to 235.1 mm (2001-02 to 2010-11).
The precipitation was more in form of rain, indicating that the quantum of snow was decreasing at a higher rate as evident from the decline in percentage of snowfall to total precipitation from 39 to 30. Further, the snow season has shifted and starts only around first week of January, while maximum precipitation takes place in February.
