Widening cracks due to road work worry Mandi villagers in Himachal Pradesh

SHIMLA: Villagers in Himachal's Mandi district continue to be plagued with fear even a year after a road caved in during road-widening work on the Kiratpur-Manali national highway near Thalout, apparently causing fissures in the land and cracks on the walls of some houses.
According to villagers, the cracks that had first appeared in the land around the villages during the construction of a tunnel on the highway continue to get wider.
The link road that connects Shalanal, Tanhula and Jalanal villages in the Bhatwari panchayat of Mandi district had started sinking over a year back. Around the same time, the land around these villages had developed fissures. Some of the houses at Tanhula village had also developed cracks.
The villagers have been blaming unscientific cutting of hills for roads as a reason behind landslides and land subsidence in their area.
"The road had caved in and the land and houses had developed cracks immediately after the work on the tunnel began more than a year ago. The villagers have not only lost road connectivity but are also living in fear as the cracks in the land are widening," said Shobhe Ram Bharadwaj, a local resident and member of the panchayat samiti.
Bharadwaj said there was an immediate need to take remedial measures. "The entire land around the villages and right above the highway tunnel has been sliding and sinking. There is an urgent need for building a retaining wall along this patch to stop land from sliding down further. A low-height retaining wall was erected in the wake of a landslide a year ago, but it's not sufficient," he said.
A section of this path is so steep and difficult to tread that children and villagers need to hold an iron wire, fixed to trees at both ends, to climb up and come down."The mountain path that children take to reach school is so narrow and dangerous that a little slip can send anyone down the cliff.
We need concrete retaining walls to stop land from sliding and the link road should be rebuilt immediately," pointed out Madan Gopal, a local resident.He said a proper geological survey should be conducted by the government to know the extent of danger.According to Guman Singh, a Kullu-based environmentalist, the four-laning work on the Kiratpur-Manali highway was posing a big threat to the mountains and its inhabitants."The National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) has indulged in unscientific tunnelling and blasting of mountains.
This has caused cracks in land in the entire stretch from Mandi to Aut on the highway as the geology here is fragile," said Singh.He said that the government should order an inquiry into the entire project. “No proper geological survey was conducted before starting the road-widening work on the Kiratpur-Manali highway.
The entire project has been implemented in a haphazard manner,” Singh added.The stretch from Mandi to Aut on the Kiratpur-Manali national highway, under which these villages fall, is a landslide prone area, especially the Pandoh section. It witnesses multiple landslides, particularly during the monsoons. On the Kiratpur-Manali highway, the work for which is being carried out by the NHAI, a total 14 tunnels are to be built.