On July 11, 14 people were buried alive in Arunachal Pradesh’s Papum Pare district. A massive landslide, triggered by incessant rains, flattened at least five houses in a village called Lapatap. The extent of the damage can by gauged by the fact that it took a team of disaster management relief force personnel and policemen, assisted by locals, almost 24 hours to find all the bodies buried under the debris.
Torrential rains are not new to Arunachal Pradesh, and the eastern Himalayan region has always been prone to landslides. However, the damage caused by them has steadily increased in the last few years, with settlements starting to mushroom in risk-prone areas. Apart from unplanned urban expansion in and around the capital city of Itanagar, including Papum Pare, mega development projects in the state have exacerbated pressures, say experts.
The highway rush
Arunachal Pradesh is currently in the middle of a hectic highway construction wave. The most significant among all these projects is the Trans-Arunachal Highway – a two-lane highway project connecting Tawang, a strategically high-important town on the India-China border in north-western Arunachal Pradesh to Kanubari in the south-eastern tip of the state, before finally culminating in Assam’s Dhemaji district. The highway, which will connect 12 out of a total of 16 district headquarter…
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