On a late July evening, Ashish Dimri wound up work at his hotel. He then retired to his home in the same building. As he and his family went into deep slumber, heavy rains started to batter their village, Kaleshwar, high up in the mountains in Uttarakhand.
Around midnight, Dimri woke up to desperate calls of help from outside. When he looked out of his window at the road outside, he saw that large boulders and a mass of mud had fallen and almost buried a car of tourists. Dimri rushed out to help them.
While the tourists were pulled out of the debris in time, in the next four hours, the road became unrecognisable – boulders blocked it and mud and trees continued to slide onto it.
At 4 am, realising that even his house was on shaky ground, Dimri moved his family and staff, and the tourists, whom he had sheltered, to a relative’s home 5 km away. That was the last night the family slept in their own home.
“The mountain had come down,” said Dimri, when we met him in late October.
This was no ordinary landslide.
The road on which Dimri’s hotel stood is part of the Chardham Pariyojana, a project to widen around 890 km…
Source: On the road to Chardham, a landslide every two kilometres
