NEW DELHI: The main opposition party Congress has condemned the Union Government over Sikkim landslide for not allocating funds to act timely to mitigate the disaster. Further, It has allowed unplanned hydro-projects in the environmentally fragile region that made Sikkim prone to disasters. Jairam Ramesh, General Secretary and a senior leader of the Congress accused the government of practicing vendetta politics that did not allocate enough funds for irrigation and flood mitigation to West Bengal which is equally affected. “The Union Budget of July 2024 made the vague promise of assistance without any details of funds for Sikkim,” states Ramesh. “In a classic case of the Government’s confrontational federalism, the Budget was indifferent to the areas in West Bengal which were equally affected,” he further said. A massive landslide disaster in Sikkim has substantially damaged the Teesta V, a 510 MW hydel power station on the Teesta river on August 20 morning in Balutar, Sikkim, 20 km southwest of capital city Gangtok. This disaster comes on the heels of the Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOF) and riverine floods in the Teesta River basin in October 2023, which caused massive devastation in Sikkim and Kalimpong, West Bengal. Moreover, the National Highway 10, the lifeline of Sikkim and Kalimpong, runs along the Teesta and has been in a precarious state with frequent landslides and closures.In his one page statement, he pointed out unplanned construction of hydropower projects in the ecological fragile Himalayan region made Sikkim as disaster prone. Ramesh underlined that the National Hydropower Development Corporation (NHDC) has been carrying out 47 hydropower projects in different stages of development on the Teesta River in Sikkim and West Bengal. “Of them, nine have been commissioned, work on 15 dams is going on and another 28 are in the pipeline. The October 2023 disaster was provoked by the GLOF, but it only reached its catastrophic scales due to the failure of the Teesta-III dam,” states Ramesh. “The mismanagement in the debris disposal has also resulted in the riverbed level going up, making the region more flood prone,” he added. Amidst these hydel projects, IRCON has also undertaken tunnelling of this sensitive region for the Sivok-Rangpo railway line (14 tunnels), contributing to the region’s increased vulnerability.
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