Cracks show in India's Himalayan building spree

STORY: Jaswant Singh Butola’s village is sinking, its houses crumbling away.

About 18 months ago, cracks appeared in his home in India’s northern Uttarakhand state.

Since then, they've widened.

He fears he will soon have to abandon Maroda, the village his family has called home for generations.

“Our village is so old. Generations after generations have lived here. And now this is the condition of the village. This is unimaginable.”

As to why, some town authorities point to nearby construction projects.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been pushing to carve roads and rail deep into the Himalayas.

It would pave the way for millions of Hindu and Sikh pilgrims to visit a clutch of religious sites that include the source of the Ganges river.

It has also been the Modi government’s stated strategy to reaffirm India’s presence along the largely unmarked border with China.

Parts of it are contested and have seen skirmishes between the two sides in recent years.

However, the strategy has run into trouble.

Some projects were halted by local authorities in the face of protests by residents after hundreds of houses were damaged by the sinking.

On a reporting trip in January, Reuters found damage in Maroda and five other towns and villages.

They are located close to either the $2 billion railway or a connected $1.5 billion highway project.

Reuters was unable to find definite proof connecting all the problems to individual infrastructure works.

But authorities in two of the towns made a link between subsidence and the projects.

In Maroda, the district magistrate said in a written communications with residents, reviewed by Reuters, that the railway ministry's construction company, RVNL, would compensate villagers by buying additional land affected by subsidence.

RVNL did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The office of Uttarakhand's chief minister and the spokesperson for the federal government also did not respond to requests for comment.

Residents in Maroda say the village had barely grown or changed in decades until the railway engineers approached the cluster of houses in 2021.

For younger villagers like 26-year-old Shubham Rawat, the future in Maroda is uncertain.

“So, the youth and the local people over here, we definitely need development but we need sustainable development. We don’t need a development that is not in accordance with our customs, not in accordance with our future, not in accordance with our dreams and prospectives."

In the town of Joshimath, over 220 families are staying at relief camps as their homes become unsafe to live in, according to the District Magistrate.