Over the past few months, I’ve spent a lot
of time going through the various notes, photos and interviews that constitute
my fieldwork data. This led me back to the field visit my research assistant Lochan
and I took on 21/11/19 to the very remote landslide-affected villages of Rabek
and Ladam, near Rishap in Kalimpong’s Algarah Block. Since the day we visited,
I’ve felt a need to highlight the seemingly forgotten plight of the people of
Rabek and Ladam. It is for others to decide what should be done to help the
people there.
Rabek and Ladam:
Rabek and Ladam are small, remote villages
just beyond the village of Rishap. A rough GPS location is 27°07'32.8"N, 88°39'35.8"E.
Figure 1 – The location of the
landslide in Ladam/Rabekin Kalimpong District.
Our visit:
Lochan and I visited Ladam and Rabek on 21/11/19.
We found about it through the Kalimpong District Disaster Management Plan and
contacted our interviewees by speaking to people when we arrived, as they gave
us phone numbers. The area is around a two-hour drive from Kalimpong Town,
followed by about a two-hour walk down the hillslope to reach the villages of
Ladam and Rabek. It would have taken perhaps another hour to reach the lowest
houses in the village, but we didn’t have the time or energy to do that!In the
village itself we interviewed one of the leaders of the affected community.
From there, we climbed back up to the top of the hill and then visited the camp
where most of the displaced currently live. We spoke to few of them there in a
sort of open discussion, led primarily by one member.It isn’t the easiest
landslide to photograph because it is an entire hillslope. In the below
picture, one of the lowest houses in the village can be seen, to give some
sense of the scale of the affected area.
Figure 2 – Part of the hillslope in
Ladam/Rabek. The entire hillslope pictured is affected.
2015
From the 29th of June to around
the 1st of July, there was extremely heavy rainfall in and around
Kalimpong district. This triggered a number of landslides across the district
and region, many of which were fatal – see here
for Save The Hill’s coverage of the many other landslides that took place over
those few days in 2015. Whilst there were no casualties in Rabek and Ladam, the
landslides have caused immense suffering for the people living there. At the
time, this was picked up by some local media outlets and we were toldthat many
local politicians visited the area. There are three other sources of
information I have found on this situation, though there may be more in Nepali
news sources:
What happened?
Whilst the exact chronology of events in
2015 is not clear, what we do know is that the entire hillslope was sliding
down at some point during this event, and that there were a number of small
mud-flows, debris falls and other landslide-related phenomena occurring all
over the area on the night of the 29th of June, 2015. Photographs of
the aftermath can be seen here.
Whilst I have no geological or hard data to
draw upon, it seems this entire hillslope has been unstable for decades, one
interviewee said this is perhaps a legacy of the 1968 rainfall event in the
Darjeeling and Kalimpong Himalaya. A few years ago in 2011, the Sikkim
Earthquake seemingly unsettled
the entire hillslope which Rabek and Ladam sit on, and a number of cracks and
crevices appeared. Our interviewee said there had been a survey done by ‘some
official with some machine’ shortly afterwards. It appears this survey didn’t
materialise into any actions, but they did find the cracks and crevices underground.
The interviewee also reported that the people here were quite used to small
landslips happening in and around the area. As a result, they had an
early-warning system of sorts within the grassroots community group known as ‘the
samaj’, which most communities have in The Hills. The samajserves
different purposes in each community it represents, including support during
times of crisis, providing ‘rules’ of sort for the conduct of the community, or
as a basis for community organisation as and when required. In Rabek and Ladam,
if there is prolonged rainfall, samajmembers go around the village and
tell people to leave their homes and take shelter in safer areas until the rain
subsides. Our interviewee suggested that without this system, lives probably
would have been lost in 2015.
Immediate impacts
Despite the fact there were no casualties,
we were told around 44 households were displaced initially. Some of these houses
were completely destroyed, some partially damaged and other households chose to
stay elsewhere in the immediate aftermath for fear of further landslides. One
of the main impacts has been the fact that the landslide has destroyed lots of
agricultural land, changed water courses and sources, and rendered the
hillslope largely unsafe for habitation. Our interviewee told us that survey by
the Krishi Kalyan Samiti (KKS), a farmer’s welfare cooperative that works all
over The Hills, confirmed that this area was unsafe for habitation.Photographs
of the relief camp and some can be seen in the Facebook post linked above. There
is also more information on the immediate aftermath in the news report linked
above.
The response
After the landslide, many of the people of
Rabek and Ladamfaced homelessness. According to our interviewee, 20 households
received an amount of 1 lakh rupees each from both the District Administration
and the GTA. They also received immediate relief supplies and rations after a
number of days. I would assume these relief materials also included the relief
camp shelters. After weeks of living in temporary shelters, local politicians
such as Bimal Gurung and Harka Bahadur Chettri—who in 2015 wielded some
considerable power locally through the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration (GTA)—were
able to negotiate with the Forest Department to allow the affected residents to
set-up camp in some nearby forest land which they had previously used as a
cattle-grazing area. As far as we can surmise, both the use of the area for
cattle grazing and the agreement for (re)settlementwere done on the basis of
verbal agreements, with the lattersupposed tolead to a more permanent
settlement at some unspecified point in time in the future.This leads me on to
the major problem that remains:5 years later, 19 of the families are still living
there.
What’s happening now?
Politics moves quickly in The Hills. The
politicians who secured the verbal agreement for the resettlement of the people
of Rabek and Ladam no longer have any real power, and the verbal agreement has
pushed the people of Rabek and Ladam into a marginal existence, somewhere
between their old land which is unsafe and no longer productive, and a
political and administrative black hole that seems incapable of resolving this
problem.I have listed some of the key issues below:
·
The land which these people
own and used to live on is unsafe.They can no
longer reside there. The panchayat cannot build on this land because it is
deemed unsafe for habitation following the survey by KKS. Besides, the amount
provided for reconstruction is probably insufficient for the cost of building
homes in The Hills, especially in remote locations such as these.
·
The land they own is now
totally unproductive. These people used to be successful
land-owning farmers who lived off their land. They have now lost these
livelihoods. To get by, most of those who are able work as daily-wage
labourers, primarily in the numerous homestays which have appeared there
recently. Some reported that this amounts to around a 90% loss of annual income.
This means they are unlikely to be able to relocate by their own means.
·
The panchayat system is
unable to help them because they are on forest land.
Those affected told us they hadn’t been offered any other alternative land.
·
They are not able to legally
build the infrastructure which would allow them to ‘permanently’/comfortably
settle here. In India, Forest Reserved Land is not
available for human habitation – or any other human activity of note. Only in
the last year or so—after four years—have they managed to negotiate facilities
such as toilet buildings, electricity, and an internet connection. There are
many young children living here. The only way you can get permission to settle
on forest land is by acquiring a ‘No Objections Certificate’ (NOC) from the
Forest Department, but this must be approved at a state or national level.
There are stories locally of these NOCs taking decades to get approval.One of
the interviewees said: ‘we are sandwiched’.
It was not the fault of anyone that their
homes became unsafe and that the productivity of their land is gone. This was a
natural hazard. However,
the situation that they now find themselves in is not natural but the
result of numerous social, political and economic factors that have created
conditions of vulnerability.
The outcome of this combination: of the hazard and the vulnerable conditions,
has been a long, drawn out disasterthrough
which these people have suffered. This event has knock-on effects and may make
these people more vulnerable to other hazards such as COVID-19, and the impacts
this has already had on rural food security in The Hills.
What can be done to reduce the
vulnerability of the residents affected by the landslides in Ladam and Rabek?
Written by Peter McGowran, with
thanks to Lochan Gurung and Praful Rao.
