Himalayan narratives between two generational Kashmiris

A father and a son, both core Kashmiris at heart, on a summit in Srinagar, a lifetime of unglamorous work, and the argument between them they have finally settled.

By: Dr Rajan Kumar Kotru and Deeptanshu Kotru

In October we sat together in a hall at SKUAST in Srinagar, at the Sustainable Mountain Development Summit. Deeptanshu had not expected the room. People came up to his father all day: foresters, scientists, state officials, social workers, men who had worked with him thirty years ago on watersheds and forest governance nobody has ever written about. None of it was for a title. It was for a working life spent with the people who actually look after these mountains, conducted almost entirely away from any stage.

Both of us are workhorses. We solve for the system and we stay in the backdrop. Sometimes that works in our favour. Often it does not, and the flashier work takes the funding, the platform and the credit. All that glitters is not gold. We are joined at the hip to this cause and we will stay that way whatever it returns, and we think that is exactly why people take Rajan’s word seriously. In time, perhaps, Deeptanshu’s too.

There was a second thing in that hall. Rajan was born in Srinagar and grew up in and around it when things were celestially normal. Deeptanshu did not get that. He grew up between Palampur in Himachal Pradesh and Kathmandu, took his first job in Kathmandu, and knows Kashmir as inheritance rather than address. Neither of us said much about it.

Both of us left the mountains and both of us were pulled back. Rajan went to the Alps to learn them technically and socially, then gave the rest of his working life to the Hindu Kush Himalaya across 8 countries and left a solid policy and practice legacy behind. Deeptanshu followed him to Munich, worked half a decade on African forests and agriculture, and came back to the same range his father never left. Fifty years between us, and we still do not agree on what these mountains need.

In August, around 110 million cubic metres of rock and glacier ice came off Langtang Lirung. More than 1,400 people are dead in Nepal and thousands remain missing. The flood carried some of the bodies 240 kilometres into India. In September, World Weather Attribution published its assessment. It declined to call the disaster an extreme weather event and called it a compound crisis instead: warming, glacier retreat, permafrost thaw and geological instability acting together.

That refusal is the argument of this article. The Himalaya does not face a set of separate environmental problems. It faces one changing system. We still manage it department by department.

What a village learns about the state

Rajan: Years ago we spent a long time getting a community to agree a microplan for participatory forest management on their own land. They supported it. We planted to restore the springs they drank from, and a spring in our hills is never only water. It is where ritual is organised. Then the plantation matured and ordinary thinning and tending operations fell due, written into the state’s own working plan. Local forest officials refused, citing the green felling ban. We had asked for their land and their time, and handed back a forest they were not permitted to use. That is how a village stops believing a forest department.

More than three million springs dot the Indian Himalayas, and roughly half have dried or turned seasonal. Nobody restores them at scale while villages have reason to believe the state is not on their side. On the other hand, social fabric in villages is changing, their rights become important and responsibilities go for a toss.

The people who steward it are not the people paid by it

Deeptanshu: Work we did recently with the Integrated Mountain Initiative, the G.B. Pant National Institute of Himalayan Environment and Systemiq put a figure on what these mountains carry. Himalayan systems underpin more than 20 per cent of India’s gross domestic product: the water behind wheat and rice on the Indo-Gangetic plain, tea in Assam and Bengal, hydropower in the Northeast, the pilgrimage economies downstream. The Himalayan states capture around 5 per cent of it. The rest accrues downstream, to states that rarely think of the Himalayas as theirs until a flood reminds them.

People object that we should not put a number on nature. In a country where economics drives most decisions, refusing to do the arithmetic simply means the mountains lose the argument.

Here is the other number. Around 21 glaciers are monitored across the entire Hindu Kush Himalaya, 16 or 17 of them in India. That is roughly 0.1 per cent of an estimated 40,000. We are running the water tower of two billion people almost blind, and then describing what follows as an act of God.

India has had no instrument equal to this. There has been no mountain policy, only a national mission for the Himalayan ecosystem, a set of central schemes, and a jigsaw of sectoral rules written mostly for the plains. That is beginning to shift. At the Srinagar summit a first draft mountain policy was presented to the Chief Minister, to the Union Minister of State Dr Jitendra Singh, and to the Lieutenant Governor of Jammu and Kashmir. We welcome it, and we will keep pushing for it. The document matters less than the habit it could start, which is mountain states arguing for their own realities, and accounting for them, a great deal harder than they do now.

Where we disagree

Rajan has grown impatient with how much talk goes into climate frameworks and finance while the work within reach of mountain states goes undone: springs, value chains, green enterprise, applied research that never reaches practice. He has run enough donor programmes to ask a narrower question of each. What survives when the funding stops? In one design meeting a senior government officer said it out loud. The donor believes this fund will change everything, but the department will be the same at the end, and the only thing that will have changed is the donor’s mindset.

Deeptanshu cannot ignore how strongly capital decides what gets built. Roads, hotels, hydropower, tourism and urban expansion follow financial incentives, not policy documents. While resilience stays unfunded and conventional development stays easy to finance, the system keeps producing vulnerability.

We are both right, which is the uncomfortable part. We settled it like this: finance should serve a mountain development strategy, not define one.

The work

None of what is needed is exotic. Restore springs and manage them as water infrastructure. Let farmers keep more of the premium attached to Himalayan provenance. Shift tourism from counting visitors to keeping value. None of it waits on a scientific breakthrough. It waits on somebody being made responsible for it.

Neither of us wants to be described as a voice for the mountains. The mountains do not need voices. They need maintenance: a spring restored, a plantation a village is permitted to use, a budget that arrives on time, a monitoring station still reporting after the project has closed. None of it is flashy. All of it is the work, and we expect to be doing it for the rest of our lives, one of us for longer than the other.

The people who came up to Rajan in that hall at SKUAST were not there because of a report. They were there because a spring was running again in a village he had worked in two decades earlier, or because a plan he argued for survived three changes of government. That is the only reputation worth holding in this work, and it takes a career to earn.

Charity begins at home. Rajan has said that to Deeptanshu since he was a child. It is still the whole of the argument.

About the authors

Dr Rajan Kumar Kotru has worked on mountain development for more than three decades. He headed the transboundary landscapes programme at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), building cooperation across the Hindu Kush Himalaya, including the Kailash Sacred Landscape shared by India, China and Nepal, and has published on mountain forestry and regional cooperation in Mountain Research and Development. Born in Srinagar and trained in forestry in Germany, he works with the Integrated Mountain Initiative.

Deeptanshu Kotru is a Manager at Systemiq, working at the intersection of climate transition, land use and sustainable finance. He leads Africa strategy and delivery for British and German government forest programmes across more than ten countries, and works on Systemiq’s Himalayan programme with the Integrated Mountain Initiative and the G.B. Pant National Institute of Himalayan Environment. He studied at the LSE and UEA, worked in Nepal, and wrote his Munich master’s thesis on the governance of transboundary mountain landscapes across the Alps, Andes and Himalayas.