Don’t let borders blind us to Himalayan risks

Why in the News

The floods in Nepal have been widely labelled a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF), and emerging evidence points instead to an avalanche that turned into a cascading debris flow hazard. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Water Resources, in its 2023 report on glacier management in the Himalaya, had already recorded that no mechanism exists for transboundary coordination on glacier linked risks and that existing water treaties carry no provisions for them. The Committee treated transboundary coordination as the core challenge rather than a secondary one. The contested point is that the Himalayan cryosphere and its river systems form one connected risk system, while the institutions that manage that risk remain organised around political boundaries.

What is a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood?

1. Mechanism: A lake held back by a natural dam of glacial debris or ice releases its water suddenly when that dam fails.
2. Cascading character: The release carries high energy and picks up rock and sediment on the way down, so the damage downstream comes from the debris as much as from the water.
3. Triggers: An avalanche falling into a lake, a cloudburst, seismic shaking or the thawing of frozen ground supporting a moraine can each breach the dam.
4. Why the label travels loosely: A flood can follow the same downstream path without being an outburst at all, which is what the Nepal episode now appears to be.

Why does a Himalayan hazard refuse to stay inside one country?

1. Rivers as carriers of risk: Rivers in South Asia are treated as sources of water to be allocated between states, and they are also the channel through which hazard moves from one country to the next.
2. Origin and impact are separable: The event originated in northern Nepal and Nepal bore the immediate brunt, which does not place downstream India outside the risk.
3. One ecological region: The Himalayan cryosphere, the river systems below it and the climate dynamics above it make South Asia a single ecological unit rather than a collection of separate political territories.
4. A geography blind response fails: Institutions built around boundaries cannot manage a hazard whose pathway is decided by the slope of a river.

What do India’s own episodes show about cascading Himalayan risk?

1. Bhote Koshi, 2014: A landslide on the Bhote Koshi impounded a lake behind the slide debris. India worked with Nepal to breach that lake in a controlled manner and reduce the downstream impact.
2. South Lhonak, 2023: The South Lhonak GLOF in Sikkim demonstrated the speed and the scale at which a Himalayan hazard reaches settlements and critical infrastructure.
3. Costs are systematically understated: Damage accounting stops at assets destroyed and leaves out the setback to infrastructure, livelihoods and development trajectories that runs for years afterwards.
4. Disruption is a standing condition: Repeated interruption of critical infrastructure and of water systems is a recurring feature of the region rather than a peripheral concern.

What did the Parliamentary Standing Committee actually recommend?

1. Scope of the 2023 report: The Committee examined glacier management in the Himalaya, covering flash floods associated with glacial melting and the risk of glacial lake outbursts.
2. Systematic data gathering: It recommended sustained data collection and monitoring of glaciers across the Indian Himalayan Region, so that actionable plans rest on measurement rather than on estimate.
3. A diplomatic route, not a technical one: It urged the Ministry of Jal Shakti to press the Ministry of External Affairs for an agreement with neighbouring Himalayan countries, which places the remedy in foreign policy rather than in water administration.
4. The gap it named: The absence of both a coordination mechanism and of treaty provisions was recorded as a finding of a parliamentary committee, so the omission is documented rather than merely alleged.

How does cryosphere risk change the balance between riparians?

1. Geography sets the distribution: River courses are fixed by geography, and with them the distribution of power and of vulnerability among the countries along a basin.
2. Upstream advantage is not absolute: An upstream riparian holds the water and holds the hazard at the same time, so risk can disrupt and even reverse the power relations that allocation bargaining assumes.
3. Treaties written for allocation alone: Water treaties in the region divide flows between parties and carry nothing for a surge of water and debris that arrives without notice.
4. Rivers enter geopolitics: River basins can no longer sit at the edge of the region’s geopolitical conversation, because the risk they now transmit is strategic rather than only environmental.

What would a regional architecture built around shared risk contain?

1. A Himalayan early warning network: A connected network across the range would convert monitoring done separately by each country into warnings that travel down the basin.
2. Shared cryosphere risk assessments: Assessment conducted jointly gives each country the upstream picture it cannot generate from inside its own borders.
3. Common alert protocols: Common protocols for GLOF and flash flood alerts make a warning issued in one country readable and actionable in the next.
4. Joint exercises: Regular exercises involving the disaster management agencies of the countries concerned test whether the protocols work before an event rather than during one.
5. India as convenor: India has the reach to convene such an arrangement and to build institutions around shared risk rather than around allocation disputes.
6. Imperfect institutions still count: Regional institutions in South Asia are weak, and the scale of the emerging risk makes continuing to marginalise them harder to justify.

Challenges to a Himalayan transboundary early warning system

1. Hydrological data is treated as strategic information: Countries in the basin withhold real time river and snow data because it carries military and negotiating value. Eg. Upstream data sharing on the Brahmaputra has lapsed during periods of bilateral tension.
   The Fix: Route cryosphere and lake level data through a technical body with a standing mandate, so transmission does not depend on the state of political relations in a given year.
2. No treaty covers glacier linked hazard: The region’s water agreements are allocation instruments and create no duty to warn. Eg. The Indus Waters Treaty, 1960 and the Ganges Water Treaty, 1996 both set shares of flow and neither addresses outburst risk.
   The Fix: Add a hazard notification protocol as a separate instrument, so it can be agreed without reopening the allocation bargain each treaty settled.
3. Warning time is measured in minutes: A debris laden surge moving down a steep valley reaches the first settlements faster than a conventional alert chain can act. Eg. The 2021 Chamoli event in Uttarakhand destroyed a hydropower site within minutes of the initial failure.
   The Fix: Place automated sensors at the lake and along the valley that trigger sirens directly, removing the human decision step from the first stage of the alert.
4. Infrastructure is sited on the hazard path: Hydropower and road projects occupy the narrow valleys that a surge uses, which converts a natural event into an economic loss. Eg. The Teesta III project in Sikkim was breached in the 2023 outburst.
   The Fix: Make an outburst assessment a condition of clearance for any new project in a glacial basin, with existing designs reviewed against it.
5. Monitoring is split across agencies: Glacier science, weather forecasting and disaster response sit in separate institutions with no single owner for cryosphere risk. Eg. Glacier monitoring, satellite mapping and alert dissemination are handled by different national bodies in India.
   The Fix: Name one authority accountable for glacial lake risk, with the mapping, forecasting and alert functions reporting into it.

Conclusion

The hazard travels by river and the response travels by treaty, and the two follow different maps. A parliamentary committee has already recorded that neither a coordination mechanism nor a treaty provision exists for glacier linked risk, and that recommendation has not produced an agreement with any neighbouring Himalayan country. What to watch is whether the Ministry of External Affairs opens a negotiation on hazard notification distinct from the allocation question, since that separation is what would let an agreement move at all.

Glacial Lake Outburst Floods in India

1. Expanding lakes: Glacial lakes in India expanded by 33.7 percent between 2011 and 2024.
2. High risk concentration: 67 high risk lakes in India recorded an increase of over 40 percent in surface area, with Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh as the main expansion zones.
3. Transboundary lakes: Glacial lakes across Nepal, Bhutan and China recorded a 10.81 percent increase over the same period.
4. Mapped inventory: The National Remote Sensing Centre mapped 28,043 glacial lakes larger than 0.25 hectare across the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra basins in a 2023 report, covering Indian and transboundary territory.

Government Initiatives for Glacial Lake Risk Management

1. National GLOF Risk Mitigation Project: A Rs 150 crore project covering Arunachal Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Uttarakhand for structural and non structural mitigation at identified lakes.
2. Central Water Commission glacial lake monitoring: It monitors 902 glacial lakes and has built a Risk Indexing Framework to rank lakes by priority.
3. NDMA Committee on Disaster Risk Reduction: The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) works with Himalayan States and Union Territories to identify high risk lakes and put mitigation measures in place.
4. Mandatory outburst studies for dams: Assessments became compulsory for new dams after 2023, and existing dam designs are under review against the same standard.
5. Mission Mausam: It upgrades weather forecasting and multi hazard early warning systems, including alerts relevant to glacial lake risk.

Matching Previous Year Question

“Discuss the recent measures initiated in disaster management by the Government of India departing from the earlier reactive approach.”