Kishtwar Catastrophe: Viral Video Of Young Student’s Poem Highlights Human Cost As Chisoti Village Destroyed By Landslide

A video of a young student reciting a poem in a school in Chisoti village in Kishtwar district, Jammu and Kashmir, prior to the catastrophe that wiped out this village, taking the lives of over a hundred people, is now in wide circulation.

This young Class 4 girl student is heard saying, “Hey manav ab tu sudhar ja, abi iss laalach ko chhod de; dharti maa ko samaj, prakriti se rishta jod de, warna ye prakriti nahin ruk payegi aur tu jhulas jaayega.” (O humans, mend your ways, leave this greed; respect Mother Earth and connect with nature, otherwise nature will not stop and you will be scorched).

She was to recite this poem on Independence Day, but the village was wiped out on August 14. Chisoti was a repeat of Dharali. Heavy rains saw an overflowing Bhut Nallah sweep down the village carrying an avalanche of slush and stones. Within seconds, the village was overrun by a river of debris.

This is a story that has been repeated in Dharali, Harsil, Mandi, and many other villages across J&K, Uttarakhand, and Himachal Pradesh. The government would like us to believe that this pattern of destruction is taking place because of recurring cloudbursts and landslides. They need to be corrected. This is a story of greed, an indifferent bureaucracy, and the steady commodification of our precious Himalayas, which are being pushed to collapse under the weight of profit-driven development.

In order to expand their vote bank, the present regime has bent over backwards to promote yatras, and so Chisoti, which used to be a remote village deep in the Himalayas, emerged as the basecamp for the Mata Machail Yatra.

The Mata Chandi has been systematically promoted as a Hindu pilgrimage site in J&K after the Vaishno Devi Yatra and the Amarnath Yatra. Community kitchens had been set up at Chisoti, and this year, the administration proudly claimed that over two lakh pilgrims had undertaken this pilgrimage, with many having been brought here in vehicles.

The promotion of the Char Dham yatra has been a much more ambitious project, having been carried out with ruthless one-pointedness in the last eleven years. Minister of Roads and Surface Transport Nitin Gadkari was given the task of executing the widening of this 900 km-long Charm Dham Pariyojana, with the National Highways Authority of India being the executing authority. From the start, the Char Dham Pariyojana was subject to no environmental regulation, though Gadkari was warned repeatedly that an Environmental Impact Assessment was a must in this fragile, eco-sensitive zone.

The result of this hurriedly executed road widening left to contractors to execute with no geologists or other scientists to oversee its execution has been an alarming increase in landslides made worse by a massive influx of tourists, whose number in 2025 has already crossed 60 lakhs. Not only did the Char Dham witness a sharp escalation in accidents and loss of lives, but a recent report released in June 2025 shows that 811 landslide zones have developed all along the Char Dham highway, whose length is 900 km. The Uttarakhand state has witnessed over 5,000 landslide-related deaths in the last 10 years, according to statistics collected by the State Disaster Response Force.

Landslides have become the bane across all our hill states, and on July 5, the Himachal Pradesh forest department filed an FIR against the NHAI, holding it responsible for the massive landslides that occurred on June 30 along the Kaithlighat–Dhalli stretch in the suburbs of Shimla.

This is possibly the first time the NHAI has been pulled up by the forest department of a state. The FIR held the NHAI responsible for the landslide, which it claimed had caused severe damage to the adjacent forest land, stating that this could have been prevented if the construction had been executed by taking proper safety measures.

A case against the NHAI has been registered under Sections 32 and 33 of the Indian Forest Act for offences related to protected areas and Section 324(5) of Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. In 2023, the mayor of the Shimla Municipal Corporation, Tikender Panwar, had also filed an FIR against the NHAI and G.R. Infraprojects, accusing them of criminal negligence because they had chosen to cut the hills vertically instead of in slopes on the Kalka–Shimla highway.

This pattern of negligence has been repeated across thousands of kilometres of NHAI projects in the Himalayan region, and the time has come for the public across all Himalayan states to come forward and take unified action against the NHAI. The dumping of waste along all the Himalayan rivers has created a situation where water levels have risen dramatically, causing unprecedented flooding.

What does the NHAI have to say in its defence? Minister Gadkari has chosen to put all the blame on civil engineers. Addressing a two-day Global Road Infratech Summit & Expo in Delhi, Gadkari said, “The most important culprits are civil engineers. I do not blame everybody, but after 10 years of my experience, I have come to this conclusion. [The] culprits are those who are making DPRs [detailed project reports]. Because of small civil engineering mistakes, there are hundreds of deaths.” Nobody, he went on to say, is ready to rectify mistakes.

The question to be asked is why have Gadkari and his handpicked team of bureaucrats failed to scrutinise the DPRs before execution? Why hold the engineers accountable after the damage is done? More importantly, why has the entire scientific community been sidelined in these major development projects taking place in this highly tectonic region?

The government cannot hide behind climate change and cloudbursts. They have received a sufficient number of warnings. Kedarnath witnessed devastating floods in 2013, in which over 6000 people lost their lives. On July 8, 2022, heavy rains saw the death of 16 pilgrims with another 40 missing near the Amarnath cave. The list of such accidents is endless.

It is time to end the unsustainable practices of allowing towns to develop on floodplains or on unstable slopes. The original village of Dharali was built on a higher elevation, but as more tourists began to pour into these upper Himalayan regions, the local villagers built hotels and homestays on the riverbanks, forgetting that rivers can reclaim their floodplains at any time.

Within minutes, the glacial slush of rocks and water swept away a large number of buildings, apart from causing the loss of life of over a hundred people. Those who went missing are buried under 50 feet of slush, and the National Disaster Management Authority has informed their relatives that it is impossible to retrieve their bodies. The same message was given to the relatives of those who went missing in Chisoti.

It is time for the government to help develop community-based disaster preparedness programmes and allow the villagers to create their own early warning systems. Better still, ensure they return to traditional slope mapping patterns in order to build houses on the higher altitudes and not around rivers. It is also time for community-led initiatives to help restore our ecosystem, which alone are the key safeguards against catastrophes.

Rashme Sehgal is an author and an independent journalist.