More than 20 minutes had gone by, and our car had barely moved. We were stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on a narrow mountain road in Mukteshwar. Perched at nearly 2,200 metres in the Kumaon Himalaya of Uttarakhand, Mukteshwar is famous for its orchards, forests and sweeping views of the snow peaks. I cursed myself for choosing this route to a local café that everyone had been raving about. By the time we reached, finding a parking spot was a challenge, and the café was packed, with a waiting time of nearly 20 minutes. This was unusual. In the decade that I had been visiting Mukteshwar, I had never seen such crowds. The tourists had the unmistakable Delhi vibe: young men and women dressed in high-street fashion that seemed more suited to a South Delhi shopping mall than a Himalayan village. The food was good, but as I drove back, I knew this wasn't the experience I had come to the mountains for. 

A few weeks later, I mentioned this to Dr. Suman Sahai, a geneticist, founder of the Gene Campaign, and someone who has spent decades working with farming communities in Uttarakhand's hills. She was unsparing in her assessment of what tourism had done to nearby Nainital. "Nainital is a monstrous, overpopulated and disgusting place. Nainital is done for. I thought you came to the hills for the good breeze, the good environment, not to wear your chiffons and heels. They don't even wear honest clothes these days."

Sahai's frustration with the visible absurdities of tourism in Nainital is shared by many residents of the hill town. But what runs deeper is the grief and anger shared by local communities and environmentalists witnessing the destruction of the Himalayan landscape in the name of development. Roads, hotels and expanding towns are reshaping fragile mountains even as climate change brings more intense episodes of rainfall and extreme weather. Increasingly, it is the interaction between these two forces—rapid landscape transformation and a changing climate—that is turning natural hazards into disasters, blurring the line between what is natural and what is human-made. 

Gita Pande, among Nainital's oldest hoteliers, remembers a very different mountain town. In the 1960s, the monsoon arrived as long spells of gentle, soaking rain, locally known as jhad. "It used to rain a lot, but there were no cloudbursts," she told me. "This year, my grandchildren got sixteen rainy-day holidays. It wasn't like this for us. After ten or twelve days of rain, we would get a sunshine holiday, just to celebrate."

The transformation of Nainital has been decades in the making. Built around seven lakes and surrounded by forests and meadows, the town became the summer capital of the North-Western Provinces under British rule in 1862. Designed for barely a thousand people at a time, it is now home to nearly 100,000 permanent residents. During peak tourist season, another 80,000 visitors descend on the town. Between 2006 and 2019, the built-up area of Nainital expanded by nearly 68 percent. 

And now this urbanisation is spilling from the town to smaller villages. Mukteshwar, barely two hours away from Nainital, is a perfect example of this transformation. My afternoon at the café was only a glimpse of what residents describe as a rapidly changing landscape. I heard numerous stories of traffic snarls, including one of a young couple stranded for nearly four hours with a hungry infant in their car. 

Yet the state's response is not to slow this growth, but to accelerate it. News reports suggest the Uttarakhand government is preparing a new master plan to address the town's "teething problems" and develop Mukteshwar into a high-end tourist destination.

The numbers explain why. Tourism is estimated to contribute 24% to Uttarakhand’s GDP. In 2025, the state recorded its highest tourist and pilgrim footfall since its formation in 2000, welcoming more than sixty million visitors. And Uttarakhand is far from alone. Across the Indian Himalaya, tourism continues to be promoted as a key driver of economic growth, even as environmentalists, scientists and government agencies warn that many mountain destinations are approaching, or have already exceeded, their ecological limits. The central government has repeatedly called on Himalayan states to assess the ‘carrying capacity’ of their mountain towns—the maximum level of human activity that local ecosystems can sustain without degrading—but progress has been slow.

One of the people who has observed these changes most closely is Chicu Lokgariwar, a water researcher who has spent more than a decade living and working in Sitla, a village near Mukteshwar. For her, the night sky is the most telling sign of change. "I lost the Milky Way. When we first came here in 2011, we could see it in all its colours. It was splendid," she told me. "After Covid, the light pollution increased enormously because of all the construction. There are now so many homestays around us, including right outside my house. The glare is constant. On a really good night now, if I'm lucky, I can make out Orion, perhaps the Seven Sisters, but that's about it."

It is almost as if two parallel worlds coexist in the Himalayas—one visited by tourists in search of pristine landscapes, the other inhabited by local communities struggling to cope with a distressed ecosystem.

I encountered the second world in Ramgarh, a fruit-growing valley about an hour from Mukteshwar in Nainital district.

We stopped at a bend in the road overlooking what felt like a haunted valley. A broken footbridge hung over a narrow stream. A house stood with its roof caved in. The riverbed below was littered with giant boulders and mounds of debris. A lone woman worked quietly outside an isolated house.

We walked down the hillside, crossed the broken bridge and met Madhuri Arya, a 45-year-old farmer. Sitting on the porch of her house, she pointed towards the small stream flowing just a few metres away. It looked impossibly gentle. Yet, it was this stream that had turned her life upside down.

It had rained through the day on October 19, 2021. Arya remembered milking her cows that evening and setting the milk aside to boil the following morning. But the rain did not stop. Late at night she noticed the water rising towards the footbridge. Alarmed, she woke her husband. Moments later, a phone call came from neighbours living higher up the valley, urging the family to leave immediately before the bridge disappeared beneath the water.

Arya grabbed an umbrella and a blanket to wrap her four-month-old granddaughter. She, her husband, daughter-in-law and the infant hurried across the bridge and climbed to safety before midnight. They expected to return home the next morning, once the rain had eased.

Instead, around five o'clock the following morning, they watched helplessly as the swollen Ramgarh river ripped through their orchard, smashed their house and swept away both their cows and a buffalo. In a matter of minutes, everything the couple had built over a lifetime vanished.

The village head arranged temporary shelter in a school building. Neighbours and local organisations brought food, warm clothes and bedding. Their sons left for Haldwani and Delhi in search of work in restaurants. After two months, the couple moved into rented accommodation, where they stayed for nearly two years. Arya's husband tried working as a daily wage labourer, but the trauma took a heavy toll on his physical and mental health.

Eventually, the couple returned to an abandoned ancestral house, a few steps away from their destroyed home. "I told my husband, let us prepare for the worst. We will live or die, but we must return to our own house," Arya said, her voice breaking. "Sometimes I feel like crying. I lost my cows, our orchard. We had fifty plum and apricot trees. We grew peas, lentils, potatoes and cabbage." 

Their irrigable land is gone. The government allotted them a small rehabilitation plot higher up the mountain, but building a house there would be prohibitively expensive. For now, they remain in the valley, living with the knowledge that it is still highly vulnerable.

The rainfall that destroyed Arya's world was no ordinary weather event. Mukteshwar recorded 340.8 millimetres of rain in just 24 hours—an October deluge after the monsoon had officially withdrawn, and the highest rainfall recorded there since observations began in 1897. Nainital was cut off as landslides blocked every approach road. Dozens of people lost their lives, while hundreds of houses, orchards, roads and bridges were damaged or destroyed.

Was this a climate disaster? 

"No," replied Dhan Singh, a 61-year-old farmer who runs a small provision store overlooking the affected valley. Singh lost nearly a hundred fruit-bearing trees in the same floods. He believes the destruction had as much to do with the landscape people had created as with the rain that fell from the sky.

According to him, builders constructing upstream routinely dumped excavated mud and debris into streams and along riverbanks. When the Ramgarh river swelled after hours of relentless rain, these obstructions blocked its natural course. Unable to follow its usual channel, the river carved a new path, tearing through orchards, fields, houses and shops. "I had never imagined that the river would change its course and come into my orchard," he told me. "I would never have planted an orchard there had I known this could happen."

Singh had witnessed many heavy rains before, but never destruction on this scale.

"Whatever they do, these builders should not dump mud and debris into the river. That day it all came rushing down. The river burst like a dust storm."

His explanation echoed what I had earlier heard from environmental campaigner Bachhi Singh Bisht. According to Bisht, all sixteen streams feeding the Ramgarh river had gradually become dumping grounds for construction debris. "The heavy rain could possibly be climate change," he had told me. "But the rainwater that could not find a passage, that destroyed houses and fields and became a disaster—that was not climate change. That was a man-made disaster. The river was disturbed."

For Bisht, the issue is not merely environmental but deeply unjust. "Streams and rivers are created by nature to carry rainwater, not waste. Not one local family has blocked the path of the river or dumped debris into it. Yet we are the ones paying the price for the folly of others."

The villagers' explanations are consistent with scientific understanding of how extreme rainfall interacts with altered mountain landscapes. Environmental scientist Vishal Singh, whose research focuses on Himalayan landscapes and climate adaptation, said: "The rainfall was exceptional in both intensity and duration. That was the immediate trigger. But the damage could have been much less if development had been aligned with mountain characteristics." Over the past two decades, he said, roads, tourism and unplanned construction have reshaped Ramgarh's landscape, leaving it far more vulnerable to extreme rainfall. And Ramgarh is not an isolated case.

In steep Himalayan valleys, Singh explained, rivers respond dynamically to sediment and obstructions. When their natural channels are blocked, they seek new pathways, eroding banks and reclaiming land that had once seemed safely beyond their reach.

"These geomorphic processes are well recognised," he said. "Rivers do create alternate pathways once their natural flow is obstructed or compromised."

Yet Singh is equally wary of another simplification: blaming everything on climate change. "It has become so easy that you can use climate change to justify any practice," he told me. "Today, even if there is average rainfall, there would be damage just the same, because the kind of development practices we are pursuing are completely uncharacteristic of a fragile region like this."

Five years after the cloudburst, Anamika Das, who heads the social enterprise Kilmora, still remembers the phone call she received that night. One of the organisation's production units, which processed herbs, grains and spices, stood beside the Ramgarh river. By the next morning, it had been gutted. "The water broke through the shutter, went through the back, smashed the walls in between and took everything with it," she recalled. "We lost the grain-processing unit, our packaging and storage materials." Along with the machinery and stocks of produce, Kilmora also lost its books and ledgers. 

Looking back, she is candid about her organisation's choices. “It was our mistake to rent a building right next to the river... 20/20 hindsight."

Like many others in the valley, she says the disaster fundamentally changed how people think about living alongside mountain rivers. "Our relationship with water has changed after that." But she resists reducing the disaster to a single cause. Construction debris was certainly part of the problem, she says, but so were household waste dumped into streams, ritual offerings thrown into rivers, small check dams built to divert water into fields, and buildings inching ever closer to the riverbanks. 

Lokgariwar believes the roots of this transformation stretch beyond a single cloudburst. "After Covid, many people from the cities felt trapped and wanted to escape to the mountains," she told me. "At the same time, villagers here had lost their livelihoods and were facing enormous financial distress." Tourism offered a lifeline. Across villages once sustained by orchards and farming, homes rapidly turned into homestays. "Every third house here is now a homestay, essentially a commercial hotel."

Her concern, however, is not tourism itself, but the speed and manner in which the mountains are being rebuilt. "In the rush to build quickly and cheaply, people built very vulnerable buildings. In contrast, traditional Kumaoni architecture can withstand earthquakes and mountain conditions, but the new spate of construction has largely ignored it.” 

None of this is to suggest that climate change is incidental. Across the Himalaya, the climate itself is changing. The Hindu Kush Himalaya is warming faster than the global average. Temperatures across the region are rising, glaciers are retreating, snow cover is shrinking, and scientific evidence increasingly points to a future marked by more intense rainfall events, cloudbursts and flash floods. 

Over the past decade alone, the Himalaya has witnessed a series of disasters—from the Kedarnath floods in 2013 to Chamoli in 2021, the Ramgarh cloudburst later that year, Joshimath's land subsidence in 2023, and the devastating monsoon disasters that swept across Himachal Pradesh the same year. There is little disagreement among scientists that climate change is increasing the likelihood and intensity of extreme weather in these fragile mountains.

But to stop the conversation there, argues Singh, is to misdiagnose these disasters. Across the Himalaya, floods, landslides and cloudbursts may have different immediate triggers, but they increasingly share the same underlying drivers: extreme rainfall interacting with fragile geology, altered drainage, expanding infrastructure and poorly planned development. The uncomfortable question, then, is where a natural hazard ends and a human-made disaster begins.

The 2023 floods in Himachal Pradesh are a striking example. Between July and August 2023, prolonged spells of exceptionally intense rainfall triggered flash floods, cloudbursts and thousands of landslides across Shimla, Mandi, Kullu, Solan and other districts. More than 400 people lost their lives, damages exceeded INR 10,000 crore, over a thousand roads were blocked or washed away, bridges collapsed and entire communities were cut off for days. 

The disaster unfolded against the backdrop of major expansion of road infrastructure across the state. Environmentalist Ravi Chopra has repeatedly argued that mountain roads in Uttarakhand and Himachal were traditionally built along ridgelines rather than beside rivers. As road construction has increasingly shifted into narrow river valleys, he says, highways, bridges and settlements have been placed directly in the path of floodwaters. When rivers swell during extreme rainfall, their erosive force can rapidly undermine roads and other infrastructure built along their banks.

"The landslides in Himachal almost mirror the highway network," said Lokgariwar. "That cannot just be a coincidence." 

Her concern extends beyond roads themselves to the kind of development they represent. "There is an obsession with large, glamorous projects," she said. "An eighteen-lane highway is far more attractive, without even asking whether a smaller project could meet the same need with far less ecological damage."

The tragedy, scientists point out, is that these decisions are not made in the absence of knowledge. There is no shortage of hazard maps, landslide zonation studies, watershed assessments or risk atlases identifying unstable slopes and vulnerable settlements across the Himalaya. For decades, scientists have documented where the risks lie. The question is whether that knowledge is allowed to shape development decisions.

"Even now, there is no real planning," said Das. She points to rockfalls that now occur after a single day of rain, where earlier several days of rainfall would have been needed to trigger them. At the same time, roads continue to widen, traffic continues to grow, and tourism continues to expand. "These are young mountains," she said. "It's almost like they are being attacked from so many sides."

For Singh, the stakes extend far beyond the communities living in the mountains. The Himalaya is not simply another landscape waiting to be commercialised. It is one of the world's most important ecological systems. The glaciers of Uttarakhand feed the Ganga, whose basin supports more than 400 million people downstream. "The contribution of Uttarakhand is several times higher than many other river basins because of the population it supports," he said. "You simply cannot commercialise this place completely."

When I asked Bisht what worried him most today, he spoke about his neighbours. "These families don't even know they are living in the shadow of disaster," he said. "Many houses became weak after the 2021 rains. If another disaster comes at night, people may not even get a chance to escape. The concrete lintels of our own houses, and of the hotels built above us, will become our graves."

He paused. 

"I don't know what the solution is," he said. "The government tells us, 'Sell your land and move to Haldwani or somewhere safe.' But people like us have spent our lives protecting these forests and living from this land. I don't think anyone will come to save us. We will bear the pain on our own."

This piece is an accompaniment and extension of the essay ‘The Price of Paradise’, which features in Hammock’s first print anthology ‘The City’. You can order the anthology here.