Summer is here, and with that our already run down hill stations and roads are alarmingly over trampled upon by pilgrims, holidaying families and trekkers. The spruced up highways leading to the hills have made travel faster, but not as pleasurable as Bollywood films and OTT serials would have you believe. Several years of unusually heavy rains and cloudbursts have brought about huge landslides and disfigured the hill sides repeatedly. After each such natural calamity, the governmental machinery tries to alter scenic routes. But the bypasses may still let loose boulders come the next cloud burst.No one can guarantee road safety during the famous Char Dham Yatra but it has not stopped the barrage of ads urging tourists to visit the holy Himalayan belt. The tourists, weary after a long hot ride, may suddenly see road barriers at several important junctures. The police guards manning them do not wave you in but tell you warily, sorry, no getting beyond this point, the town beyond is full! Those driving their SUVs may heave and whine, “why ? why ? why ? When will you hill folk learn to manage your tourism business like Goa and Rajasthan ?”Actually the hill stations they are headed for, were not created organically by the natives who lived in the central Himalayan region and followed a simple lifestyle, using forest produce and what little their fields could grow for sustenance. It was around 1820-1920 when the official India based representatives of the then vast British empire entered the hills and were greatly charmed by some scenic areas that could be developed for leisure activities. Later their agenda also stretched to assess the commercial potential of vast forests full of precious wild life and timber.Engineers were sent for from England to help build small but comfortable townships with basic health and education facilities for families of their own white officials. Here they could all get much needed rest and recuperation after long stints in the heat and dust of India’s vast plains. Thus resorts in Simla, Dalhousie, Nainital, Mussorie, Ranikhet or Lansdowne came up.Today, while tweaking that earlier narrative to include religious yatras and reorganising domestic tourism around new leisure activities – water sports, spas, yoga and meditation centres – the promoters overlooked a whole history of clever civil engineering works that created roads, bridges and drainage points that gave accessibility to the spots and made them functional. The scientific realisation of the geological vulnerabilities of these young mountains among the British corps of engineers had created for all builders a strict set of operating procedures.They seem to have been abandoned in favour of speedy completion of works and greater push for more visitors and quick money. Designing of all civil and military works as we were growing up, were overseen by seasoned geologists and engineers whose word was law. The maintenance they demanded is being flouted from Himachal to Uttarakhand.On a recent short visit to Nainital and Almora, one realised with horror how close the hill towns have come to reliving the Great Landslide of 1880, that had decimated the newly-created resort town of Nainital. Engineers and contractors refusing to dilute the high standards of service, we were told by locals, are quickly replaced with ones who will use inferior quality material and finish the ‘project’ in time for mantri ji to cut the ribbon and inaugurate a new chapter in “vikas”.Traditionally, the hill natives have cared deeply about their flora and fauna and lived in harmony with each other. But now just like their British predecessors, the officialdom and private builders are creating urban structures that spell disaster in the long run. This is sustaining the same old binaries between the rulers and the ruled, between leisurely and working classes. Visible socio cultural chasms between outsiders from Delhi, Mumbai, Gurugram or wherever, who have bought out the locals’ land, have also scarred the previous humble lifestyles. The new owners repeatedly boast proudly how they are stopping the migration out of the hills by re-employing the earlier land holders as managers, domestics or providing them work as wage day labour .Locally no one is fooled. They will tell you how by the 1970s, things had started to flag, especially upholding of regular maintenance and repairs of roads and river water. A little later, two tiny hill states of Uttarakhand and Himachal were carved out of what was earlier the United Province (UP) and Patiala and East Punjab States Union (PEPSU). Both had limited resources. Finally it was decided that to beef up revenues, both be repackaged and publicised as perfect summer resorts .No lessons it seems, have been learnt from the earlier ecological disasters and against the advice by specialists on record, furious road expansion and tunneling to widen the roads have been carried out as even as mountains collapse. Ironically the biggest disasters in the last two decades have occurred in the valleys of our holiest rivers, Vyas, Satluj in Himachal and Punjab and Ganga and Yamuna. The iconic village of Raini , the birth place of Chipko movement, India’s first major public movement against environmental degradation, has now been all but disappeared due to repeated floods and resultant mass migration of its villagers to safer locations .As a child of middle class parents growing up in the hills in the 50s and 60s, one benefitted enormously from the local civil hospitals and vernacular schools then run by ageing but efficient teachers, inspectors, medical doctors, and their staff. Our civil hospitals and schools were solid buildings, sparsely furnished but adequate with large playgrounds for students . Today one would be lucky to survive them.Last year at the comfortable homestay in Pyunda village, I asked the retired principal of the local school how come their grandsons and daughters-in-law had left them alone to live in rented hovels in Nainital or Almora ?“How can they have a future unless they study in the English medium schools there? There are only Hindi medium schools here. (English medium education ke bina unka bhavishya kaise banega? Yahan tau Hindi medium hi hai na?) the old man had said sadly.Kipling had once posed an interesting question : “What do they know of England, who only England know ?”If the same question were to be asked of those turning all poetic and dewy eyed talking of the beauty and holiness of our Himalayan region, after a week-long visit, my likely answer could be : “Maybe not nearly enough.”Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.