Chalaunthi spoke before the authorities did.It spoke through cracks that split walls and floors after the blasting for the Sanjauli-Chalaunthi tunnel. Nearly twenty buildings – homes that held families, savings, memory, and winter warmth – were declared unsafe. The cracks appeared on January 9, 2026, and by night, people were evacuated into the open, standing helplessly in temperatures plunging to minus four, minus five degrees. Children, elderly residents, the sick – left out in the cold not by nature, but by development.This was not an unforeseen mishap. It was a predictable outcome. Chalaunthi is not an isolated tragedy. It is merely the most recent manifestation of a structural violence being inflicted across Himachal Pradesh, where mountains are treated as engineering material rather than living geography.Understanding where Shimla really sitsTo understand why Chalaunthi happened, one must first understand where Shimla stands – geographically and geologically.The Shimla Hills are not an undefined upland nor a vague “middle zone.” They are part of the lesser (or middle) Himalaya, the most fractured, stressed, and inhabited belt of the Himalayan system. This belt lies north of the Shivalik (outer) Himalayas – young, loose, collapsing – and south of the massive Greater Himalaya, whose tectonic weight presses relentlessly downward.The lesser Himalaya absorbs pressure from both sides. Its rocks are folded, faulted, water-bearing, and fragile. It is precisely here that cities like Shimla, Mussoorie, Nainital, Joshimath, and now Chalaunthi exist. It is also here that reckless tunnelling, slope cutting, and blasting are most dangerous.To understand why interventions such as grouting are deeply problematic in Shimla, one must first grasp the nature of the mountain itself. The Himalayas are not old, stable landforms but young, folded and faulted mountains –still rising, still adjusting, still remembering every tectonic shock. A faulted mountain is not solid rock; it is a body of crushed, sheared and fractured material, broken along planes where the earth has repeatedly moved. These fault zones act like conduits for groundwater and stress, not defects waiting to be “repaired”. Grouting, as described in geotechnical studies, involves injecting cementitious or chemical mixtures under pressure into underground voids, joints or fissures to “strengthen” the ground or arrest movement.In stable terrains this may work as a localised measure, but in tectonically disturbed mountain systems it becomes an invasive act – forcing material into living geological pathways, displacing groundwater, sealing some fractures while pressurising others, and often transferring stress rather than eliminating it. In folded and faulted strata, such injections can behave less like healing and more like hydraulic jacking, prising open old weaknesses and destabilising adjacent zones. What is presented as stabilisation thus risks becoming silent re-engineering of the mountain’s internal balance, in a landscape where fragility is structural, not accidental, and where the illusion of control often precedes collapse.Chalaunthi, in fact, the entire Himalayan arc now is under the highest seismic risk area, Seismic Zone VI, as per the latest Dec 2025 seismic map. This zonation means that these places need very specific, earthquake-resistant designs for any construction, let alone drilling mountainsides for tunnels.This is not opinion. This is Himalayan geology.How the cracks were engineeredThe cracks in Chalaunthi did not appear mysteriously. They followed the logic of a project.Under the ongoing four-laning of the national highway, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has been executing a tunnel connecting the Sanjauli–Chalaunthi stretch with Bhattakuffar, cutting directly beneath and alongside a densely inhabited slope within the Shimla planning area. The method employed was aggressive blasting in close proximity to residential structures, without adequate buffer zones, without transparent structural audits of buildings above, and without real-time public disclosure of geological risk.In a water-bearing, fractured rock system like the Lesser Himalaya, such blasting does not remain confined underground. Shock waves propagate through joints and faults, disturb subsurface aquifers, loosen rock mass, and create voids. When tunnels intersect natural drainage paths – as they inevitably do here – pore water pressure rises, soil cohesion weakens, and foundations above begin to shift. What residents experienced as “cracks” were surface expressions of subsurface destabilisation.The damage was compounded by the absence of phased excavation, inadequate grouting, and insufficient micro-zonation of inhabited slopes. Buildings that had stood for decades suddenly developed diagonal and vertical fissures – textbook signs of differential settlement and slope failure. Roads fractured. Retaining structures weakened. The mountain responded exactly as geology predicts when violence is inflicted faster than it can absorb.This was not a failure of nature. It was a failure of project design, regulatory oversight, and institutional accountability.This accountability cannot be treated as abstract. As early as 2023, a formal police complaint was filed at Parwanoo Police Station warning that NHAI’s highway construction practices – particularly indiscriminate slope cutting in fragile Himalayan terrain – posed grave risks to life, property, and environmental stability. That complaint was not an afterthought; it was a prior warning. The subsequent damage at Chalaunthi therefore raises a serious legal question: when risks are formally brought to the attention of an executing authority and work continues unchanged, responsibility shifts from accident to negligence.Under Indian law, including principles of tort liability, environmental jurisprudence evolved by the Supreme Court, and the precautionary principle embedded in disaster governance, executing agencies cannot plead ignorance after documented warnings. If homes crack after blasting beneath settlements, liability does not diffuse into committees and inquiries – it rests squarely with the agency that designed, approved, and executed the work.When Engineering Ignores GeographyYet national infrastructure policy continues to behave as though the Himalayas were uniform rock. The National Highway from Parwanu Shimla four laning project began in September 2015. Highways are pushed through the Lesser Himalaya with tunnel-heavy designs, aggressive timelines, and a singular obsession with speed and kilometre counts. The NHAI has become the principal instrument of this violence – cutting, drilling, and detonating mountains as if they were inert obstacles to economic growth.But mountains are not blank space.In Shimla, the consequences are already visible: roads cracking overnight, slopes slowly sliding, and a recent incident where a bus plunged after subsidence hollowed the ground beneath the carriageway. These are not random failures. They are symptoms of a system that refuses to respect carrying capacity.Chalaunthi is simply where the rupture became undeniable.Cost paid by ordinary peopleEvery time such destruction occurs, the same justification is offered: roads bring development. But development for whom?Himachal Pradesh has long failed to provide adequate social housing. As a result, most housing has emerged through small, painstaking private investments – life savings of teachers, drivers, shopkeepers, nurses, private-sector employees, and informal workers. These are not speculative assets. These are homes built incrementally over decades.When blasting cracks these structures, it is not the contractor who loses shelter. It is not the consultant who stands in freezing darkness. It is not the approving authority that sleeps outside.It is the citizen.Compensation, when offered, rarely reflects real loss. EMIs continue even after evacuation. Rents must be paid while income is disrupted. Psychological trauma is not counted. Intergenerational savings vanish overnight.This is not collateral damage. This is systemic dispossession.The cruelty is compounded by hypocrisy. Himachal Pradesh is already operating under the Disaster Management Act. The Chief Minister himself has repeatedly warned of extreme vulnerability. And yet, national highway projects continue as if disaster governance were irrelevant.Where is the District Disaster Management Authority when blasting destabilises inhabited slopes? Where are municipal councils, ward committees, and panchayats when alignments are finalised? Why are city governments reduced to spectators while highways carve through their jurisdictions?Disaster management is not a post-collapse ritual. It is meant to govern prevention, preparedness, and planning. If national highways are truly in the public interest, then local governments must be integral to monitoring and decision-making, not bypassed as inconveniences.Perhaps the most alarming absence is that of scientific accountability. Where are the geologists and hydrologists? Were they consulted meaningfully, or merely hired to legitimise predetermined outcomes? Were cumulative impact assessments conducted for entire corridors, or were projects fragmented deliberately to evade scrutiny?If warnings were issued, why were they ignored? If studies exist, why are they not public? And if experts remained silent, were they compromised – by payment, by pressure, or by institutional capture?In the Lesser Himalaya, water remembers every fracture. Rock remembers every blast. Science, when silenced, becomes complicit.Chalaunthi as a WarningWhat Chalaunthi demands is not sympathy. It demands a reckoning. Himachal Pradesh does not need infrastructure that defies its geography. It needs regional planning rooted in ecological and geological reality. Jobs can be created without tearing mountains apart – through slope-sensitive construction, decentralised tourism, forest-based livelihoods, repair and maintenance economies, and public transport systems that reduce the obsession with road-widening.Infrastructure must follow carrying capacity, not contractor appetite. A comprehensive review of all ongoing tunnelling and highway projects in the Lesser Himalaya is no longer optional. It is an ecological necessity, a constitutional obligation, and a moral imperative.If Chalaunthi is reduced to another inquiry report, another compensation file, another forgotten winter night, then the state has learned nothing.The cracks will travel – from Chalaunthi to Shimla, from Shimla to Kullu, from Kullu to the upper valleys – until the Lesser Himalaya responds not with fissures, but with collapse. The mountain has already spoken.The question is whether those governing it will finally listen – or continue blasting their way into disaster.Tikender Singh Panwar was once directly elected deputy mayor of Shimla. He was linked with the Leh Vision document and has written vision documents for a dozen cities. Author of three books, he is an urban specialist working in the design of inclusive cities and also a member of the Kerala Urban Commission.