The North Bengal Floods Are the Cost of Development

Hoglatari (Bengal): At dawn, the sound came first, a roar that seemed to tear the sky apart. Within minutes, a wall of water surged through Bamandanga village in Jalpaiguri’s Nagrakata block, uprooting homes, trees, and soild at once.

“I was born on the banks of the Jaldhaka and have lived here all my life. Never have I seen such floods,” narrated Sadhu Roy, one of the oldest residents of Hoglatari village in Jalpaiguri.

Staring at the crater where his fields once lay, he described the day that devastated North Bengal. Floods on October 9 killed 40 people in the region. “I heard a horrific sound – like an explosion. A torrent of water, like an arrowhead, rushed in and ravaged our village. Pucca houses, coconut trees and betel-nut trees – everything was uprooted.”

Disaster has become the new normal across North Bengal. From the bursting of Sikkim’s Teesta dam to relentless rainfall cascading from Bhutan, the Himalayan foothills have been struggle with ecological distress with the past two years.

What struck the plains of North Bengal this time was no act of nature alone. According to ecology experts, it was the predictable outcome of a Himalayan ecosystem pushed past its limits due to unregulated construction, reckless river mining, and the political capture of environmental governance.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, during her visit to the flood-ravaged Bamandanga village, shifted the blame to Bhutan’s excess water discharge.

Surveying the village, which was washed away in the floods, Banerjee said, “We’ve long demanded an Indo-Bhutan River Commission. The Centre has finally called a meeting. But it’s not just the water, Bhutan’s dolomite mining is also harming our region.”

Environmentalist Rupan Sarkar says that it is not just mining either. “Since India and Bhutan diverted the Pasakha source flow last year, smaller tributaries like the Hollong have faced unprecedented water pressure. Combined with rampant tree-felling and unscientific riverbed construction, the region has turned into a tinderbox of ecological instability,” Sarkar added.

Scientists describe the Sikkim-Darjeeling Himalayas as one of the most unstable mountain systems in the world, perched on active seismic zones IV and V. Yet it is being carved, tunnelled, and blasted on the pretext of infrastructure development.

Illegal debris dumping from projects such as the NH-10 expansion and the Sivok-Rangpo railway has led to massive siltation in the Teesta and its tributaries, raising riverbeds and amplifying flood impacts, studies note. These overlapping stresses have created what environmentalists call “cumulative geo-environmental collapse,” where each new project amplifies the damage of the last.

Rupak Pal, who teaches geography at the University of North Bengal, says the crisis has been building quietly for decades. He explained, “Over the past two decades, the ecological character of the hills has changed drastically. Deforestation, driven by the construction of tunnels, bridges, and hotels, has stripped the hills of their native forest cover.”  

Indigenous tree species are declining, Pal says, while Dhupi (Cryptomeria japonica) trees are increasing rapidly. The Dhupi tree, introduced during the British period, has become commercially profitable for plywood. But its shallow root system loosens the soil, making the hills dangerously unstable. 

“That’s why every mountain river now runs thick and muddy,” Pal said.

Rivers that once nourished fertile plains are now stripped of their beds through illegal sand and stone extraction. The Jaldhaka, once Bengal’s premier potato belt, has seen its embankments hollowed out by daily heavy-duty vehicle traffic and unregulated mining. 

Bamandanga farmer Motilal Sarkar shared his observations, “After the water receded, I went to the Jaldhaka. I saw that the section of the embankment used daily by sand-carrying payloaders had completely collapsed. The daily pressure has turned the banks fragile.”  

North Bengal’s ecological fragility is being rapidly compounded by a tourism model driven by unchecked construction enabled by political complicity. Nowhere is this collapse more visible than in Darjeeling. The so-called “Queen of the Hills” is now drowning in concrete.

Once built on timber and stone suited to seismic conditions, the town has become a forest of illegal high-rises, defying the 11.5-metre height limit set by law. Over 1,500 hotels and more than 3,000 homestays operate across the district, many without environmental clearance.

Environmentalists warn that this unrestrained vertical growth, combined with heavy vehicular load and road expansion, is pushing the hills toward a Joshimath-like subsidence crisis. The conversion of tea estate lands under the Tea Tourism and Allied Business Policy, 2019 has further blurred the line between hospitality and ecological vandalism, legitimising real estate speculation in one of India’s most landslide-prone belts.

“The media claims disasters are increasing because of hotels and resorts. But isn’t it the government that’s granting these permissions? It’s important to see whether there’s a proper national policy to balance tourism construction with environmental protection,” said Samrat Sanyal, the president of the Darjeeling District Hoteliers Association.

Meanwhile, CM Banerjee has pledged new temple projects in Darjeeling and Siliguri, including a new Mahakal temple with what she said would be the biggest idol of the Hindu deity Shiva in the flood-ravaged Dooars. 

Translated from the Bengali original and with inputs by Aparna Bhattacharya.