Photographs by PTI outlookindia.com 2021-02-12T18:23:53+05:30 Dev Bhoomi, they call Uttarakhand. Going by the past 30 years, the gods must be angry. The 1991 Uttarakashi earthquake cost 768 human lives. The 1998 Malpa landslide left 221 dead. The number of casualties in the 1999 Chamoli earthquake was 103. The 2013 Kedarnath floods left 5,700 dead. Many smaller disasters punctuated these. All these disasters relate to earthquakes or water activity. Often both. “The Himalayas are very fragile, crumbly and young. They are not the Alps. They are prone to erosion, landslides and seismic activity. The terrain means these things will happen, and climate change may worsen it,” says Rajesh Thadani, a PhD in Forest Ecophysiology from Yale. “If the administration calls it a natural calamity, that’s just lack of foresight. It is like sitting under a rock which you know will fall, and when it falls you say there is nothing we could have done.”