DA Editorial Desk (Sara Debbarma)
August 21, 2026
On the evening of August 13, a wall of water and debris tore into a tunnel at the THDC hydropower site near Pipalkoti in Chamoli, catching an entire shift of workers inside. By the time rescue teams from the SDRF, NDRF, the Army and ITBP had finished the grim accounting, seven workers were dead and thirteen injured. The trigger, officials said, was a landslide. In Himalayan Uttarakhand, that single word has become almost routine, which is precisely the problem.
This was not an isolated freak event. Barely a month earlier, twenty workers were killed in a tunnel collapse at another state-run hydroelectric project in neighboring Sikkim. Go back further and the pattern hardens into a record: the 2023 Silkyara tunnel collapse, where 41 workers spent seventeen days trapped before a dramatic rescue; the catastrophic 2021 Tapovan-Vishnugad disaster, when a glacier or rock-ice avalanche sent a flood through NTPC and Rishiganga project tunnels, killing over 200; the 2013 Kedarnath floods that remain the region’s grimmest reference point. Each time, officials describe the immediate cause as unforeseeable — a cloudburst, a glacial event, a sudden landslide. Each time, the response is a war-footing rescue, a promise of accountability, and eventually, quiet return to business as usual.
The uncomfortable truth is that these are not truly unforeseeable events happening to well-sited infrastructure. Ecologists and geologists have warned for years that the young, seismically active, and increasingly unstable terrain of the Himalayas is a poor host for the dense grid of tunnels, dams, and run-of-the-river hydro projects being built through it. Warming-driven glacial melt, unpredictable cloudbursts, and slopes destabilized by blasting and excavation form a feedback loop: infrastructure construction itself contributes to the very instability that later kills the people building it. Villagers near several of these project sites, including communities affected by the Rishiganga project, took their objections to court years before disaster struck. Those warnings were litigated, not acted on.
None of this is an argument against hydropower in Uttarakhand, a state with genuine energy needs. It is an argument against treating each disaster as a standalone tragedy rather than a data point in a pattern repeating at a steady clip of roughly one major incident per year. The workers who die in these tunnels are disproportionately migrant laborers doing dangerous work far from home for wages that rarely reflect the risk. Their deaths generate days of urgent coverage, a chief minister’s promise of a war-like rescue, and then silence until the next tunnel floods.
What would actually change the pattern is unglamorous: independent geological risk assessments before, not after, project approval; real-time monitoring in high-risk tunnels; enforceable construction restrictions during monsoon; and safety standards that make cutting corners more expensive than following them. Uttarakhand does not lack an early-warning problem. It lacks a follow-through problem. Until that changes, the next headline reading ‘trapped in the tunnel’ is not a matter of if, but when — and where.