Cost of Ignoring Fragility

The story of the Himalayan states like Himachal, Uttarakhand, and J&K is becoming sadly repetitive. For the past few years, it has been the story of excess rainfall, glaciers melting, river levels swelling, landslides, and cloudbursts wiping out roads and villages. The pitter-patter of rain on tin roofs and the lush greenery of the Himalayas appear now as things of a romanticised past. Tourist inflows have plummeted. The usual proximate blame is on the rampant construction of highways, hydro projects, tall buildings, etc., and the remote blame, which the middle class loves to throw, is hurled at intangible concepts of global warming, climate change, the construction mafia, and so on. But the main issue here is — are we asking the right questions? The ones which will force us to do some self-searching and own up to things honestly. So here goes...

First of all, will we throw out our air-conditioners, which contribute to warming? Will we stop taking out our petrol-guzzling cars on the villainous highways? Will we stop using electricity from hydropower? Or will we stop using thousands of products made in factories that use this power? All these questions come up directly from the energy-guzzling life we live today — and thanks to that, it is a life as comfortable as humans have ever lived before. Of course, the honest answer to dozens of such questions is an obvious “No.” All these changes look too demanding and impractical. So the bad news we have to accept is that global warming is here to stay, and we have to find a solution to survive and get along. That we can do only by adapting and using appropriate technology and engineering, which are suited to the situation humanity has created — and which is going to remain, and possibly get worse.

To start with, the obsession with concrete construction has to end. Concrete is heavy and non-insulating against cold, and in mountains like the Himalayas, which are in risky seismic zones 3 and 4, it is also a dangerous material. There are substitutes like light-weighted Autoclaved Aerated Concrete, which at times is as much as 80 per cent air and therefore lightweight, and it has good thermal insulation. It is used widely in Germany, Nordic countries, China, and, of late, is being used — albeit sparingly — in India as well. Its use has to increase. Besides this, ingenious products and technologies using engineered wood, bamboo, and Light Gauge Steel Frames (LGSF) have also come up in recent years, which are suited for the mountains. Then there are earth-friendly construction materials like Compressed Stabilised Earth Blocks (CSEB) and straw bale construction. To build using these is not rocket science.

Road construction will continue, but along with the roads, the budget for the stabilisation of slopes has to be there. The obsession with adding kilometres per day, without stabilising the roads and protecting the slopes above, has to be replaced by: build less, build better, and build safe.

To do all this, the main issue here is to bring primacy to engineering knowledge and couple it with judicious regulations, rather than keep succumbing to the conventional contractor–Government Department–promoted heavy buildings made out of cement and reinforced steel. We are aghast at the spectacle of heavy buildings falling as a result of a few landslides and river floods. This is nothing. One shudders at the thought of what devastation a full-blown earthquake will cause in our Himalayan towns and villages, which today are littered with heavy and ill-designed concrete monstrosities.

We have to realise that the Himalayas have very fragile and varied geology. Within a few metres, the geological conditions change. So a templatised “one solution fits all” approach is fraught with danger, and each structure has to be site-specific. Design specifications for each section of the road have to incorporate the local geological conditions. These have to be carefully incorporated into the Detailed Project Report (DPR). If it leads to an increase in the design engineering budget, it has to be done. Making a DPR, in the end, is a very small part of the total road construction cost. It is far less than the cost which has to be incurred for repeated repairs of roads, re-erecting caved retaining walls, and clearing landslide debris. For this, besides judicious rules and regulations, the implementing agency, the town and country planning administration, state PWDs, NHAI, and the Forest Department also have to come together. Further, the spectre of encroachments, over-construction, and unsupervised construction by ill-trained contractors has to end. If we have aspirations to become a first-world nation, we need to have first-world regulations on structural safety and on who can become a building contractor and what minimum technical training they must possess.

We have well-defined building codes, but the main problem is that the “safety factor” (also called the factor of safety (FoS) or load/resistance factor) in structural engineering is one aspect that has long been forgotten. It is not a number but a framework defined by building codes. It varies on a host of factors, including the type of load, soil conditions, gravity, wind, earthquake, and flood. Only then can the building be designed — and that too after factoring in the worst-case scenario for each of these factors. But the problem is that these worst-case scenarios actually appear once in a few decades and, at times, do not occur even in centuries. Once you add the approved safety factors of, say, 1.5 for dead load (self-load of the building or structure), 1.2–1.5 for live load (occupants, furniture, gadgets, snow, etc.), and 1.5 each for wind, earthquake, and flood, the building does get to be a little costly. But it is certainly far less costly than getting it washed away or developing structural cracks.

So economic considerations have given rise to the tendency to design for very normal situations, keeping a small and acceptable margin of safety. Of late, with extreme weather events occurring far too frequently, these have proved to be inadequate, and hence the terrifying scenes that we are witnessing in the mountains. So the time demands that economic frugality be adjusted for the challenges posed by the changing weather patterns. The obsession with constructing cheaply has to be replaced by a commitment to construct economically but safely. Crafted and safe buildings, roads, and bridges may be expensive to build initially; they are undemanding, and in the long run, they justify their cost.

Views expressed are personal. The writer is an Ex-IPS officer, and he writes regularly on policy and economy