Black Forest: The Fires That Ravaged The Uttarakhand

The fires that ravaged Uttarakhand demonstrate how dysfunctional the state administration is in times of a crisis

- Chinki Sinha

 

Eight-year-old Sudhanshu tries hard to fight back the tears. Next to him, his elder brother Priyanshu sits by the window looking out at the blueblack mountains. They say beyond the mountains lie more mountains. The boys saw the fire coming from way beyond there. Even at his age, Sudhanshu knows he must learn to live with the forest fires, an enemy that won’t take defeat. On the afternoon of April 27, the two children lost their mother, 28-year-old Urmila Devi, to the forest fire that  has ravaged the state of Uttarakhand, spreading beyond to Himachal Pradesh and even Jammu & Kashmir.

Urmila had gone down to check on her husband, who was trying to clear the grass and build fire-control lines on the slope of the mountain in Sauro village in Pauri Garhwal. That’s when the fire leapt up, and now, the slopes are black and grey, much like most of the forests here. “It was around 3.30 pm when a ball of fire came towards us and exploded. That’s what happens when the crown of the forest catches fire,” Urmila’s husband Digambar Kumar, 33, says. At some point, his wife’s hand slipped from his. The smoke and the fumes blinded his vision. By the time he found her lying in the farms, her flesh had melted. She died at the burns ward at Safdarjung Hospital in New Delhi a few days later. “I don’t know who to blame except these murderous pine trees that grow on our land,” he says. “We are harbouring death in our own backyards, but we can’t even cut them.”