Himalayas and Alps are both called water towers of their respective continents, but the similarity ends there.
Mountain is my go to place. I have travelled enough in Himalayas – Mt Kailas, the Annapurna Range, Muktinath – and several other mountain ranges in India and Nepal to learn one simple truth: mountains collapse only when human behave as if they are all powerful and can do anything with the mountain ranges.
What happened during last week of August in Nepal is being widely proclaimed as a tragedy of water and ice, but anyone who has seen the Alps knows that nature rarely kills without being provoked. In Switzerland, the mountains are not “business resources,” rather they are treated like elderly parents – with respect, caution and an awareness that one careless act can break a bone!
Himalayan blunder vs. Alpine standard
The Swiss do not blast Alps the way we have been blasting the Himalayas during recent decades; they do not carve roads screwing knives, and wounds, in Himalaya’s body; they do not let hydropower tunnels pierce rock as if mountain geology is a child play. In Alps, in contrast, every cable car; every hiking trail; every chalet is built after years of study, public hearings, and environmental vetoes.
In the Alps, the mountain decides; human, read governments, merely negotiates. In the Himalayas, the opposite happens. The mountain pleads, the government bulldozes.
A direct comparison is worth looking at. Despite the Alps being much older and geologically more stable than the Himalayas, the Alps’ primary economic driver is high-value seasonal skiing and winter tourism as well as sustainable agro-tourism. This contrasts with the Himalayas, which has plethora of mega infrastructural projects ranging from hydropower, highway widening and expansion & intensive mass tourism at ecologically fragile sites. While the governance of the Himalayas, spread over several countries, remains mostly fragmented, the Alps’ governance is much more coordinated.
Himalayas treated like a construction site
Switzerland earns billions from tourism without massacring its slopes. They understood early that the mountain is the product.
If you destroy the product, you destroy the economy.
So they built a model where development is slow, regulated, and often rejected outright if the mountain says “no.”
Nepal and India, meanwhile, have spent fifteen years treating the Himalayas like a construction site. Blasting, tunnelling and diverting rivers; as if the mountain were an enemy to be conquered!
And when the mountain finally retaliates, we blame carbon, climate, and every abstract noun available in the UN vocabulary.
Human triggers, climate piggybacks
The Swiss would laugh at this. Not because they are arrogant, but because they learned long ago that climate change is only the last straw that piggybacks on anthropogenic actions — the real damage comes from human impatience and interference .
If the Himalayas are to survive, we need a Swiss-style discipline:
development that listens, tourism that respects, and governments that fear the mountain more than they fear losing an election. Until then, every disaster report will read the same: “Nature collapsed,” over and over again.
When in truth, it was simply tired of being tortured.
Jitendra Kumar is a corporate leader at Exide Industries limited; also an avid nature follower