Joshimath

• Located at about 2,000 metres elevation in Chamoli District in the Himalayas, Joshimath is an ancient, sacred town of about 17,000 people.
• Late in 2022, a new chapter started in the long history of Joshimath as cracks started to develop in buildings across the town.
• The reality is something else: the town is built upon debris from an ancient landslide.
• The age of the landslide is unclear, but it is likely to be hundreds or even thousands of years old.
• A third theory is that climate change, which has caused more intense rainfall in the area, has triggered the landslide.

Many other Joshimaths go unreported

• Landslides are destroying communities right across the high mountains of South Asia, most frequently small, isolated settlements that do not command the attention that has been heaped on Joshimath.
• Over and again, people lose their major economic assets – their house and land – and are rendered destitute.
• In the vast majority of cases, the landslides result from things outside of the control of the people affected, making these events a travesty of social justice.

A safety net for landslide victims

• The victims at every stage are the local people, who lose their home, their land, their possessions and their livelihood, and sometimes their lives.
• For most people it is not possible to assess the likelihood of a property being affected by a landslide, so home owners are in effect having to gamble.
• When things go wrong, and they will, there is a need for a safety net, either through insurance or through government schemes.