Uttarakhand

On June 16, 2013, a cloudburst above Kedarnath temple triggered a flood that killed over 6,000 pilgrims and trapped 300,000 more in valleys leading to Hinduism's most sacred Char Dham circuit. Twelve years later, Uttarakhand welcomes 4.8 million pilgrims annually to the same sites—Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri, and Yamunotri—while recording over 4,600 landslides in the past decade alone.

The demand for a separate hill state dates to 1930, when residents of what was then the United Provinces first petitioned for autonomy. The movement intensified in 1994 when police killed demonstrators at Rampur Tiraha, and on November 9, 2000, Uttarakhand became India's 27th state, carved from Uttar Pradesh's northern hill districts. Its founders envisioned an Urja Pradesh—a power state—built on the Himalayan rivers' estimated 25,450 MW hydroelectric potential.

That vision produced the Tehri Dam, a 260-meter earth-fill structure generating 2,000 MW of electricity. But over 70 hydropower projects now fragment the state's rivers, destabilize slopes, and concentrate construction in seismically active zones. The 2013 disaster demonstrated the consequences: a glacial lake burst above Kedarnath, sending boulders and debris through a town where a massive rock providentially lodged behind the 8th-century temple, splitting the floodwaters and saving the shrine while everything around it was destroyed.

The state rebuilt Kedarnath and doubled down on pilgrimage infrastructure. All-weather roads now reach higher elevations; helicopter services ferry thousands of devotees daily during the May-October season. But waste generation reaches 10-20 metric tonnes daily during peak season, and landslides continue.

Beyond pilgrimage, Uttarakhand houses India's military training facilities at Dehradun and the Forest Research Institute established in 1906. The Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve contains one of the Himalayas' most intact high-altitude ecosystems.

By 2026, Uttarakhand confronts the arithmetic of religious tourism: pilgrim numbers that triple the state's permanent population, generating revenue that funds reconstruction from disasters that pilgrimage infrastructure itself exacerbates.