Every Permit Passed, the Mountain Failed: Why Himachal Needs a Carrying Capacity, Not More Clearances

The Mountain Never Applied for a Clearance Himachal

Pradesh does not lack environmental rules. The problem the Central Empowered Committee has identified lies in what those rules are designed to assess. Each hydro project, hotel and road widening is judged on its own. No authority ever asks what all of them together do to a single slope, valley or river. That is the specific failure in the chain: monitoring and coordination, not a shortage of law.

Three Pressures, Each Assessed Alone The

CEC's first-phase report, taken up by the Supreme Court on 27 October 2026, describes three kinds of growth that no single clearance captures.

• Small hydropower. The report says projects below 10 MW make up 866 of the state's 1,007 hydro projects. Only 136 are commissioned; 470 are under clearance or investigation and 217 are yet to be allotted. Individually, each is minor. Together, they reshape river after river.
• Tourism. Registered homestays reportedly grew by 669.7 per cent, from 876 in 2016 to 6,743 in 2026 and now outnumber hotels. The steepest growth was in Lahaul and Spiti (5,315 per cent), Kinnaur (1,556 per cent) and Hamirpur (1,500 per cent). These are fragile, high-altitude districts that were never planned for this many visitors.
• Roads. The CEC found repeated damage to national highways and flagged landslides caused by engineering failures and near-vertical cutting of slopes. Under the EIA Notification, 2006, expansion of existing national highways can be exempt from prior environmental clearance within defined limits. So a road can be widened on a fragile slope without the review that a new road would require.

Where the Chain Breaks

Ananya's test applies here: what was promised, what the data shows and which link failed. On compensatory afforestation, the report says the target from 1981-82 to 2025-26 was 34,169 hectares and plantation was reported on 30,462 hectares, a shortfall of 3,707 hectares or 10.85 per cent.

The funding gap is sharper. Of an approved plan of ₹1,110.81 crore for 2020-21 to 2025-26, ₹865.10 crore was allocated and only ₹592.69 crore spent. Even where work is reported complete, the CEC found that muck-dumping sites of the Larji, Parvati-II and Parvati-III projects had not been fully rehabilitated.

So the failure is not one of intent. It lies in funding not spent, sites recorded as restored but not restored and, most of all, the absence of any body responsible for adding up the impacts.

Why Carrying Capacity Is the Real Reform The

CEC's main recommendation is to assess the carrying capacity of major tourist destinations and to plan around risk, coordinate across departments and keep monitoring compliance. That changes the question from whether one more project should be allowed to how much activity a valley can sustain.

The cost of not asking that question is visible: the 2025 monsoon killed 386 people and caused losses of ₹4,465 crore, according to the SDMA. Credit is due where it is earned. The CEC did not rely on the state's figures alone; it checked them through site visits.

The NHAI has approved ₹825 crore to stabilise 44 critical points on the Kiratpur-Manali corridor. These show that problems can be identified and corrected once someone looks at the whole system. For the exam, the lesson is that India's Himalayan crisis comes less from weak rules than from an assessment system that evaluates each project on its own and never adds up their combined impact.