Between Fury and Fragility

SARIKAH ATREYA

When springs fall silent and a river runs thinRecently, driving from Gangtok to Kalimpong and back, I saw something I had hoped not to see again.

The roadside springs — those faithful threads of mountain water that feed the larger rivers — had dried up. Not reduced. Not trickling. Gone. These springs and rivulets, once small assurances — thin silver threads slipping out of rock faces — hadvanished.

And the Teesta.

After the GLOF, she was fierce, swollen, unpredictable — almost young again in her rage, almost defiant in her dance. For three years she carried the memory of that violence in her sediment load, her altered channels, her restless current.

Now she is thin again.

The Teesta looks bare-chested. Her ribs visible. She has shrunk back into a narrow, uncertain line. The river that once roared now thins into silence.

When a Himalayan river swings between fury and fragility, it is climate instability layered over human interference. Erratic rainfall. Warmer winters. Reduced snow accumulation. Flash events instead of steady recharge.

The Teesta has always been more than a river. She is artery, memory, economy, politics and poetry. When she shrinks, something inside us does too.

So here is the question that matters:

Is this just a bad season? Or are we watching a new normal form in real time?

For those who remember the early 2000s, this sight feels painfully familiar. When protests erupted against the cascade of hydropower dams on the Teesta, the argument was never abstract. It was about flow. About sediment. About what happens when a mountain river is broken into a chain of reservoirs and tunnels.

We were told development demanded sacrifice. We were assured regulation meant stability. We warned that fragmenting a Himalayan river would alter not just electricity generation, but sediment movement, ecology and long-term resilience.

Those warnings were dismissed as obstruction.

Today, climate change has entered the equation with brutal clarity. Warmer winters. Erratic rainfall. Glacial instability. We now oscillate between too much water and not enough — between disaster and drought — without addressing the structural fragility beneath both.

Dry springs are early warning systems. They are mountain barometers. Hydrology is shifting. Recharge cycles are disrupted. When springs disappear, groundwater patterns have already changed. Snowmelt timing, forest cover and rainfall distribution upstream are no longer predictable.

Drying springs do not remain an abstract mountain concern for long. They travel downstream into daily life. Village taps that once ran steadily through the year now sputter and fall silent by late winter. Storage drums fill anxiety before they fill with water. Even Gangtok, which once relied on dependable upland sources, is already reeling — forced to ration supply, depend more heavily on tankers and scramble for supplementary intake points. When springs fail, so does dignity and local economies.

And as the Teesta thins, the sand mafia descends. Fresh deposits left behind after the GLOF are mined aggressively. Short-term profit is extracted from a river already struggling to stabilise. Each truckload weakens banks, distorts channels and deepens future risk.

When the river floods, we speak of calamity.When she shows her ribs, we look away.

But this is not a temporary lean season. It is cumulative stress — climate layered upon infrastructure layered upon unchecked extraction.

Two decades ago, we asked whether development without ecological foresight would cost us later.

That “later” has arrived.

If we continue to treat the Teesta as a resource to be controlled when she is raging and exploited when she is weak, we cannot claim surprise at the next catastrophe. We feared the dams would choke her. We did not realise climate would swing her between rage and ribs.

Rivers do not forget.Mountains do not forgive.And denial is no longer an option.

(Views are personal. The author is a writer and a senior journalist. Email: sarikahatreya@gmail.com)