A fortnight after calamity stuck Uttarakhand, leaving hundreds dead and missing, six environment protection groups wrote an open letter to chief minister Virbhadra Singh.

Heavy rain had also caused major disruption in Himachal’s Kinnaur district.

Three large hydroelectric projects have been built and are operational in Satluj valley (Kinnaur district).

Many others under construction are central to the exacerbation of the fragility of the area by bringing on deforestation, climate change and affecting land stability, said the activists.

“Creating tunnels of several kilometres, carrying out 24x7 construction, blasting, crushing and haphazard muck dumping along the riverbed at the current scale will continue to play a destructive role if all the 30-odd projects planned in the Satluj basin are allowed to be constructed,” the activists wrote.

Quoting the India State of Forest Report 2011, they said that in Kinnaur, of the total geographical area of 6,401 sqkm, less than 10 per cent is under forest cover, and 40 per cent of this is open forest.

Kinnaur is also the only district where there has been a gradual decrease in forest cover in the past 10 years, the activists said.

According to the report, in comparison to 2001 data, the total area under forest cover, especially dense and moderate forest, has reduced by 7.25 per cent.

“We strongly believe that this decrease in forest cover is connected with forest land diverted for hydropower projects and other development activities.

And it is this which is exacerbating the phenomenon of global climate change in an ecologically and geographically fragile region like Kinnaur,” the open letter to the chief minister said.