This monsoon, North Bengal is paying the price for last year’s Sikkim floods
The height of the Teesta riverbed has risen sharply in Kalimpong district because of debris from the 2023 deluge, putting homes and a highway at risk.
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In October last year, when a breach in the South Lhonak glacial lake in Sikkim swept away a hydropower project on the river Teesta, the effects were felt downstream in West Bengal’s Kalimpong district.
Nawang Doma Bhutia, whose home in Melli, Kalimpong, overlooks the Teesta, felt lucky to have survived.
The 45-year-old remembers several homes being washed away as debris from a broken dam, silt and water barrelled down because of the glacial outburst lake flood, or GLOF, on October 4, 2023.
A few days after the floods had subsided, Bhutia and other residents in this area on the border of West Bengal and Sikkin noticed something alarming – the riverbed had risen. “Earlier, the river used to flow about 20-25 feet below our house. But it had clearly gone up after the flood.”
Activists, district administration officials and residents attribute the rise to deposits from last year’s massive floods.
“The amount of debris which was brought down by the GLOF was phenomenal,” Praful Rao of Save The Hills, a Kalimpong-based non-governmental organisation, told Scroll.
The flood had broken the Chungthang dam or the Teesta Phase III hydropower project, 60 km from Melli, as well as several bridges and a power station. “Besides trees, trunks and branches, the heavier debris which we cannot see now...
