A village erased from the map

Every morning, Hira Lal Raspa walks toward his field in Lindur with a growing sense of dread. “An anxiety grips me,” he says. “Has more of my farmland collapsed today? What will be left tomorrow?”

Raspa, a 55-year-old tribal farmer from Lindur village in the Lahaul and Spiti region of Himachal Pradesh, planted potatoes on his 2.5 bighas [about 0.2 acres] of land in April 2025. By mid-May, nearly half of his farmland had fallen into a widening drain.

The rest of his crop still stands, healthy for now, but Raspa is not hopeful.

The short summer window from late April to October is critical for residents of the Lahaul and Spiti valley, where snow seals off life for six months every year. It is the only time residents can grow food and cash crops.

June, usually a month of hard work and hope, was clouded by dread this year. People still toiled in the fields, but with anxious hearts.

“Every day, every week, a bit more of my field disappears,” Raspa says. “By the time the potatoes are ready to harvest, the whole field might be gone.”

With a kind of weary disbelief, he adds: “Our homes, our fields, our farms –they’re all slipping away. We don’t understand why the Almighty is punishing us. We, the people of Lindur, are living through a kind of hell.”

That hell is land subsidence, a sloping or sinking of the ground caused by readjustments or collapses in underground soil structures.

Lindur, located next to the Jahlma rivulet, a tributary of the Bhaga, once had more than 500 bighas (125 acres) of farmland. In only the past two years, more than 100 bighas have collapsed into the adjoining stream. The village’s ancestral orchards, once dense with apple, apricot, and plum trees, are vanishing. Thousands of trees planted by earlier generations now lie uprooted or swallowed by the shifting earth. A solitary stupa that once marked the presence of this remote village has also collapsed.

“Look at our walls - they are splitting apart,” says Devi Singh, 74, pointing to the jagged crack that cuts across his living room. “The roof is ready to fall any day. At night, we don’t know if we’ll wake up alive.”

Across Lindur, homes lean at precarious angles. Deep cracks slice through floors, ceilings and doorways. Families push their beds and belongings into the few corners of a room that still feel solid, abandoning the rest. Outside, pathways that once joined neighbours now end in sudden, gaping hollows.

The fields are scarred — some torn open, others sunk into the earth. “It is as if the ground is swallowing our lives, bit by bit,” Singh says, recalling how his family’s orchard of apples and apricots once stood behind the house. “Now the trees are gone, the land has slipped away. We are watching our memories disappear into the drain.”

Residents trace the crisis back to the heavy rains of August 2023. “The rain was intense, but not something we had never seen before,” Singh remembers. “What changed was the drain—it was already flowing high and after that rain it turned wild. Soon after, we began seeing cracks in the ground, and they kept widening.”

For Raspa, the disaster has split open his two-bedroom house. “One entire room is almost detached now because of the cracks,” he says. “We had to move everything out of it. We don’t know how long the rest of the house will stand.”

“Our emotions are tied to every field, every tree, and every house in this village,” says Raspa. All 14 families in Lindur now live in a state of emotional distress, surrounded by cracked homes and crumbling fields. A few elderly residents have died of heart attacks since 2023, say residents.

A team from the Indian Institute of Technology [IIT] at Mandi investigated the causes of the subsidence in Lindur, in December 2023.

Lindur is nestled in the Great Himalayan range, marked by rugged terrain, steep slopes, and glaciers in the higher reaches. Temperature records from 1950 to 2023 show a consistent upward trend for the months of June, July and August, says this 2025 study. Records also show more rainfall, higher soil temperatures, and a drop in snow accumulation during July, which records the sharpest rise in temperatures.

For villagers, these shifts are visible to the naked eye. “Earlier the glaciers stood here behind us like a backdrop,” says Hira Lal Raspa. “Now they are clearly smaller, and the snow cover has almost disappeared.”

With less snow and more rain, the ice melts faster, sending greater volumes of water into the nallahs—the narrow streams that serve as both lifeline and drainage system for Lindur. “The nallah is almost always full now, running faster than anything we saw in the last ten years,” Raspa adds.

Scientists say this surge of water in Jahlma accelerates erosion, loosens the fragile soil, and feeds the fissures cutting across Lindur.

A study by the Geological Survey of India (GSI), also in December 2023, found Lindur and its surrounding slopes to be sitting on loose debris held together by clay. This soft soil is susceptible to erosion, particularly during episodes of intense rainfall. The architecture of houses in the village, using local rocks and mud, often with shallow foundations no more than 2 metres deep, makes them vulnerable to land subsidence.

The GSI report identified a combination of factors behind the ongoing land failures—structural fragility, poor construction practices, and natural hydrological processes. Slope instability in Lindur, the scientists noted, tends to occur during periods of heavy rainfall, especially when combined with glacier melt and irrigation runoff. Continuous seepage from these sources saturates the soil, weakening its shear strength, or its capacity to withstand forces that cause its internal structure to move against itself. This triggers ground fissures and subsidence.

Cracks are often exacerbated by freeze-thaw cycles—dry spells followed by sudden wet periods—that cause tension fractures in the soil. These cracks allow more water to seep into deeper layers, oversaturating the ground, reducing its ability to hold together. In Lindur, this process has led to the emergence of deep fissures not only near known landslide zones but also in areas previously considered stable.

The scientists recommended continuous monitoring, improved drainage systems, short-term slope stabilisation, and structural reinforcements. They suggested geotechnical studies to better understand the subsurface conditions before designing engineering solutions.

The district administration is already implementing some of these suggestions, including phasing out the traditional surface irrigation using kuhls or narrow earthen canals. Five major kuhls that passed a little uphill of Lindur en route to neighbouring villages are now being diverted through pipelines to prevent further seepage into the already fractured terrain.

Despite these measures, however, nothing has really changed for Lindur. The ground is still giving way, bit by bit.

The government paid a compensation of Rs. 1 lakh to several residents whose homes were damaged, a sum most view as painfully inadequate. “This land is our only asset—our only security,” says Raspa. “What will one lakh rupees do when we’re losing everything? It’s nothing. We have pleaded again and again with the government to rescue us. But those efforts seem to be sinking into the same cracks.”

Villagers say they’ve knocked on every door they could—from local officials to district administrators and state ministers. They have filed petitions, attended meetings, and submitted applications, but no concrete measures have been taken.

Lindur’s geological vulnerability is a long-standing one but changing climate patterns in recent years have made the village more susceptible to subsidence.

“There used to be more snow and less rain,” says Raspa, who has lived in Lindur his entire life. “Now, snowfall is shrinking every year, and when it rains, it comes all at once unpredictable and violent. We’ve never seen weather like this.”

His observation that their forefathers lived in the village for decades without the land cracking open mirrors what scientists have confirmed through long-term data.

Dr. Sunil Dhar, professor at the Department of Environmental Sciences, Central University of Jammu, says environmental changes have altered rainfall patterns, leading to excessive rainfall and a rise in landslides. “Lahaul-Spiti, which traditionally received minimal rainfall, is now getting more, and with devastating consequences,” he says.

A 2024 study published in the Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing found that glacial lakes in the region have been expanding rapidly since 2014, a direct result of accelerated glacial melt. These growing water bodies pose a significant hazard. Earlier this year, a glacial lake outburst near Jahlma Nallah caused major damage to drainage systems, its debris and floodwater disrupting the flow of the Chenab river.

Lindur’s situation should serve as a cautionary tale, say environmentalists. As plans proceed for at least 22 new hydropower projects with a combined capacity of 828 MW besides other infrastructure projects in the region, experts argue that development in such an ecologically sensitive zone could tip the region into further disaster.

“Lahaul is a highly sensitive area, and its mountains are fragile,” says Guman Singh, founder of the ‘Save The Himalayas Policy’ campaign. “Lindur is already in the grip of land subsidence. If large-scale projects continue without ecological safeguards, more villages will meet the same fate.”

Lindur is only the beginning.

The cracks that first appeared in Lindur have now begun to ripple outward. Villages such as Rapding, Jahlma, Phuda, Jobrang, Jasrath, and Tadang are starting to show early signs of distress. Many farmers told PARI that during the 2025 monsoon, a swollen Jahlma Nallah caused violent flash floods, disrupting transportation during peak harvest months. It was an especially devastating occurrence for farmers who rely on these narrow market windows to sell their peas or potatoes.

Roads are washed out currently. Crops on more than 130,000 hectares of agricultural land are damaged. Fear grows with every darkening cloud.

“Our region has been increasingly affected by natural disasters,” says Dr. Ramlal Markanda, former Himachal Pradesh minister for agriculture, also a native of Lahaul. “The impact of climate change is clearly visible. Lindur is a stark example—but now, every other village is beginning to show signs of strain. These are not isolated incidents. This is systemic.”

Rahul Dooshi, a resident of nearby Jahlma, echoes that concern. “The debris from the landslides in Lindur flows directly into our stream and causes flooding in our village. It’s affecting all of us downstream. If there isn’t a permanent solution soon, more people will be living in fear.”

Temporary fixes may provide only momentary relief, say experts. “To save Lindur,” says Dr. Markanda, “the government must act collectively—not only to compensate those who have lost everything, but to ensure that people are not forced to abandon the land and heritage passed down through generations.”

For Hira Lal Raspa, there is no backup plan, no fallback option.

“Farming is all we know,” he says, standing on what remains of his land. “Now even that is slipping out from under our feet. Where will we go when this land is gone? How long do we have? We don’t know. We have no answers.”