River Kheer Gad

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2025 Aug

Gaurav Talwar, August 7, 2025: The Times of India

Dehradun : The Kheer Gad did not veer from its path — it followed the course it had always known. On a grey, rainheavy Tuesday in Dharali, the stream surged back through low-lying ground where homes, shops and a riverside bazaar had gradually been built over time. Much of what stood there is now gone.


Geologists say the destruction was not random, not unpredictable, not even extraordinary in the broader logic of Himalayan rivers. The bazaar and the buildings that once stood as the village’s spine had been constructed on the river’s ancient bed — on soft alluvial ground laid down by the Kheer Gad itself over centuries. What occurred was not a deviation, but a return. 
Prof MPS Bisht, head of geology department at HNB Garhwal University in Srinagar, called it a lesson in basic river dynamics.

“When a river flows around a bend,” he said, “it typically takes on a convex and concave shape. The water strikes harder on the convex side—this is where scouring and erosion take place. On the concave side, the flow slows, and sediments collect.” This rule revealed itself with “devastating clarity”. The stream, thick with debris and charged with monsoon force, surged against the outer bank where the bazaar had grown. Buildings were flattened in moments. But homes on the inner bank — where silt had built up over time — escaped.


To imagine Dharali now is to rely not on witness accounts — none have come from outside since the flood — but on satellite images, drone footage, and testimony of geologists. No one has walked its streets in days. Yet, even from adistance, the shape of the destruction appears deliberate, almost diagrammatic. One side of the village lies gouged clean, the other remarkably intact, as if the flood followed an invisible instruction. It is not the first time the Kheer Gad has made itself known. In 2013, senior geologist Piyoosh Rautela said, the same stream buried the national highway beneath a surge of debris. That too had been called a freak incident. A warning — unheeded. “We have forgotten the river’s right of way,” Rautela said. “Himalayan rivers are not gentle flows you can negotiate with. Their floodplains are not real estate. They are part of the river.” He recalled how earlier generations built higher, placing faith in ridge lines and solid ground rather than convenience or commercial viability. 
 The newer generation saw the riverbanks as opportunity. Cafes, hotels, market stalls, guesthouses all rose over time. And slowly, the water was boxed in, channelled into submission. But the river remembered. A K Biyani, senior geologist and former principal of DBS college in Dehradun, said: “We came down from the slopes and built at the river’s door. We forgot that doors can swing both ways.”