In a span of a few days, the land subsidence triggered by unknown reasons has put the entire village of Nai Basti in Thathri town of Jammu’s Doda district on the verge of destruction. https://thewire.in/environment/land-subsidence-jammu-doda-19-houses
On the evening of Friday, February 3, Ahmad, a head constable in J&K Police who shifted to his brother’s house, was having tea. A phone call broke the tragic news – his home, the result of years of savings and hard work, had been reduced to a huge mound of debris.
Deputy Commissioner of Doda, V.P. Mahajan, said that the Nai Basti village was affected by massive land subsidence on Friday, prompting the district administration to shift 19 families to safe locations. He said that three houses have collapsed so far, while many others have developed cracks. The administration has also declared a religious school and a mosque in the area as unsafe.
Some 30 kilometres from Doda town, Nai Basti is a standalone village located on a hillock in Thathri town overseeing the Doda-Jammu highway and the Chenab river. A Srinagar-based environmentalist said that the Pir Panjal mountains, which separate Doda and other districts in the Jammu region from the Kashmir Valley, have become highly unstable due to dynamite blasts and hill cutting for building roads and power projects.
An official in the Doda administration claimed that the affected area in Thathri was prone to land subsidence when it was uninhabited before the eruption of insurgency in J&K in the early 1990s, “Most of the residents have built their houses on the hillock in recent years because they fled from their native places in Pir Panjal region due to militancy. This may have caused land subsidence,” he said.