Latest news with #Hardoodh
Time of India
5 days ago
- Climate
- Time of India
'Saved by the school bell': Dharali students, teacher left 40 minutes before flash flood; headmistress remains untraceable
DEHRADUN: Sushil Kishor Nautiyal, one of the two primary school teachers at Dharali, cannot believe the series of coincidences that kept him safe from Tuesday's disaster. "I had a family commitment on Wednesday for which I left for Uttarkashi on the same afternoon as the disaster. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now We dispersed the students at 1 pm as usual. Of the 17 students enrolled in this school, two come from Dharali village. They were a no-show on Tuesday, most probably due to the Hardoodh festival. We can only hope that they are safe, though there has been no contact with them because of poor network connectivity in the entire region," said Nautiyal, who has been a teacher at the school since 2016. The other 15 students are children of Nepali immigrants and travel from Sattal, which remained relatively safe from the floods, he said. Even the headmistress, Babita Panwar, has not been reachable since Tuesday's disaster, but Nautiyal is hopeful that she too is safe. "I locked the school around 1.10 pm and by 1.20 pm I was hailing a shared cab for Harsil. Barely half an hour later, the whole landscape changed. The school is almost 1.5 km away from the old Dharali village that was hit. If not for my trip to Uttarkashi, I would have been in my school quarters," he said. He also told TOI that while the Nepali origin students are safe, some of them have been unable to get in touch with their parents, many of whom are employed at apple orchards in the area and are missing or out of connectivity. Another 'coincidence' that Nautiyal spoke of was the safety of a class 6 student, Rajat Kumar, who actually goes to the secondary school in Mukhba. "Rajat's sister studies at our school in class 5 and he drops her here every day and then goes to his school. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now That day, he was without an umbrella and it was raining heavily. I convinced him to stay back at the primary school. Both siblings left together at 1 pm. Had he gone to his school, he might have been caught in the floods," said the teacher. It was yet another coincidence that kept the lone teacher from Dharali, who teaches at the Mukhba secondary school, away from the disaster-hit area on Tuesday. "We had an audit in Muneri. The teacher went there for it. While he was lucky, he lost his house and all his belongings. We also have four students from Dharali who come to our school, but because of the Hardoodh festival, we ended classes at noon that day. Most students were safely back home before the disaster hit. We were able to get in touch with them once on Tuesday afternoon. They were being taken to a makeshift ITBP shelter nearby. Had we followed the usual 1 pm time for dispersal, we might have lost our students and teacher," said Saroj Negi, headmistress of the govt school in Mukhba. In light of the bad weather and the disaster, schools in the area are closed for now.
Time of India
5 days ago
- General
- Time of India
Uttarakhand cloudburst: Local festival spares lives as half of residents travel across stream; villagers say, 'loss could have been far greater, guardian deity saved us'
DEHRADUN: Many Dharali residents were not where they were supposed to be when a flash flood tore through one side of the village. They had walked earlier that morning across a narrow bridge to the other side of the stream, to attend Hardoodh, a little-known local festival that draws the community each Sawan to offer prayers to Naag Devta. That saved them. There, under the canopy of a modest hillside temple, they had gathered with flowers, milk, and quiet devotion. It kept them alive. The serpent deity invoked during the ritual is traditionally associated with rivers, rainfall, fertility and protection. "Had people been inside their homes, the loss could have been far greater," said Sanjay Singh Pawar, a resident. Kavita Kumari agreed. "It was truly the grace of the divine that most of us were outside, gathered in one place. " The Hardoodh festival does not exist in textbooks or tourism brochures. It only belongs to the oral landscape of the region - passed down by memory and habit, enacted without pomp, rooted in seasonal cycles and mountain belief. In Dharali and nearby villages like Jhala, it is held with quiet consistency each monsoon, drawing people to make offerings to the stream's guardian deity. This year, the date coincided -unknowingly - with a disaster. A man from Jhala, who joined the ritual and asked not to be named, said, "We had gone to offer prayers on the other side of the Kheer Gad. God is kind. That's why we're still here. But the other side..." he trailed off, gesturing towards the site of collapsed homes and flooded ground. "That's where the pain is." What separated the two banks was more than just the stream. The side where the festival took place lies on higher, less developed ground. Over the years, construction on the other side had crept closer to the water's edge, with homes, guesthouses and shops rising on unstable terrain. When the flash flood struck, likely triggered by a glacial breach upstream, the water obeyed gravity and momentum. It flattened only one side. MPS Bisht, professor of geology at Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna Garhwal University and a native of the region, saw in the aftermath something both scientific and spiritual. "The deluge devastated the side that had been unscientifically developed on the riverbed," he said.
