In this article Cracks in the Ridge: PIL Exposes Shimla’s Forgotten Danger this is matter of importance for our beautiful hill station
Last Tuesday evening, I was standing on the Ridge watching this kid, maybe eight years old, jumping up and down near the bandstand. His mother was trying to get a decent photo while he kept bouncing around, giggling. Normal scene, right? Except I couldn’t stop thinking about what’s underneath his small feet — a water tank older than independent India, developing cracks like an old tea cup that’s been dropped one too many times.
Look, I’m not trying to be dramatic here. But when you know what I know, when you’ve talked to the engineers who’ve actually been down there with their flashlights and measuring tapes, it’s hard to watch people treating the Ridge like it’s made of titanium. It’s not. It’s made of colonial-era concrete, hope, and an increasing amount of structural damage that someone finally had the guts to take to court.
Someone Finally Said It Out Loud
So here’s what went down. A PIL — Public Interest Litigation for those lucky enough to avoid legal jargon — just hit the Himachal Pradesh High Court. And honestly? It’s about damn time. The petition basically says what every structural engineer in Shimla has been muttering into their whiskey for years: that underground water tank beneath the Ridge is cracking. Not hairline stuff you can ignore. Real, growing, oh-shit-this-is-bad cracks.
The trigger? Fire engines. Those massive red trucks that barrel across the Ridge every time there’s an emergency. Each one weighs… what, 15-20 tons when fully loaded? Now imagine that weight pressing down, sending shockwaves through century-old concrete that was built when horses were considered heavy traffic. The vibrations travel down, meet those existing weak points, and the cracks spread a bit more. It’s like pressing on a bruise, except the bruise is holding up one of Shimla’s most important public spaces.
The court’s done its part — sent notices to the Shimla Municipal Corporation, Urban Development Department, the works. But let’s be real. We all know how this usually goes. Notices lead to meetings, meetings lead to committees, committees lead to reports that gather dust until something actually collapses.
This Isn’t Just About Old Concrete
Okay, I need you to understand something. This isn’t some boring infrastructure story that only civil engineers care about. The Ridge isn’t just a nice place for evening walks — though it is that too. It’s literally holding things together. The underground tank is what engineers call a “critical load-bearing element.” Translation: if it goes, it doesn’t go alone.
Think about what the Ridge means to Shimla. It’s where we celebrate. It’s where tourists spend their money. It’s where that famous church sits for all those postcards. It’s also sitting on top of a structural weakness that’s getting worse every day. You know what this reminds me of? Joshimath. Remember that disaster? Started exactly like this. Small cracks. People complained. Authorities promised to look into it. Then boom — buildings tilting, families evacuated, national embarrassment.
But Joshimath had an excuse — it was built on unstable ground to begin with. What’s our excuse? That we were too busy planning the next Summer Festival to check if the venue might cave in?
The really frustrating part is that Shimla should know better. We’ve seen enough landslides, enough buildings sliding down during monsoons, enough “unexpected” infrastructure failures to write a textbook on what not to do. Yet here we are, knowing there’s damage, having documented proof, and the response is… what exactly? Forms in triplicate?
Every Heritage City Has This Disease
I wish I could tell you Shimla is unique in its negligence, but that would be a lie. Take a trip around India’s so-called heritage cities. It’s the same story everywhere, just different flavors of disaster waiting to happen.
Mussoorie? Those beautiful colonial buildings are basically held together by paint and prayer at this point. Udaipur? The lakeside havelis have foundations that are more suggestion than structure. Parts of Old Delhi? I spoke to a guy who lives in a haveli where the cracks in his wall are so big, his neighbor’s cat uses them as a doorway. And we’re not talking about slums here — these are “heritage structures” that appear in tourism brochures.
The pattern is exhaustingly predictable. Politicians show up for photo ops during festivals but vanish when someone mentions maintenance budgets. Tourists treat these places like theme parks — nobody at Disneyland worries about structural integrity, right? Meanwhile, the actual engineers and architects who understand what’s happening are ignored because their warnings don’t win elections.
Unregulated tourism is killing these places. I mean literally killing them. Every year, the footfall increases. Every year, the structures get pushed harder. And every year, we act surprised when something fails. It’s like being shocked that your car broke down after never changing the oil for ten years.
The Water Angle Nobody’s Talking About
Here’s something that should terrify every Shimla resident: that tank isn’t just some historical curiosity. It’s active. It’s part of our emergency water reserve system. In a city where water shortage is as regular as the summer heat, where we’ve literally had hotels turning away guests because they couldn’t guarantee running water, this tank matters.
Remember 2018? The water crisis that made national news? People carrying buckets for miles, that old lady who collapsed in a water queue, the whole ugly mess? Now imagine that happening with one major storage facility already gone. The tank holds… what, several lakh liters? That’s not just numbers — that’s drinking water for thousands during an emergency.
After what we saw during the recent monsoons — entire villages cut off, water supplies contaminated — you’d think we’d be paranoid about protecting every drop we can store. But no, we’re literally letting our water security crack apart while debating Smart City proposals. The irony is so thick you could cut it with a knife.
So Now What?
I’ll tell you what should happen, though I’m not holding my breath. First, get engineers down there immediately. Not the ones who owe their jobs to political connections — real engineers who’ll tell the truth even if it’s ugly. Second, stop heavy vehicles from crossing the Ridge right now. Today. Not after another committee meeting.
Third — and this is crucial — tell people what’s actually happening. Stop treating citizens like children who can’t handle bad news. We have a right to know if the ground we’re standing on is stable.
A local activist (who asked me not to use her name because apparently speaking truth requires anonymity these days) told me something that stuck: “My grandmother walked on the Ridge. My mother walked on the Ridge. I want my daughter to walk on the Ridge. But at this rate, she’ll be walking on rubble.”
An engineer who’s actually been inside the tank was even blunter: “You want to know how bad it is? I won’t let my family go to the Ridge during peak hours anymore.”
The Bottom Line
The High Court notice is good news, I guess. At least someone’s paying attention. But courts can only do so much. They can order assessments, demand reports, maybe even force some temporary measures. What they can’t do is make us care about boring things like maintenance and prevention.
We need to face an uncomfortable truth: we’re terrible at prevention. We’re great at disaster response — nobody organizes relief like Indians do. But preventing the disaster in the first place? That’s not dramatic enough, not vote-worthy enough, not Instagram-worthy enough.
The Ridge will be packed again this evening. Families will gather, couples will hold hands, that guy with the balloon animals will make his rounds. And underneath, in the dark, wet, forgotten space that nobody thinks about, the cracks will grow a tiny bit wider. Every footstep, every vehicle, every day we ignore this is another small push toward something we’ll definitely regret.
The question isn’t whether we’ll fix this. We probably will — eventually. After it becomes a crisis. After something fails. After we can’t ignore it anymore. The question is whether we’ll learn anything from it, or whether we’ll just move on to ignoring the next warning sign.
That kid I saw jumping on the Ridge? He deserves better than our usual pattern of neglect-crisis-panic-forget. We all do.
