Before Another Tunnel Becomes a Tomb: An Urgent Appeal to Declare the Himalayas a UNESCO Protected Buffer Zone

On 20 May 2026, India’s National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC) quietly floated a tender for the “Chenab-Beas Link Tunnel Project (Link 3).” Three days later, on 23 May, it was withdrawn just as quietly. No public feasibility study, no environmental impact assessment, no forest clearance, no tribal ministry consent, and no Gram Sabha resolution had ever been placed before the people who would live — or die — in its shadow. A project capable of altering the hydrology of two Himalayan river systems appeared and disappeared from public record in under a week, leaving behind only the tender number and a great deal of unanswered risk.

We write this not as adversaries of India, but as people who care deeply about the Indian people of Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, and Uttarakhand, and about the fragile mountain ecology that sustains all of South Asia. We are engineers, planners and citizens of a shared Himalayan watershed, and we believe the region’s rivers, glaciers and tribal communities deserve protection that transcends national rivalry. That is why we are joining the growing chorus of Indian scientists, hydrologists and civil society groups who are calling for the Himalayas to be recognised internationally — through UNESCO — as a protected ecological buffer zone. The Indian government itself has described the Himalayas as the world’s “climate regulator” and a global freshwater tower; it is time that description came with the legal protection it deserves.

A Barrage Built on Melting Ground- The proposed barrage site at Koksar sits in the headwater region of the Chandra River, one of the two source tributaries of the Chenab, in Himachal Pradesh’s Lahaul-Spiti district. This is not a stable place to build permanent hydraulic infrastructure. Scientific modelling shows the Chandra basin could lose roughly a third of its ice volume by the 2050s even under a moderate-emissions pathway — a loss measured in the tens of gigatonnes. Sixty-seven kilometres upstream sits the Samudra Tapu glacial lake, which has expanded more than ninefold since 1965 according to India’s own National Remote Sensing Centre, and which its scientists explicitly flag as a growing glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) risk to downstream settlements — including, by extension, any barrage built in their path. A similar distance away lies Bara Shigri, Himachal’s largest glacier, retreating year after year and dotted with more than sixty unstable, ice-dammed lakes. This glacier has already dammed and catastrophically released the Chandra River once, in 1836. It can do so again.

Downstream, at the proposed tunnel outfall near Dhundi, Palchan and Solang in the Beas headwaters, the story is no better. The 2023 and 2025 monsoons washed away the Palchan bridge, tore out stretches of the Leh-Manali highway, and severed access to the Atal Tunnel for months. This is a landscape that is actively, visibly failing under the strain of a warming climate — and it is precisely here that planners have proposed drilling new tunnels and constructing new barrages to divert additional volumes of water.

The Nepal Tragedy Must Change the Conversation- In late August 2026, catastrophic flooding on the Nepal-China border, triggered by glacier instability, buried hydropower tunnels under mud and rock, trapping hundreds of workers underground and killing more than 950 people across Nepal and Tibet, with thousands still missing. Rescue teams spent days trying to blast and dig their way into collapsed tunnel shafts, uncertain whether anyone inside still had air to breathe. Chinese state media itself attributed the disaster to glacier instability driven by long-term climate warming — the same climatic force that is measurably eating away at the Chandra and Beas basins today.

This is not a distant cautionary tale. It is a preview. The Nepal disaster demonstrates, in the most brutal terms possible, what happens when tunnel and barrage infrastructure is placed in young, seismically active, glacially fed Himalayan terrain without accounting for the accelerating instability of the cryosphere above it. Engineers cannot treat glacier-fed valleys as ordinary construction sites. The same geological and climatic conditions that produced mass casualties in Nepal’s tunnels are present, in comparable or worse form, at Koksar and along the Beas headwaters. A project pushed through without a published environmental impact assessment, without geotechnical transparency, and without free, prior and informed consent of the tribal communities who would live above and below its tunnels is not merely a policy failure — after Nepal, it is a foreseeable humanitarian risk.

Why This Is a Matter for International Law, Not Just Domestic Policy-India’s own procedural laws — the Forest Rights Act, the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, and its Environment Impact Assessment framework — required public disclosure, Gram Sabha consultation and tribal ministry clearance before any tender was even floated. None of that happened here. That alone should trouble Indian courts and Indian citizens. But the implications reach further than domestic administrative law.

The Chandra and Beas basins are transboundary, glacier-fed systems whose hydrology, sediment loads and flood behaviour do not respect political borders. Under customary international environmental law — the precautionary principle, the duty to conduct transboundary environmental impact assessment, and the “no significant harm” principle recognised by the International Court of Justice in cases such as Pulp Mills on the River Uruguay — states are expected to assess and disclose the downstream and cross-border risks of major water infrastructure before proceeding, not after. A project of this scale, sited in one of the most climate-vulnerable and seismically active corridors on Earth, arguably triggers exactly these obligations.

We therefore call on the United Nations Environment Programme, the UNFCCC secretariat, UNESCO, and independent glaciological and disaster-risk bodies to formally review the Chenab-Beas Link Tunnel proposal — and any successor project bearing its features — against international environmental and human-rights standards. We ask the International Court of Justice and relevant UN human rights mechanisms to examine whether the absence of environmental assessment, tribal consent and transboundary disclosure constitutes a breach of accepted international norms. And we ask the International Criminal Court and international human-rights rapporteurs to remain vigilant: if this or a similar project proceeds and results in loss of life among workers or downstream communities — as happened in Nepal — the question of foreseeability and accountability for those who authorised it without adequate assessment will not disappear.

A Buffer Zone, Not a Battleground- Our core appeal is constructive, not adversarial. We support the many Indian scientists, environmentalists and Himalayan-basin communities who are demanding that the Himalayas be declared a protected buffer zone under UNESCO’s frameworks — a designation consistent with India’s own stated recognition of the range as a planetary climate regulator. Such a designation would not strip India of sovereignty; it would give the region’s rivers, glaciers and tribal peoples a layer of international scientific oversight commensurate with the stakes. Nepal has just shown the world, at devastating human cost, what is lost when that oversight is absent.

We are, and remain, well-wishers of the Indian people and of the extraordinary, fragile mountain ecology they are custodians of. We ask the international community not to punish India, but to stand with the tribal communities of Lahaul-Spiti, Kullu and the wider Chenab-Beas basin, and to insist — urgently, and before another tunnel becomes another tomb — that no barrage, tunnel or diversion project proceed in this landscape without full transparency, rigorous glaciological and seismic assessment, and the free consent of the people who call it home.