Rethinking Progress

On the morning of August 26, a wall of water and rock roared down the Bhotekashi valley where Nepal meets Tibet, a glacier somewhere high above the clouds having broken loose and turned an ordinary river into an instrument of annihilation. Villages disappeared within minutes, hydropower stations that had taken years to build were flattened, and a bridge that had carried traders and pilgrims across that border for generations was gone before anyone downstream even understood what was happening. Rescue teams in Rasuwa were still wading through mud in search of the missing when television screens began carrying near identical images from across the frontier in China, where weeks of saturated soil in Guangxi had turned routine monsoon rain into landslides, where tornadoes tore through Hubei, and where the thermometers in Xinjiang touched fifty degrees Celsius in June. Two neighbouring nations, one catastrophe repeating itself in different ways, and a planet serving notice in the plainest language it has that something in the way we have organised our relationship with it has failed. Advertisement It would be a mistake to see Rasuwa and Guangxi as unrelated and separate tragedies, acts of nature to be mourned and then forgotten till the next tragedy. They are data points in a pattern the Sustainable Development Goals were meant to interrupt and did not. The report on those Goals, drawn up as 2030 approaches, brings out some uncomfortable truths. Barely a third of the targets are on track, close to half are crawling forward too slowly to matter, and a worrying number have actually reversed since 2015. Advertisement What Rasuwa adds to that report is not a new statistic but a human face for it, the particular horror of a glacier that has held firm for millennia choosing this decade to let go, of a warning system built with real ingenuity and genuine cooperation between two governments being simply outrun by the speed of the collapse it was designed to detect. When the very early warning infrastructure fails because the disaster moves faster than any siren, the perspective should not be that the warning systems need upgrading. It is that the condition producing the disaster needs addressing. This is the deeper failure of the last three decades of climate governance, that so much of it has been remediation dressed up as strategy. We rebuild the bridge, relocate the village, strengthen the reservoir bunds, deploy the radar, expand the sponge city, and each of these is needed and none of them is sufficient, because every one of them treats the flood as the problem rather than as the symptom. The permafrost that once held the Himalaya together is thinning because the planet is warming, and the planet is warming because the global economic model built on extraction and consumerism has spent two centuries treating the earth as a quarry rather than as a living system within its own thresholds. A country can install every early warning system science can devise and still be surprised, because the mitigation plans are built on a paradigm that only asks how much damage can be prevented and never asks what kind of relationship with the earth would prevent the damage from arising in the first place. That distinction, between preventing harm and addressing its root, is where the conversation must now move, and it is here that regenerative development offers something sustainability never could. Sustainability, honestly examined, is a defensive posture, asking us to consume a little more carefully and pollute a little more slowly so that the next generation inherits a world no more ruined than the one we received. Regeneration asks an entirely different question, not how much can be taken before something breaks but how much can be given back so that a watershed, a forest, a community, a civilisation, becomes more capable of holding itself together than it was before. A regenerative approach to the Himalayas would not stop at monitoring glaciers. It would ask what combination of afforestation, community stewardship of upper catchments, and restrain in how those fragile slopes are built upon might restore the resilience that industrial development has spent decades eroding. It would treat the mountain not as a hazard to be managed but as living ecosystem whose vitality is our responsibility to renew. India carries civilisational resources for exactly this reframing, and it would be a failure of imagination not to draw on them at a moment like this. The Vedic notion of Rta, the order binding nature and human conduct into a seamless frame, and the Dharma that grew from it, never allowed human flourishing to be separated from the flourishing of the world that sustains it. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, the conviction that the world is one family, was never sentiment reserved for ceremonial occasions but a working theory of interdependence long before ecologists spoke about it. These are not museum pieces. Mission Life, which Prime Minister Modi placed before the world at COP26 and carried further during India's G20 presidency, translates that inheritance into policy, asking individuals and nations alike to examine consumption not as a private choice but as a collective responsibility. The principle of Antyodaya, beginning with the person standing last, and the practice of Janbhagidhari, making participation the method rather than the afterthought of development, are exactly the instruments a regenerative response to disasters like Rasuwa would need, because no early warning system, however sophisticated, replaces a community that knows its mountain well enough to read its moods. None of this argues against investment in infrastructure, forecasting, or the hard engineering that saves lives when disaster does strike. It argues that infrastructure alone, built on an unchanged relationship with the earth, will keep discovering the limits of its own insufficiency one collapsed glacier at a time. The nations gathering to reimagine the Goals beyond 2030 would do well to notice what Rasuwa and Guangxi are actually telling them, that resilience without renewal is a losing race against a warming planet, and that the country's best places to lead are not necessarily those with the largest budgets but those carrying the oldest, clearest memory of what it means to live in reciprocity with the earth rather than in extraction from it. India has that memory, and it has, in the same decade, the practical experience of lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty without needing to be told twice that development divorced from dignity is no development at all. That combination, ancient wisdom paired with recent, hard-won capability, is a rare inheritance, and it need not stay confined to conference halls and policy papers. Somewhere in the Himalayas right now, villagers who lost everything are already rebuilding, not with despair, but with the quiet, stubborn resolve that has carried mountain communities through worse. If a civilisation can find in that resolve the seed for a larger idea, that the work ahead is not merely to survive what the earth is enduring but to help it heal, then even a tragedy as raw as Rasuwa will have left behind something more durable than grief. It will have left a lesson the world is hopefully ready to learn. (The writer is Member, Niti Aayog. Views expressed are personal)