Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmir has reported 169 major landslides in last five years, impacting life and infrastructure, government of India said on Friday.
In all 3656 major landslides have occurred across India and were collected by Geological Survey of India through onsite field investigations under the Post-Disaster Studies programme taken up annually by GSI in all the landslide prone States and UTs as per GSI’s Standard Operating Procedure, mainly in response to the requests received from the concerned State Governments.
“For all these landslides, during field validation, GSI collected vital preliminary geoparametric attributes for each of the landslides, including studying its impacts, future vulnerability, and indicating the requirements for future detailed geo-scientific investigations, if any,” said Minister for Ministry of Science and Technology and Ministry of Earth Sciences Dr. Harsh Vardhan in a written reply in Parliament.
To a question whether the State Governments/UTs are maintaining or having National Landslide Susceptibility Mapping (NLSM) in the respective State/UT, he said the NLSM project was launched by GSI after the 2013 Uttarakhand disaster as per the directive of the Technical Advisory committee (TAC). “With the NLSM mapping, GSI has prepared 1: 50,000 scale landslide susceptibility map of 85% of the total target area (3.63 lakh sq. km. out of 4.2 lakh sq. km.) in different landslide prone States/ UTs,” he said, adding, “The work for the remaining area in Arunachal Pradesh is under execution and will be completed by Field Station (FS) 2021-22.”
During NLSM, he said, GSI also collected historical information on 61287 number of landslides polygons using both Remote Sensing (RS) and field-based source data, out of which, 28831 landslides have already been field validated by GSI . (GNS)
