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Gobind Singh watched the sky above his apple orchard in Shantha, Himachal Pradesh, with growing dread through the first week of April 2026. Then the hailstorm came. When the ice finally stopped, the buds on his trees were stripped clean.

In a region where one crop funds a family’s entire year, there is no cushion for a single ruined season. “This is not just crop loss,” he told local reporters. “It is a collapse of rural economy. Without immediate government relief, many families will be pushed into debt.”

Government relief, as farmers across the Shimla apple belt have come to learn after many seasons, arrives slowly, selectively and does not cover the actual losses. The Himachal Pradesh government cannot afford a more generous response. The reasons for this shortage take us directly to the heart of how India compensates its mountain states for ecological services the rest of the country silently depends on. 

A warning no one acted on

In July 2025, the Supreme Court said something that should have shaken the national conscience. Hearing a suo motu case on ecological degradation in Himachal Pradesh, a bench led by Justice J.B. Pardiwala warned that if the current trajectory of destruction continues, “the entire state of HP may vanish into thin air from the map of the country.” This was not rhetorical excess.

Between 2022 and 2025, Himachal Pradesh lost 1,200 lives and suffered economic losses of roughly Rs 18,000 crore due to natural disasters. Uttarakhand recorded losses of around Rs 5,000 crore in a single year; the 2023 Joshimath subsidence alone cost Rs 2,000 crore in displacement and rehabilitation.

The court blamed human activity, hydropower tunnels, road construction through fragile slopes, unregulated tourism and unchecked building, alongside climate change. But it did not fully ask why these states keep building at this pace? What compels them to dig into mountains they know are geologically fragile?

The answer is fiscal.

What the mountains actually provide

Himachal Pradesh’s forests form the upper watersheds of major tributaries of the Indus and Yamuna rivers, supplying water to Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi. Uttarakhand’s glaciers and forests feed the Ganga river system, which covers 26% of India’s landmass and sustains approximately 500 million people, nearly 40% of the country’s population, across 11 states. 

A 2025 report by the Institute of Forest Management, Bhopal, valued the total forest wealth of Himachal Pradesh at Rs 9.95 lakh crore. Its annual economic value stands at Rs 3.2 lakh crore, including Rs 1.65 lakh crore from carbon sequestration, Rs 68,941 crore from ecosystem services and Rs 15,132 crore from water provisioning. The water flows downstream to Delhi, Chandigarh, Haryana and Punjab. None of........

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