GSI Field Diaries

 

  In Search of the Mystery of the Ranga River

( My thanks are  due to  my  Ph.D Guide and Senior  colleague in GSI , Dr. J.R.Kayal professor emeritus,  ISM,  Dhanbad, for providing valuable insights  while writing this article .  This write up  is based on experiences  during Geophysical  field assignment  in Geological Survey of India)

In the heart of Arunachal’s Ranga Valley, nature and humanity exist in a rare, rhythmic harmony. It was here that I met Heli, a young Nishi woman of about twenty-five, serving as our daytime camp guard. With her fair skin, Mongolian features, and a figure that radiated strength, she stood as a testament to the rugged landscape. She wore a tattered white saree without blouse, her hair dusted with the earth of a week's labor, a long machete sheathed at her side.

When I urged her to move her bamboo-cutting work from the scorching sun into the shade, she offered only a faint smile and a reply that was as haunting as it was profound:"No, sir. By working with love, a person gains strength; a person remains alive. In the shade sits a man who is about to die."

Her words captured the spirit of the Nishi people—an indigenous tribe as resilient and unyielding as the river that defines their home. The Ranga River, an eighty-kilometer-long daughter of the Himalayas, descends from the Dafla peaks with a thunderous roar. Fed by a thousand waterfalls, she is a river of eternal youth, restless and surging, eventually surrendering her strength to the Subansiri and, ultimately, the mighty Brahmaputra.

The Ranga is a study in contrasts: transparent and serene in clear weather, yet wild and muddy under the rain. She is a force of creation and destruction, crushing granite into sand to carve out the very valleys the Nishi call home. Civilisation has followed her lead, carving roads into the mountainside to follow her path.

From our vantage point at the GSI’s Hawa Camp, the air is filled with the constant, musical roar of the currents. This valley, birthed by the Ranga, provides a peaceful sanctuary for the Nishi settlements. Here, amidst the "Transit Camp " and a newly established network of earthquake observation stations, one feels the pulse of the earth—a world where the mountains stand in solemn meditation and the river never stops its song.

 

                                                                  - Pankaj Mala Bhattacharya