Adi Kailash second phase slips to 20 September after the Kulagad bridge fails again

The second phase of the Adi Kailash Yatra will not start on 15 September. Pithoragarh district officials said on Monday that inner-line permits for the high route in Uttarakhand will be issued from 20 September, and only if the weather and the road allow it. The date is tentative.

Dharchula Sub-Divisional Magistrate Ashish Joshi tied the delay to a Bailey bridge at Kulagad on the Dharchula-Gunji road. The span washed away on 11 September, the second time in two weeks. The collapse cut Byas, Chaudas and Darma valleys off from Dharchula. Further damage between Gunji and Tawaghat added to the break. The Border Roads Organisation has started to rebuild. The Army has cut an alternative path into the high valleys. Joshi said the pilgrimage starts only when both weather and transport look safe.

The district had already stopped issuing inner-line permits for Adi Kailash on 2 July, citing monsoon slides. That pause was supposed to lift for a second window in mid-September. The Kulagad failure ended that plan. Joshi told reporters the new Bailey work might take about three days for vehicles if the weather holds. Tour operator Himanshu Joshi said some travellers have already reached Dharchula and are sitting in hotels, asking whether 20 September will hold.

Adi Kailash, also called Chota Kailash, is a 6,000-metre peak in the Kumaon Himalaya, close to the Tibet border. The yatra is shorter than the journey to Kailash in Tibet and has grown as an Indian alternative since the Lipulekh route and the inner-line system were marketed more heavily. Pilgrims still need a permit because the last stretches sit in a restricted belt. That bureaucratic detail is why an SDM's calendar is the calendar that matters.

The same mountain chain produced a different emergency two days earlier on the Kedarnath track, where a rockfall near Chirbasa forced more than 6,500 pilgrims to walk out. The two events are not the same slide. They are the same season. Uttarakhand's pilgrimage economy now runs on a monsoon that is wetter and on roads that are asked to carry more people than the geology wants to allow. Bailey bridges are designed to be replaced. They are not designed to be the only way into three valleys.

For the Army and BRO the task is familiar: put steel back over the water, keep a mule or foot track open, and tell the civil administration when a bus can pass. For hotel owners in Dharchula the task is to hold rooms for people who may leave if 20 September slips again. For the state government the task is to avoid a headline in which a yatra leaves on a repaired span and meets the next cloudburst halfway to Gunji.

Joshi's sentence is the policy. Permits follow a safe road. The road is not safe today. Twenty September is a hope with a bridge still in pieces.