'Ghost villages' of the Himalayas foreshadow a changing India
JHAKOT, Uttarakhand, India – Lakshmi Devi and her husband live in a small village in the hills.
Just a decade ago, the farming community was home to 38 people from seven families.
Two months ago, Devi says, one of the three remaining families packed up their belongings and moved to Delhi, where their children had jobs.
"Loneliness takes over," says Devi, reflecting on this latest departure from Jhakot in the country's middle Himalayan region. Family after family has left in the past 10 years, Devi says, pointing out the village's half-dozen locked and abandoned houses.
Jhakot is one of some 1,200 "ghost villages" in the area — that's the term many use when the number of residents is down to 10 or so. And at least a thousand of those villages have been completely abandoned based on the latest official figures, which are far from current, dating back to 2011.
"These are permanent migrations," says, an economist at Doon University in Uttarakhand state. It's not a new phenomenon in this region, but the reasons for the current exodus have changed.
