Tenzin is a farmer from Himachal Pradesh in the Himalayas. He lives in an isolated village in the Pangi Valley, 3,000 meters above sea level, where roads and the telephone network have not yet arrived. To sell his peas, his only source of income, he has to walk 24 kilometers with his mules to reach a track where a truck awaits him which will take him, on an unpaved and vertiginous road, to the first town. .

Despite the danger and a vehicle whose steering is half faulty, he has to go fast so that his peas keep all their freshness and sell at a good price. The slightest misconduct can be fatal. The peasant does not complain. “Before,” he said, “people walked the path to get supplies of wheat and rice twice a year. »

When crossing a dreaded pass, the peasant stops at the temple to pray to the goddess Durga. “Each time I pass by, I ask for his protection. Thanks to her, I avoid accidents and I am successful in my business. The Indian government has undertaken to pave the road, but the workers who work with archaic means only progress 2 kilometers per year.

“People of the Rivers”

The new season of “Roads of the Impossible” kicks off in northern India. Frédéric Elhorga and Antonin Marcel, the directors of this episode, have chosen to explore lands of the subcontinent that are still undeveloped, where the bond that unites people with nature is endangered by climate change. The journey takes us to the Himalayas, Pangi Valley, Ladakh, and beyond to Meghalaya and Assam where river islands are disappearing due to global warming and erosion.

It was on one of them that Kotai was born, a member of the Mising community, “the people of the rivers”. Kotai knows he will have to move soon. “I have less and less space to grow my bamboo and my rice,” he says. His island, on the Brahmaputra, shrinks visibly, it has gone from 15 to 4 square kilometers. Every day its banks collapse into the river, swollen by the melting of the glaciers. Kotai transports his assembled bamboos to form a raft to Jorhat on the mainland. Sandbanks obstruct the passage, the river descent is as perilous as the road in the Pangi valley.

In the spectacular Meghalaya, one of the wettest places in the world, where it rains almost all year round, the Khasi tribe builds living bridges with the only roots of Ficus elastica, the rubber trees, to connect the remote villages of the mountain . Tenzin, Kotai, the Khasi worship nature and the gods, but their efforts are ruined by India’s rampant development and climate change.

The water tower that is the Himalayas is drying up. “The glaciers are disappearing, and there is less snow. The lack of water jeopardizes our pastures, our animals and our crops,” laments the pea producer. In Ladakh, an engineer had the idea of ??creating, using water and cold, ice stupas, huge cones which, melting in the spring, are transformed into water reservoirs to irrigate the fields.