Himalayan Institute of Alternatives
Why a cone
Ladakh is a high-altitude desert: barely 100mm of rain a year, and villages depend on glacier melt arriving weeks after they need it most, in April and May. Flat ice sheets melt fast once the spring sun returns. A tall, narrow cone shades itself — most of its surface faces away from the sun at any given hour — so it survives long enough to matter.
No pumps, no power, no fuel. Just a pipe, elevation, and winter air cold enough to freeze water mid-fall. It's a piece of engineering built almost entirely from gravity.
A shaded patch of ice under a footbridge, still standing in May while everything around it had already melted — that's what started this.
— Paraphrased from the project's own origin accountThe mechanism
Milestones
Laid out the way the stupa itself grows — one layer at a time, base to peak.
Reach
An illustrative sketch of the valley, not a survey map — tap a marker for what happened there.
River line and ridge shown schematically to orient the markers, not to scale.
Impact, in numbers
Ice Stupa is one strand of HIAL's work. See the rest, or find your own way to contribute.
Visit hial.edu.in Get involved