Kerala landslides: a tale of overdevelopment?

Known for its natural, rugged beauty with green hills, lush tea plantations and gushing waterfalls, the Wayanad district in the southern state of Kerala was devastated by a series of landslides triggered by torrential rain in the early hours of 30 July, killing at least 400 people.

The landslides, which occurred between 2am and 4am, primarily affected the regions of Mundakkai, Chooralmala, Attamala and Noolpuzha.

Many of the victims were tea plantation workers and their families who were asleep at the time in makeshift tents, with reports of people being buried or swept away to their deaths under torrents of mud, water and tumbling rocks. The region around the landslide-hit areas features a large number of tea estates owned by private firms such as Harrisons Malayalam Limited (HML).

Images and videos circulating on social media showed how the massive landslides triggered by torrential downpours had uprooted trees, knocked down communication lines, blocked highways, submerged roads and washed away the sole bridge that connected the district of Mundakkai to the nearby town of Chooralmala.

Rescue efforts were hampered by the region’s difficult terrain, exacerbated by destroyed roads and bridges. This made it challenging to reach hundreds of residents in the hardest-hit areas.

A combined rescue mission by the Indian Army, National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), fire and rescue services, forest and wildlife authorities and the police, along with hundreds of volunteers and government officials, rescued thousands of people from the surrounding forest area and mud-filled locations. 

“This is one of the worst natural calamities Kerala has ever witnessed,” said Pinarayi Vijayan, the state’s chief minister, in a statement. He added that the damage to homes and livelihoods was “immense”, and the Kerala government had set up relief camps for thousands of people affected.

Vijayan also announced compensation payments of Rs 6 lakh (600,000 rupees) for the next of kin of those who were killed in the landslides.

Death benefit fund
Harrisons Malayalam Ltd, which describes itself as the second largest producer of tea in south India, announced a special death benefit fund for the dependants of employees who lost their lives.

“In the calamity, we have 41 employees and 48 family members either declared dead or missing,” said Benil John, general manager – tea operations, at Harrisons Malayalam. “We are organising alternate accommodation for 127 families who have lost their homes. These families will be provided with accommodation with necessary facilities in our other estates which have not been affected. This will be done in a way that ensures they have a safe and secure place to stay and can get employment in estates where they are staying.”

He added: “We will be providing medical facilities and support to the direct dependents of our deceased employees for next three years at our Group Hospital.”

The landslides also claimed the lives of two migrant workers, left three missing and displaced 323 migrants, according to a fact-finding team from the Centre for Migration and Inclusive Development (CMID), following a week-long tour of the affected areas.

‘Human apathy and greed’
Criticising Kerala’s state government, Kerala High Court said that the landslides that hit Wayanad district claiming over 200 lives were yet another instance of nature reacting to human “apathy and greed”.

The court said that the “warning signs” had appeared a long time ago but “we chose to ignore them in pursuit of a development agenda that would supposedly put our state on the high road to economic prosperity”.

It said that major floods in Kerala in 2018 that claimed the lives of over 400 people, the deaths in 2019 of 17 people in a landslide in Puthumala, another district of Wayanad, and the most recent landslides “have shown us the error of our ways”.

“If we do not mend our ways and take affirmative remedial action now, perhaps it will be too late,” said Judges A K Jayasankaran Nambiar and Syam Kumar V M during a court hearing following the 30 July landslides that completely wiped away three villages in Wayanad and left 119 people unaccounted for at the time of this article’s publication.

The court initiated a PIL (public interest litigation), a legal instrument designed to pressure stakeholders like state governments to act to protect the interests of a community or the wider public, “to persuade the state government to introspect on its currently held notions for sustainable development in the state of Kerala and revisit its policy regarding the same”, the bench said in its order issued on 23 August.

Extreme weather conditions
India has experienced extreme weather conditions in recent years – such as torrential rain, floods and droughts – and many experts say the increased frequency and severity of these weather events is due to climate change. They have also warned that monsoons, which occur between June and September, are becoming more erratic.

However, experts say that construction activities and development in the Western Gnats mountain range of Kerala which is prone to landslides – and where the hilly district of Wayanad is located – are combining with climate change to increase the risk of catastrophic landslides and flooding, posing a serious risk to human life.

According to Associated Press (AP), a 2013 report by a federal government-appointed committee said that 37 per cent of the total area of the Western Ghats mountains should be declared an eco-sensitive area and proposed restrictions on any form of construction. However, the report’s recommendations have not been implemented so far because state governments and residents opposed it, reported AP.

Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Pune-based Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, told AP that Kerala’s government and authorities should urgently assess the impact of construction activities in areas of the Western Ghats at risk of landslides, and if necessary halt further development in the region.

Meanwhile, climate scientist S Abhilash, head of the Advanced Centre for Atmospheric Radar Research at Kerala’s Cochin University of Science and Technology, warned that increasingly heavy rainfall in the northern and central areas of Kerala was linked to changing conditions in the Arabian Sea, driven by climate change.

He told Reuters: “The Arabian Sea is warming at a higher rate compared to other regions and sending more evaporation into the atmosphere, making the region a hotspot for deep convective clouds. Deep developed clouds in the south-east Arabian Sea region were carried by winds towards land and produced this havoc.”

Change in land-use patterns
Meanwhile, a rapid analysis by World Weather Attribution (WWA), an international collaboration of scientists who analyse the influence of climate change on extreme weather events, found that the climate crisis and a change in land-use patterns over the years in the Western Ghats mountain range had helped trigger the recent catastrophic landslides in Wayanad.

The study, released on 14 August 2024, also found that single-day monsoon downpours in Wayanad have become 10.8 per cent heavier due to atmospheric warming since the pre-industrial era, fuelled by fossil fuel emissions.

The heavy rainfall was one of many reasons for the destruction wreaked by series of landslides in the Wayanad, as well as changes to land use driven by deforestation and quarrying.

“Given the small mountainous region with complex rainfall-climate dynamics, there is a high level of uncertainty in the model results,” cautioned WWA in its scientific report of the study. “However, the increase in heavy one-day rainfall events is in line with a large and growing body of scientific evidence on extreme rainfall in a warming world, including in India, and the physical understanding that a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, leading to heavier downpours.”

The WWA added: “While the linkage between land cover and land use changes and landslide risk in Wayanad is mixed in the limited existing studies, factors such as quarrying for building materials, and a 62 per cent reduction in forest cover, may have contributed to the increased susceptibility of the slopes to landslides when the heavy rain fell.

“The soils in the hilly Wayanad district are among the loosest and most erodible in Kerala, with high risk of landslides during the monsoon season. More stringent assessments of landslides, restricting construction in hillside areas and minimising deforestation and quarrying are needed to avoid similar disasters in the future,” said WWA scientists in a statement.

Also, post-disaster studies conducted by other scientists have concluded that human-induced activities are chiefly responsible for the increased intensity of landslides in the state of Kerala.

According to the Indian Landslide Susceptibility Map developed by the Hydrosense Lab at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, over 31 per cent of Wayanad’s land is classified as very highly susceptible to landslides. Among Kerala’s districts, Wayanad ranks first in terms of the proportion of land at very high risk of landslides. 

The Wayanad landslides are not the first time Kerala has been hit by devastating landslides. The 2018 landslides and flooding left over 400 people dead and forced the evacuation of more than one million residents.

Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, who won the Lok Sabha seat for Wayanad in the recent general election but resigned because he had also won the seat for his family home of Raebareli in the north, said in Parliament: “Our country has witnessed an alarming rise in landslides in recent years. The need of the hour is a comprehensive action plan to address the growing frequency of natural calamities in our ecologically fragile regions.”

According to data from the India Meteorological Department, Wayanad had a 15 per cent deficit in rainfall so far this season. However, on 30 July, Wayanad received six per cent of its annual rainfall in just a few hours.

Experts say that climate change, driven by human interventions, plays a significant role in such events.

“Kerala, with about half of its land area under various levels of vulnerability to landslides, ought to create the political ambience to effectively enforce the multiple laws on sustainable land use,” noted Dr S Faizi, an ecologist specialising in biodiversity management and international environmental policy, in Liberation, the magazine of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist).

He added: “The political parties and bureaucracy ought to overcome the pressure exerted by the powerful lobbies of the planters, tourism, church and the quarry owners. The Kerala Panchayati Raj Act has very powerful environmental protection provisions and the people must organise and demand the panchayats to enforce these in the interest of our common future.”

Dr V Ambili, deputy director general of the Geological Survey of India (GSI), Kerala unit, told The New Indian Express: “Landslides are a natural phenomenon, and while we cannot prevent them entirely, we can take steps to minimise their impact.

"As experts suggest, reducing human interventions in ecologically sensitive areas can help avoid exacerbating these disasters.”