Beyond landslide debris: The making of Wayanad's vulnerability

For the past 15 years, Chooralmala was home for Ranjith, a graphic designer, and his parents. Once a picturesque village with a clear stream flowing through it, Chooralmala is located in Meppadi grama panchayath of Kerala's Wayanad. Even after Ranjith moved to Kozhikode when he got a job, his parents continued to live among the tea hills in the valley of the mighty Vellarimala. 

But the 2019 landslide in neighbouring Puthumala, which took 17 lives, prompted Ranjith and family to rethink their decision to live in Chooralmala. He came across several studies on Wayanad’s fragile ecosystems and learned that even his house was located on landslide susceptible land. 

“Besides the one in Puthumala, there was a small landslide in Mundakkai [a village upstream from Chooralmala] in 2019. I had visited that place as part of the surveys conducted by the Hume Centre for Ecology and Wildlife Biology. That was the first time I considered shifting from Chooralmala,” he told TNM. 

Ranjith said that he also read a landslide susceptibility report for Wayanad prepared by the Hume Centre – a research institute in Kalpetta dedicated to studying climate change and its impacts on ecosystems and wildlife. Following that, he bought land in Muttil, over 20 km from Chooralmala, and began constructing a house there. 

Ranjith was part of a WhatsApp group for Wayanad weather forecast, an initiative of Hume Centre. When he saw reports of excessive rain on July 29, he travelled to Chooralmala to take his parents to Kozhikode. “The rainfall data for July 28 and 29 showed it was risky for my parents to stay in Chooralmala, so I took them to Kozhikode,” he said. 

The next day, the family woke up to the news that their neighbourhood had been completely swept away in the massive landslides that killed over 300 persons in Punchirimattom, Mundakkai, and Chooralmala of the Meppadi grama panchayat.

Not everyone in the landslide-hit villages had the awareness that Ranjith possessed. Neither did they have the means to uproot their current lives and plant themselves in safer locations. But the same cannot be said about the government. 

Warnings had been sounded almost a decade and a half earlier, with the Madhav Gadgil-led Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) classifying the location as an Ecologically Sensitive Area in 2011. The last warning, though unofficial, came 15 hours before the tragedy, from the Hume Centre, which alerted authorities to potential landslides following excessive rains in the two preceding days. 

Union Home Minister Amit Shah too made a statement that a warning was given to the state government regarding landslides four days ago but a fact check showed this wasn’t true. “India does not have any system to predict landslides four days ahead. The pore pressure limit might be crossed and a landslide caused within seconds. What can be done is to identify vulnerable locations and take efforts to reduce the impact, not prevent the landslide," said KG Thara, a former member of the Kerala State Disaster Management Authority (KSDMA), while speaking to TNIE.

Everything from excess rain, human intervention, changes in land use, and tourism have been blamed for the landslides that hit Wayanad in 2024, a stark reminder of the region's complex ecological vulnerability. This tragedy, rooted in centuries of land use changes from colonial-era plantations to modern tourism developments, exposes the dire consequences of ignoring scientific warnings and prioritising unsustainable development in the fragile Western Ghats ecosystem. As climate change intensifies extreme weather events, the disaster underscores the urgent need for a comprehensive reassessment of human activity and development policies in this ecologically sensitive region, balancing economic aspirations with environmental preservation to prevent future catastrophes.

To seek answers to the questions raised by the tragic loss of lives we need to look beyond the immediate trigger and understand Wayanad’s evolution over centuries, and the history of human activity that influenced it.