The calamity in Wayanad, the most devastating landslides in Kerala’s history, is not just a wakeup call—it is a death-knell, one that had long been tolling. Yet instead of introspecting, learning from our mistakes and ensuring we never again repeat them, we in India focus on immediate relief (which Kerala does well), then on rehabilitation (which Kerala does less well), and then lapse into business-as-usual. This failure to rise above our political inertia prevents us from safeguarding our future from more such cataclysms.
On Saturday, August 3, I made an emotionally searing visit to Wayanad and assisted in the distribution of relief supplies gathered by the MP office in Thiruvananthapuram. Picking my way through the rubble to view the destruction in Mundakkai, Chooralmala and Punchiri Mattam, I beheld JCBs rumbling where, till five days ago, lavishly verdant, hilly and scenic villages had sprawled beneath great blue skies. I saw the fortunate in a relief camp.
At a hospital suffused with the anguish of those whose homes and dreams were pulverised by a bombardment of rocks and boulders in the early hours of July 30, I met a young survivor who had endured unimaginable horrors. At eight years of age, she had lost her father, mother, brother, sister, grandfather and grandmother, and sustained numerous injuries, from broken bones to a heavily bruised face. As I watched her propped up in bed, immersed in her colouring book, desolation gripped me. After all, we should have been able to prevent what she had endured.
Kerala’s battle-lines with the ferocity of nature, exacerbated by climate change, have long been drawn. The writing has again been on the wall since February 2023, when ISRO’s National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) published the Landslide Atlas of India, ranking Wayanad as the 13th most vulnerable region for landslides among 147 districts in 17 states and two Union territories. Indeed, 13 of Kerala’s 14 districts are among the 50 most landslide-prone Indian regions.
When a landslide struck Wayanad’s Puthumala in 2019, no special new measures were taken in the surrounding areas. Over five years later, in the secrecy of a misty and chilly night, 86,000 square kilometres of forest slipped off high in the Vellarimala hills, and tumbling into a turgid Iruvazhinjipuzha (whose course it altered), hurtled down the hillside, devouring Mundakkai, Chooralmala, Attamala and Noolpuzha, reducing their residents to figures in a tragic death toll. Upwards of 300 bodies have been found, while more than 200 souls remain missing, the odds of their still being alive dwindling by the day.
Ecologically, Kerala is deeply fragile; not only did it record the highest number of landslides in India between 2015 and 2022, there has not been a single year between 2017 and 2022 when a natural calamity—whether cyclone, flood, or landslide—did not lash it. Some ecological issues contributing to the current catastrophe include widespread deforestation, with 62 percent of Wayanad’s forests having disappeared between 1950 and 2018; ceaseless soil erosion, made more relentless by rainwater seeping into loose topsoil, which reduces soil cohesion and contributes to landslides; and soil piping, the formation of underground tunnels because of subsurface soil erosion. The Puthumala landslide scarred Wayanad with extensive soil piping, which aggravated these landslides.
Climate change is worsening the situation, especially with more flash floods and landslips being triggered by merciless monsoons. As climate scientists have revealed, the extreme warming of the Arabian Sea has created deep cloud systems, which result in brief spells of ruthlessly intense rainfall, making Kerala yet more vulnerable to landslides. The ‘heavy rain’ predicted for the area was 52-200 mm over a week; instead, 522 mm fell in a matter of hours, far more than the saturated soil could absorb. The hill just collapsed.
A day after tragedy struck Wayanad, I wrote to Home Minister Amit Shah, urging him to declare this upheaval a ‘Calamity of Severe Nature’ in pursuance of Paragraph 8.1 of the Members of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme guidelines. This will entitle all of India’s MPs—543 in the Lok Sabha and 250 in the Rajya Sabha—to contribute, if they so wish, up to Rs 1 crore from their MPLADS funds for extracting Wayanad from the jaws of devastation. (As of now, only the MP of this constituency is allowed to deploy funds, but there is no MP currently, and no by-election has been called). I have yet to receive a response from the government.
Yet one thing is evident: we need far more rigorous, reliable, and real-time forecasts of such catastrophes in order to evacuate residents from the epicentre, bolster existing infrastructure and build emergency structures, and enter a vigorous state of preparedness. For far too long, we have been relying on remote sensing technologies, but these have proven inadequate. Remote sensing deploys deep learning, among other techniques, to unearth the mysteries of a region’s topography, hydrology, vegetation and other geographic vagaries. Satellites built for this purpose snap pictures of the area, gathering every detail, from water and soil to vegetation and rocks.
When pieced together, these snapshots create a comprehensive map. Then deep learning comes into play, building predictive models that highlight regions prone to ecological disasters. The trouble, of course, is that much like predictive models built by artificial intelligence, the results are not foolproof. And satellites cannot see that well beneath the surface.
Once and for all, we ought to learn the right lessons from Wayanad and move towards on-ground sensor grids, capable of anticipating landslides. That the internet is now awash with high-resolution images tracing the horrific course of the Wayanad cataclysm is perhaps ironic. Released by the NRSC after the landslide, these ‘before-and-after’ images illustrate that while remote sensing can guide us in retrospect, it may fail to awaken us to the imminence of a tragedy until after people have perished. I hope that the gruesomeness of these landslides has roused us from our slumber, compelling us to move beyond our existing early warning systems to adopt forecasting methods that are truly credible. And tough decisions are still pending about the degree of human activity permissible in such areas.
Should we fail to do this, Wayanad would become yet another natural calamity from which we have learnt nothing.
(Views are personal)
(office@tharoor.in)
Shashi Tharoor | Fourth-term Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram and Sahitya Akademi winning author of 24 books, most recently Ambedkar: A Life