Scientists have repeatedly warned that the Western Ghats were prone to ecological disasters for years — but their warning went unheeded.
Published Aug 04, 2024 | 5:00 PM ⚊ Updated Aug 04, 2024 | 5:00 PM
Villages have been wiped out, and rescue workers do not expect to save many who have been buried under mud and debris. (Supplied)
India has become one of the most environmentally disaster-prone nations in the world. We are witnessing one major disaster after another, resulting in thousands of deaths, and yet there is no learning curve.
Following each disaster, a blame game erupts across the political spectrum but no concrete steps are initiated to prevent a repeat.
More than 300 people were killed in the pre-dawn landslides that hit villages in Chooralmala, Mundakkai, Attamala, and Noolpuzha in the Wayanad district on 30 July. Several houses, shops, tourist resorts, and bridges were destroyed in the nature’s fury.
Entire villages have been obliterated, and search and rescue personnel from various agencies, including the Indian military, have lost of finding the missing people alive. As per reports, many residents are still feared trapped under thick layers of mud.
This was the worst natural disaster ever in the state after its formation in 1956. A century ago, the ‘Great Flood of 1099‘ (the year is based on the Malayalam calendar; 1924, according to the Gregorian calendar) had killed more than 1,000 people.
Scientists have repeatedly warned that the Western Ghats were prone to ecological disasters for years.
The findings of the Centre-appointed Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel headed by noted ecologist Dr Madhav Gadgil were emphatic in their insistence that 75 percent of the 129,037 sq. km of the Western Ghats — spanning Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Goa, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala — be declared ecologically-sensitive, considering its dense, rich forests and a large number of endemic flora and fauna.
The Gadgil report, submitted to the central government in August 2001, highlighted Wayanad as one of the eight ecologically hotspots in the world because of its biological diversity.
The report was rejected by the Kerala government which felt the recommendations anti-development. Local politicians and the influential Church whipped up anti-Gadgil, anti-environment sentiments. Consequently, the thrust was to level hills for large-scale construction, extensive road construction and illegal quarrying, resulting in massive deforestation.
Changing land-use patterns saw traditional farming and forest land being used for cultivating commercial crops that were incapable of root cohesion. All these factors accelerated the loosening of the soil, which when combined with heavy rainfall, saw a steady rise in landslides.
Gadgil, when interviewed after this disaster by several TV channels, slammed the government for shirking responsibility. “It is a man-made disaster with the government itself having abetted the exploitation of the environment,” he said.
On Friday, 2 August, the Union government issued a new draft notification to designate 56,800 square kilometres of the Western Ghats as an ecologically sensitive area. The area would cover 9,993.7 square kilometres in Kerala.
Five years ago, a similar massive landslide hit Kavalappara on the Muthappankunnu hill slopes in Malappuram, killing 59 people. On the same day, 8 August 2019, Puthumala in Wayanad — separated from Kavalappara by just six kilometres across the hills — too experienced a similar calamity that claimed at least 17 lives.
A year later on 6 August, a massive landslide at Pettimudi in the Idukki district killed at least 66 people.
The small town of Mundakkai had witnessed a landslide in July 1984 but of a lesser magnitude. Legislative Assembly records showed that even during the 1984 landslide, dead bodies were recovered from the Chaliyar River.
The National Centre for Earth Sciences Studies identified the Wayanad-Kozhikode border as being one of the most landslide-prone areas in the world. The Kappikalam landslide in 1992 claimed 11 lives while a landslide in Valamthode in 2007 claimed four lives.
A team of scientists from the National Remote Sensing Centre analysed six major landslides between 2018 and 2020. They found heavy rainfall between 200 to 600 millimetres triggered havoc in those regions.
The extremely heavy rainfall reportedly prompted the Hume Centre for Ecology and Wildlife Biology in Kalpetta, Wayanad, to issue a landslide warning 16 hours before the tragedy struck on 30 July.
The rainfall recorded in the Puthumala gauge showed 572 mm of rainfall in 48 hours. The Hume Centre sent a warning at 9.30 am on 29 July to both the disaster and state-level agencies but obviously, they failed to alert the district administration or the local people.
N Badusha, president of Wayanad Environment Protection Committee said that between 2015 and 2022, Kerala recorded the highest number of landslides in India.
“In Kerala, these landslides have been triggered largely by extensive land-use change. During the past 10 years, 500 tourism resorts have come up just around the Camel Hump Mountain which is known to be a very ecologically sensitive area,” he said.
“Extensive tea plantations and mining have also started. But during this period, we have seen that the rainfall pattern has also changed and we are now witness to very heavy rainfall which adds to the loosening of the soil,” he explained.
“It is for this reason that we asked the state government to urgently relocate people living on the eastern slopes of the Western Ghats, something that the State Disaster Management Authority had also recommended,” Badusha added.
S Abhilash, the director of the Advanced Centre for Atmospheric Radar Research at the Cochin University of Science and Technology cited southeast Arabian Sea becoming warmer as one of the reasons for heavy rainfalls. The warmer sea has been making the atmosphere above this region, including Kerala, thermodynamically unstable.
It was making the rainfall, earlier more common in the northern Konkan belt, move southward, resulting in extremely heavy downpours over Wayanad, Kozhikode, Malappuram and Kannur.
What is sad is the myopic views of the political class. Despite knowing the vulnerability of this region, they are planning a tunnel connecting Puthumala with Muthappampuzha for which ₹3,500 crore has been sanctioned.
These planned twin tube tunnels, whose entire length is expected to be 8.17 kilometres, could reduce traffic congestion on the Thamarassery Ghat road and also improve the cargo transit from Karnataka.
A senior engineer based in Kerala, on condition of anonymity, said, the state has the example of the collapse of the Silkyara Bend-Barkot tunnel in Uttarakhand, which was being built in a highly seismic and fragile mountain zone of the Himalayas.
“The tunnel was wrongly aligned along the `shear zone’ and its re-profiling ‘ work was being done without taking adequate precautions. But the tunnel work here (in Kerala) is being undertaken in a highly ecologically-sensitive area without any studies to assess its environmental and sociological impact. It could further destabilise the Western Ghats,” he said.
Former Principal Chief Conservator of Forests in Kerala Prakriti Srivastava found it ironic the state government’s disinterest in protecting its forests, its true sources of revenue and well-being.
“When I was posted in Kerala, I had started the Navakiranam voluntary relocation scheme to allow people facing landslide threats or attacks from wild animals to relocate and rebuild their lives by offering them a cash incentive and also skilling them for jobs,” the former IFS officer said.
“We received 4,000 applications and in one year, relocated 2,000 families. Sadly, the scheme was called off due to a lack of funds,” Srivastava said.
An IIT-Delhi report on the soil structure and ecology of this region recommended the relocation of 4,000 people.
The focus must be to prevent disasters and it is for the state governments to use the expertise of scientists and environmentalists and also to take strict steps to ensure that this precious heritage of forest and soil is not destroyed as this is the very basis of human existence.
This is the only way such catastrophes could be prevented during this age of climate change.
(Rashme Sehgal is a senior journalist and author. Views are personal. Edited by Majnu Babu)
(South First is now on WhatsApp and Telegram)
