How missed warnings and ‘over-tourism’ aggravated deadly India landslides

CHOORALMALA, India – With a steeply pitched tiled roof piercing misty green hills and a gushing stream nearby, the Stone House Bungalow was one of the most popular resorts in the Wayanad region in southern Indian state Kerala.

It was empty when

two landslides early on July 30

washed away the 30-year-old stone building. Staff and tourists left after rain flooded its kitchen a few days earlier.

But neighbouring dwellings in Mundakkai village were occupied and 205 people, almost all locals, were killed and scores are missing. Tourists were warned to leave a day earlier.

Local authorities are now counting the cost of the disaster and questioning whether rapid development of the tourism industry played a part. Weather-related disasters are not unusual in India, but the landslides in Kerala state this week were the worst since about 400 people were killed in floods in 2018.

Mundakkai, the area worst affected by the landslides, was home to some 500 local families. It and neighbouring villages housed nearly 700 resorts, homestays and zip-lining stations attracting trekkers, honeymooners and tourists looking to be close to nature, a local official said. Cardamom and tea estates dotted the hills.

Experts said they had seen July 30’s disaster coming for years. Several government reports in the past 13 years warned that over-development in the ecologically sensitive areas would increase the risk of landslides and other disasters such as floods by blocking natural water flows.

The warnings were largely ignored or lost in bureaucratic wrangling.

A fast-growing India is rapidly building infrastructure across the country, especially in its tourist destinations, including the ecologically fragile Himalayan foothills in the north, where there has been a rise in cave-ins and landslides.

Just three weeks before the latest disaster, Kerala state tourism minister P. A. Mohammed Riyas said in the local legislature in answer to a question that Wayanad was “dealing with an influx of more people than it can handle, a classic example of a place facing the problem of over-tourism”.

The area is just six hours by road from Bengaluru, India’s tech hub, and is a favoured weekend destination for wealthy IT professionals.

However, officials were unable to share any documentary evidence of resorts and tourist facilities flouting building regulations, although they said some did so.

Stone House employee Noorudheen, who goes by one name, said no government or village authority warned the management against building or operating a resort.

There was no sign that the landslides were directly caused by over-development. Residents said regions higher up in the hills were loosened by weeks of heavy rain and an unusually heavy downpour on July 29 night led to rivers of mud, water and boulders crashing downhill, sweeping away settlements and people.

But experts said the unbridled development worsened the situation by removing forest cover that absorbs rain and blocking natural run-offs.

Local environment protection group Wayanad Prakruthi Samrakshana Samit head N. Badusha said: “Wayanad is no stranger to such downpours. Unchecked tourism activity in Wayanad is the biggest factor behind worsening such calamities. Tourism has entered ecologically sensitive fragile areas where it was not supposed to be.”

Surge in tourism

Wayanad received more than a million domestic and foreign tourists last year, nearly triple the number in 2011. Then, a federal government report warned against over-development in the broader mountain range the district lies in, without clearly spelling out the consequences.

“The geography is really too fragile to accommodate all that,” Mr K. Babu, a senior village council official in Mundakkai, said in his office this week as he coordinated rescue efforts. “Tourism is doing no good to the area... the tourism sector was never this active.”

A Wayanad district disaster management report in 2019 warned against “mindless development carried out in recent decades by destroying hills, forests, water bodies and wetlands”.

“Deforestation and reckless commercial interventions on land have destabilised the environment,” Wayanad’s then top official Ajay Kumar wrote, after landslides in the district that year killed at least 14 people.

Mundakkai used to be a small village sitting on the eastern slope of one of the forested green hills of the Western Ghats mountain range that runs parallel to nearly the entire length of India’s western coast for 1,600km.

Mr Rashid Padikkalparamban, a 30-year-old Mundakkai native, lost six family members including his father to the landslides. He said the place came to the attention of outsiders mainly after 2019 and turned into a major tourist attraction.

“They discovered a beautiful region full of tea and cardamom plantations, and a river that swept through it,” he said at a school-turned-relief camp.

Many locals sold their lands to outsiders, who then built tourist retreats, he noted.

‘God’s own country’

Kerala, a sliver of land between the Western Ghat mountains to the east and the Arabian Sea to the west, is one of the most scenic states in India, and is advertised as “God’s Own Country”.

But it has witnessed nearly 60 per cent of the 3,782 landslides in India between 2015 and 2022, the federal government told parliament in July 2022.

Studying the ecological sensitivity of the Western Ghats, a federal government-appointed committee said in 2011: “It has been torn asunder by the greed of the elite and gnawed at by the poor, striving to eke out a subsistence. This is a great tragedy, for this hill range is the backbone of the ecology and economy of south India.”

The committee, headed by ecologist Madhav Gadgil, recommended barring mining, no new rail lines or major roads or highways in such areas, and restrictions on development in protected areas that it mapped out. It said only minimal impact tourism should be promoted with strict waste management, traffic and water use regulations.

State governments, including Kerala, did not accept the report, and a new committee was set up. In 2013, it reduced the overall protected area from 60 per cent of the mountain range to 37 per cent.

But all the states along the mountain range wanted to curb the protected area even further, minutes of successive meetings until 2019 show. The federal government issued drafts to implement the recommendations for all stakeholders, but is yet to issue a final order.

Mr Gadgil said his committee had “specifically recommended that in ecologically highly sensitive areas, there should be no further human interventions, such as reconstruction”.

“The government, of course, decided to ignore our report,” he added, because tourism is a cash cow.

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan dismissed questions about the Gadgil recommendations, telling reporters his focus is on relief and rehabilitation and asking people to not “raise inappropriate propaganda in the face of this tragedy”.

While experts bemoan tourism-led development, locals like Mr Padikkalparamban said it brought jobs to an area that did not have many options earlier.

“After the plantation estates, resorts are the second biggest job-generating sector in the area now,” he said.

But Mr K.R. Vancheeswaran, president of the Wayanad Tourism Organisation that has some 60 resorts and homestays as members but none in the vicinity of the landslides, said the industry needs to take some of the blame.

“If human activities are going to be unbearable to nature, nature will unleash its power and we will not be able to withstand it,” he added. “We have had to pay a very, very high price so let us try to learn from it.” REUTERS