# Ajayan | Ecologically fragile Wayanad has rewritten the old saying: twice bitten, never shy. Now has come the third blow. The shyness remains missing and arrogance against nature stays. After the devastating Puthumala landslide in 2019 and the catastrophic Mundakkai disaster in 2024, Kalladi has become the latest warning from a landscape repeatedly pushed to its limits.
Yet, instead of introspection, there appears to be an attempt to pin the blame on the mound of excavated soil at the project site. That explanation misses the larger and more troubling question. The mudslip occurred at the very entrance of the controversial twin-tunnel project in an ecologically sensitive region. The real issue is not the heap of earth removed for construction, but the wisdom of pursuing such a project despite repeated warnings from nature. The mound of soil flowed down after the hill above gave way, leaving a mountain of ignored warnings that now stands exposed.
Incidentally, the political silence is as striking as the mudslip itself. Chief Minister VD Satheesan, who as Leader of the Opposition had questioned the twin-tunnel project and its allegedly ‘cooked-up” environmental clearance, has remained silent on those concerns now. Opposition Leader Pinarayi Vijayan, whose government pushed the project despite repeated warnings from environmentalists, visited the site but offered no indication that those warnings deserved a second look.
The warning signs were evident from the start. The hurried inauguration of tunnel blasting by Vijayan raised eyebrows, particularly as the alignment passed dangerously close to the sites of Wayanad's earlier disasters. Expert warnings were ignored, environmental activists faced intimidation, and a geological study just weeks before the mudslip cautioned of potential large-scale slope failure. The State Expert Appraisal Committee echoed these concerns. Reports also warned that blasting could trigger subsurface rock piping and weaken slope stability, well-established geological processes, not speculative theories. Yet, despite repeated representations by the Wayanad Prakriti Samrakshna Samiti to the State, the Centre and the courts that the project was unsafe in an ecologically fragile landscape, it was cleared as a "lifeline", recalls Samiti president N Badushah.
Eminent geologist CP Rajendran, formerly with the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, and Director of the Consortium for Sustainable Development, Connecticut, is unequivocal: the region is geologically too fragile for major construction. Having visited the site after the devastating landslide two years ago, he maintains that the landscape offers little margin for engineering intervention and should be treated as a no-build zone.
"The scars of the 2019 Puthumala landslide remain visible even today," says Rajendran. "It is tragic that even after two devastating disasters, no meaningful measures were taken to avert another. Instead, the push for the tunnel project reflects a deeply callous disregard for the region's ecological and geological vulnerability," he said.
Relentless and unscientific human intervention, including the expansion of plantations, unchecked construction across river floodplains and indiscriminate quarrying, has severely destabilised the landscape, making large parts of the region increasingly unsafe for habitation. The proposed tunnel project, involving extensive hill blasting, can only further aggravate this fragile geological setting.
Several parts of Wayanad, including the project area, fall within the Ecologically Sensitive Zone-1 identified by the Madhav Gadgil Committee as requiring the highest level of environmental protection. Gadgil's passing has silenced one of the strongest scientific voices warning against precisely such human-induced ecological disasters.
The new government under Satheesan, who had projected himself as an advocate of environmental protection, now faces its real test. His Government’s immediate priority should be to suspend the controversial twin-tunnel project and order an independent scientific review of its ecological and geological impacts. This should be followed by comprehensive hazard mapping to identify vulnerable red zones, detailed geotechnical and soil investigations and a moratorium on further human intervention in these fragile ecosystems until the studies are completed. Only science, not political expediency, should determine the region's future.