# Ajayan
In the shadow of Himalayan rains and landslides, and amid warnings of climate change’s heavy hand, the newly submitted report on the 2024 Wayanad tragedy at Mundakkai, Chooralmala, and Punchirimattom where land and lives were swept away, assumes grave significance. It declares, with stark clarity, that the disaster was inevitable, shaped by the very ways the land had been used over the years.
On the night of July 30, 2024, the hills of Mundakkai, Chooralmala, and Punchirimattom in the Western Ghats came crashing down, swallowing homes, people, trees, and boulders in their fury. The toll stands at over 230 dead, yet the count of the missing remains uncertain.
Barely five days ago came the release of Sliding Earth, Scattered Lives, a report prepared by the People’s Scientific Study Committee. Its authors include geoscientist CP Rajendran, risk analyst Sagar Dhara, climatologist S Abhilash, forest scientist TV Sajeev, biodiversity expert CK Vishnudas and renowned paddy conservator Cheruvayal Raman, among others.
The report is a convergence of many disciplines from social and empirical sciences, Sajeev, leading scientist at the Kerala Forest Research Institute, told Metro Vaartha. It draws on years of ongoing investigation rather than hurried data gathered after the disaster, making it deeper and more insightful than a conventional post mortem account, he adds.
The study makes it plain: this disaster was no surprise. It was scripted by reckless assaults on a fragile ecosystem and by governments that looked away from known risks. And yet, in a striking irony, this same scarred terrain is where the State Government has now approved an 8-km tunnel to shave minutes off the drive between Kozhikode and Wayanad.
For decades, Wayanad’s slopes have been scarred - plantations massively creeping higher and eating into the already dwindling forest cover, tourist resorts mushrooming and the granite quarry mafia slicing away hillsides. One flank of Ambukuthimala, home to the prehistoric Edakkal caves, has been brutally shaved off. What should have stood as a buffer against climate-driven rains now remains exposed. The warning signs were already there - the 2019 Puthumala landslide - yet nothing was done. The scars of the tragedy are evident in Puthumala even now.
In the 48 hours before the latest tragedy, Wayanad was lashed by more than 500 mm of rain with as much as 370 mm falling on July 29, the night before the hills collapsed. A stark alert from the Hume Centre for Ecology and Wildlife Biology in Kalpetta, tracking rainfall across 200 villages since 2019, had flagged Mundakkai as “extreme risk”. Authorities ignored it. The price was paid in lives and land.
Geologist CP Rajendran, who surveyed the scarred terrain months after the tragedy, had then termed it a single, cataclysmic landslide that began around 1 am A torrent roared down from the hilltop, sweeping boulders and debris into a heaving earth-and-stone dam. As the pressure built, the mound burst in the early hours, mistaken by many as a second landslip. The force was staggering: everything in its path was obliterated.
The report should serve as an eye-opener - above all, for those in power. “We need to use the technologies now at hand,” said Rajendran, “to monitor landslide-prone areas and track their time-dependent growth wherever possible.”
What’s needed is a rethink of the entire development paradigm, grounded in fresh land-use planning. Strict land-use zonation must be enforced wherever vulnerabilities are identified, Rajendran stressed.
