A worrying pattern of an increasing number of localised but extreme rainfall events has emerged across India this monsoon season.
One obvious reason is human-induced climate change, triggered by increasing emissions. Another, not so obvious, reason is poor localised governance coupled with a lack of adaptive strategy on the ground with electoral politics trumping the histories – and warnings — of natural disasters.
We can look at Wayanad in Kerala, which witnessed the region’s worst landsides in history killing over 310 persons so far, and Kullu and Shimla districts in Himachal, where 10 people have died and another 45 are missing because of a cloud burst.
The Mundakkai and Chooralmala hills in Wayanad received over 500 mm of rain in 24 hours between July 29 and July 30, triggering a series of landslides burying over 400 homes constructed on the natural path of several rivers flowing out of the Western Ghat hills.
Old timers in Wayanad and experts said these constructions came up in the past four decades as Mundakkai and Chooralmala became popular for coffee and rubber plantations and also began to attract more tourists. The lush green forests that once covered Wayanad were gradually destroyed as business and commercial activities expanded in the region.
As land was only available close to natural waterways, huge concrete and make-shift constructions came up there, blocking the flow of water. In forest areas, increasing human pressure meant the depletion of critical green cover, exposing the topsoil to more run-off monsoon water and making the region prone to landslides.
In 11 years, the period in which the governments — both at the Centre and State — failed to implement ecologically sensitive zone regulations — Wayanad has lost 14% of its forest cover as tourists surged eight times in the past 18 years. Wayanad is one of the 13th most landslide-prone districts in the country of the 147 studied by the Geological Survey of India (GSI) in 2023: This data was available to policy planners but they chose to ignore it.
The ecologically sensitive zone guidelines for the Western Ghats have been hanging in balance since 2010 because of opposition from the implementing states of Kerala, Karnataka, Goa and Maharashtra and the lack of keenness shown by the Union environment ministry.
In all these states, some locals propped by vested interests had protested against the guideline, whose diluted version proposed 30% of the Western Ghat as ESZ. In many cases, the hotel lobby was said to be behind the protests, creating a fear that locals would not be allowed to enter eco-sensitive areas and that it would affect their livelihoods. These fears were unfounded as the ESZ mechanism proposed environment-friendly co-existence for locals but banned environmentally degrading industries such as mining and heavy construction in the zones.
Lack of a warning mechanism
The impending danger of not respecting nature in an ecologically fragile region is clear from the Wayanad tragedy; the region has a long history of landslides and extreme rainfall. Despite Wayanad witnessing landslides repeatedly, no early warning system is in place either.
The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) warning system, about which Union home minister Amit Shah, spoke in Rajya Sabha, does not provide specific landslide warnings and instead issues a generic warning for a district based on rainfall input from IMD. The GSI said its warning system in Wayanad is still working on pilots while the Central Water Commission also failed to warn the state.
In the absence of alerts, the Kerala government was not able to evacuate a large number of people living in hamlets on the affected hills. Only a few from highly sensitive areas were sheltered at a school, which also got washed away. “We were never told about the magnitude of the rain. Red Alert was issued only after the landslides,” Kerala chief minister Pinayari Vijayan said in a rebuttal to Shah.
Himachal Pradesh, the northern state that matches Kerala on most of the socio-economic and educational parameters, witnessed something similar on August 1 when multiple cloud bursts in the Kullu and Shimla districts resulted in the death of 10 persons.
The districts were epicentres of the devastating extreme rain-induced flash floods and landslides in 2023, which resulted in the death of over 500 people and loss of over ₹12,000 crore.
The repeat of the cloudbursts, whose frequency has increased in Himachal in recent decades as per IMD data, in the same region — where forests have rapidly depleted — shows the devastating impact of replacing natural forests with horticulture plantations.
Like Wayanad, the region has witnessed the mushrooming of concrete structures along rivers and streams (many homestays and hotels) and on the natural flows of glaciers. The rising population load has witnessed a spread of villages inside ecologically sensitive areas. Like most Himalayan states, Himachal has failed to study its landslide or extreme cloudburst-prone regions/villages/towns.
Too much focus on tourism without any effort to strike a balance between nature and the load of high emissions is showing its impact through the rising incidence of localised extreme rainfall events.
Such localised rainfall events are visible in cities such as Delhi and Mumbai as well. On July 27, when a heavy downpour flooded the basement of a coaching institute in Rajendra Nagar resulting in the death of three students, the rest of the national capital did not receive much rainfall.
On the night of July 31, several locations in Delhi such as Mayur Vihar and ITO received more than 100 mm of rain in an hour but other localities in the same city received less than 50 mm of rain. The aftermath of these localised rain events reveals how ill-prepared the civic agencies are, a clear example, for one, that municipal bodies have not mapped regions for long-term rainfall data.
No early warning system and IMD’s failure to predict daily rain puts people’s lives in jeopardy. The government needs to prepare an integrated national rainfall grid that identifies vulnerable areas based on history of landslides, monsoon water flow data, changing rainfall patterns over the years and historical lightning data. The grid should be embedded with satellite data to issue real-time alerts based on actual rainfall and cloud formation. This should be a single alert system instead of separate ones being run by the IMD, NDMA, Central Water Commission and state disaster management departments.
This is only the first step towards India’s adaptability to climate change-induced disasters. Next obviously is to create awareness among people and teach them disaster responsiveness. The third would be restoring nature, which, fortunately for us, has the ability to conserve and protect itself: Wayanad and Himachal tragedies are nature’s warning that if damaged beyond repair, humans will bear the cost of the loss of lives and livelihoods.