Kerala landslides: The role of unchecked tourism and missed warnings

With a steeply pitched tiled roof piercing misty green hills in southern India and a stream gushing through rocks nearby, the Stone House Bungalow was a popular resort in the Wayanad area of Kerala.

It was empty when two landslides early on Tuesday washed away the 30-year-old stone building: staff and tourists had left after rain flooded its kitchen a few days earlier.

However, neighbouring dwellings in Mundakkai village were occupied, resulting in 205 deaths, almost all locals, and many people missing. Tourists had been warned to leave the day before due to the rain.

Local authorities are now evaluating the disaster's impact and considering if the rapid growth of the tourism industry contributed to the tragedy. Weather-related disasters are not uncommon in India, but this week's landslides in Kerala were the worst since the 2018 floods that killed about 400 people.

Mundakkai, the hardest-hit area, was home to about 500 local families. It and nearby villages housed nearly 700 resorts, homestays, and zip-lining stations, attracting trekkers, honeymooners, and tourists. The hills were dotted with cardamom and tea estates.

Experts had anticipated the disaster for years, with several government reports over the past 13 years warning that over-development in ecologically sensitive areas would increase the risk of landslides and other environmental disasters by blocking natural water flows. These warnings were largely ignored or lost in bureaucratic wrangling.

India is rapidly building infrastructure, especially in tourist destinations, including the ecologically fragile Himalayan foothills in the north, where there has been an increase in cave-ins and landslides.

Just three weeks before the latest disaster, Kerala state tourism mnister PA Mohammed Riyas said in the local legislature 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 the city's wealthy IT professionals.

Officials were unable to share any documentary evidence with Reuters of resorts and tourist facilities flouting building regulations, although they said some had done so.

Noorudheen, part of Stone House's managing staff who goes by one name, said no government or village authority had warned the management against building or operating a resort there.

There was no indication 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 Monday night led to rivers of mud, water, and boulders crashing downhill, sweeping away settlements and people.

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

"Wayanad is no stranger to such downpours," said N Badusha, head of Wayanad Prakruthi Samrakshana Samiti, a local environmental protection NGO. "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 1 million domestic and foreign tourists last year, nearly triple the number in 2011 when 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," 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.

Reuters reached out to the Wayanad district head, its disaster management authority, Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan's office, and the federal environment ministry seeking comment but received no responses.

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 1,600 km (1,000 miles).

Rashid Padikkalparamban, a 30-year-old Mundakkai native who lost six family members, including his father, to the landslides, 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 in the area, he said.

'GOD'S OWN COUNTRY'

Kerala, a sliver of land between the Western Ghats 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. For tourism, 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, which in 2013 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 reduce 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.

Gadgil told Reuters 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 said because tourism is a cash cow.

Kerala chief minister Vijayan dismissed questions about the Gadgil recommendations, telling reporters his focus was on relief and rehabilitation and asking people not to "raise inappropriate propaganda in the face of this tragedy."

While experts criticise tourism-led development, locals like Mundakkai's 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 KR Vancheeswaran, president of the Wayanad Tourism Organisation, which has about 60 resorts and homestays as members but none near the landslides, said the industry needed to take some 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," Vancheeswaran said. "We have had to pay a very, very high price, so let us try to learn from it."

(Reuters)