Mountains keep warning us, but are we listening?

Barely two years after Wayanad witnessed one of India’s worst landslide disasters, another mountainside has collapsed. This time it is at the site of one of Kerala’s most ambitious infrastructure projects — the Wayanad Twin Tunnel — in the same Vellarimala ranges that witnessed the Mundakkai-Chooralmala tragedy. At the time of writing this article, six workers are confirmed dead, many are missing, construction has been halted, and investigations are underway. The immediate cause of the landslide will eventually be established. But a larger question demands attention. Did we not see this coming?

The 8.75-km Anakkampoyil-Kalladi-Meppadi twin tunnel is designed to bypass the narrow, congested and accident-prone Thamarassery Ghat road, providing faster connectivity between the neighbouring districts of Kozhikode and Wayanad in North Kerala. Wayanad has long needed a safer and more reliable route to the plains. So, the debate was never about whether the district needed infrastructure. It was about whether this was the right project in one of India’s most fragile mountain landscapes — the Vellarimala ranges in the Western Ghats.

Nobody can honestly say the risks were unknown. In fact, the project’s environmental clearance reads like a checklist of risks. The more one reads it, the less it sounds like a green signal.

The project was first examined and recommended by Kerala’s State Expert Appraisal Committee before being taken up by the Union environment ministry’s Expert Appraisal Committee for final environmental clearance. The committee recognised that the alignment passed through highly landslide-prone terrain that had witnessed devastating landslides in both 2019 and 2024. It noted that the project lay within the buffer of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, passed through Ecologically Sensitive Area villages and cut across a landscape that supports elephants, endemic birds and several threatened species. It raised concerns over blasting vibrations, the possibility of aggravating landslides, changes to groundwater and natural drainage, slope stability, disposal of excavated muck and the cumulative ecological impacts of tunnelling through such a fragile landscape, seeking additional scientific studies before making a decision.

When the proposal returned with more studies, it was recommended for environmental clearance but with an unusually long list of conditions attached, one of which expressly prohibited dumping construction material outside designated sites. Whether that condition was breached and whether it had any bearing on the collapse are matters for investigation. But the broader point is that the clearance itself recognised an extraordinary degree of geological uncertainty. Environmental clearance should not become an exercise in attaching longer lists of conditions to increasingly risky projects. Its first responsibility is to answer a simpler question: have we understood the landscape well enough to proceed at all?

Earlier this year, the project clearance was challenged by the Wayanad Prakrithi Samrakshana Samithi (Wayanad environment protection committee) before Kerala High Court and later the Supreme Court. Both courts declined to revisit the scientific judgement of the expert committees. The SC even went ahead and qualified the tunnel as a project of “national importance” and a “lifeline” for Kerala. That description sits uneasily today. Before it could serve as a lifeline, the project became the site of a fatal landslide.

This is not an isolated story. Across India’s mountains, tunnel projects have repeatedly encountered geological realities that engineering models failed to anticipate. The Silkyara tunnel collapse in Uttarakhand trapped 41 workers for 17 days. Other Himalayan tunnels have run into unstable rock formations, excessive deformation, water ingress and repeated redesigns. Different mountains. Different geology. The same lesson: geology does not follow engineering drawings.

Climate change is changing the mountains themselves. For instance, in the Vellarimala ranges, rain now falls harder, in shorter bursts and over successive days. It soaks the soil to such levels of saturation that the mountains cannot hold them any longer. Water and the slushy soil find new paths, sliding down the slopes and causing devastation along the way. Rock masses weaken and slip along.

India undoubtedly needs better roads, railways and maybe even tunnels. But mountains are not simply obstacles waiting to be drilled through. They are living landscapes with limits that engineering alone cannot negotiate.

The committee now being appointed by the Kerala govt will tell us why this particular slope failed. But another question will remain long after the reports are filed away. Why did the approval document spend so many pages explaining the risks and how they could be managed, yet so little time asking the simple question: were those risks worth taking?

Until we answer that honestly, Wayanad will remain a reminder that environmental appraisal demands more than scientific expertise. It demands intellectual honesty to recognise that there are landscapes where the wisest decision is not how to build, but whether to build at all.

Some mountains are not asking to be engineered. They are asking to be understood.

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