When The Mountains Begin To Speak

It is well past midnight.The relentless rain has finally cooled the air, but instead of feeling good, an uneasiness has crept in. Will this lashing rain turn into a cloudburst? Will the neighbourhood become another waterway by dawn? Terrible August seems to be returning yet again.

Eight years is long enough to determine whether an environmental phenomenon is no longer an aberration but a recurring reality. Yet Kerala continues to brush aside this brutal truth, even as the state stands on the precipice of even greater tragedies in the coming years.

If the highlands of Kerala, particularly Idukki and Wayanad, witnessed the highest number of landslides during the 2018 floods, it was only a matter of time before the pattern spread to the midlands. The midlands, once regarded as relatively stable, have steadily become vulnerable.

This monsoon, several towns in Kottayam remained inundated for days. The pattern has been unfolding ever since 2018, with places such as Koottickal in Kottayam and the midland regions of Malappuram increasingly bearing the brunt of landslides and flash floods.

A major reason for landslides and landslips in midlands is human intervention. Unscientific hill cutting, indiscriminate quarrying and repeated blasting weaken slopes and destabilise fragile terrain. The recent landslide at Panakkad in Malappuram occurred below an operational quarry, once again pointing to the consequences of disturbing already vulnerable hill systems.

Equally worrying is another phenomenon that has emerged since 2018: Rivers are flooding with unprecedented speed. Many remain almost dry until the peak monsoon, only to swell dramatically within hours, inundating nearby settlements. Three major factors contribute to this. The capacity of riverbeds to hold rainwater has declined after repeated floods.

Rivers such as the Pamba and several of its tributaries have become clogged with silt, debris and waste. Above all, rainfall patterns themselves have changed, with intense bursts replacing prolonged moderate rain. Kottayam, for instance, recorded nearly 400% more rainfall between August 1 and 5 than during the corresponding period last year, causing the Meenachil River to overflow into many homes.

Citizens are left marooned in their homes without warning because Kerala still lacks a localised weather forecasting system, and awareness of what intense rainfall can trigger remains low. Warnings were issued well before the Mundakkai landslide, but residents didn’t take them seriously — they had little idea what emergency steps to take during an extreme weather alert, and little faith in the alert system itself.

The debate over whether sand removal alone can prevent floods misses the larger picture. The uncomfortable truth is that all 44 rivers in Kerala are sick. What’s needed is an audit of the unscientific check dams built on most of them, constructions that have forced these rivers into fragmented flow.

The tragedy unfolding in Pathanamthitta comes as no surprise. Once one of the greenest districts in the state, it has undergone one of the ugliest forms of urbanisation, treating its hills, water bodies, and riverine systems with disdain. It begins at Sabarimala, abode of forest deity Ayyappan, which a Supreme Court-empowered committee, during its post-flood visit in 2018, found had been turned into a “concrete temple.” The temple overlooks the Pamba, one of Kerala’s most polluted rivers, and the pollution worsens during peak pilgrimage season.

The Pamba basin alone hosts 176 quarries, and even Chebanmudi, the district’s highest peak, has not escaped extensive quarrying. The slow ecological decline of the Pamba has unfolded alongside the commercial expansion of the pilgrimage economy. Township after township along the riverbanks discharges waste into the river, which eventually empties into the Vembanad Lake. The result is visible today in the deteriorating health of Kerala’s largest wetland ecosystem. The enormous quantity of waste removed last week from the Thottappilly spillway represented the cumulative burden carried by four major rivers—Pamba, Achankovil, Manimala and Meenachil—all of which ultimately feed the Vembanad system.

The unfortunate part is that we’re in a hurry to obliterate this tragedy, one that repeats every monsoon, from our minds, so we can plunge into Onam and then Christmas festivities. There is nothing wrong with celebrating life; nobody celebrates life like Malayalis. But it’s time we pause and reflect on what’s happening around us before it’s too late. We have long taken our fertile coast and ghats for granted, treating them badly—constructing buildings in ecologically sensitive zones, dumping waste into wetlands, pushing ahead with mega tunnel projects in landslide-prone areas—forgetting that ecology is not separate from our existence, but integral to it, and without it, life ceases.

The word “ecology” originates from the Greek oikos and logos—the study of how living entities interact with each other and their surroundings. Kerala’s Gen Z, flocking to watch Christopher Nolan’s homecoming epic “The Odyssey”, need to be equally concerned about their native oikos—their life-sustaining abode, the Western Ghats— which is dying.

In the last six decades, more than 33% of the original forest cover—over 33,500 sq km — has vanished along the Western Ghats across six states. The ecological warning bells from the fragile Ghats and coastline have been ringing far too consistently, and ignoring them will cost us a tragedy unheard of before.

It is not that Kerala—which has served as a model for the rest of the country in many reforms—cannot do this. What is lacking today is collective political will, and the need to go beyond knee-jerk blame games that offer instant popular catharsis but fail to address the basic problem: How to build a society that looks at nature with empathy and care. At the policy level, the state needs a development framework that accounts for climate change, local weather alerts, waste management, coastal erosion, droughts, integrated crop farming, and the cleaning up of water bodies in every neighbourhood.

Farmers living in the buffer zones of the Western Ghats need incentives for protecting the remaining green cover. And Kerala, which pioneered the country’s literacy movement, now has a unique opportunity to envisage an eco-literacy campaign — bringing the young into the green fold, since their own sustenance is at stake.

When TOI first reported that the proposed Wayanad mega tunnel would threaten the habitat of the tiny Banasura Chilappan, a bird found only in the shola forests of Camel Hump Mountains, conservationists were ridiculed for placing the fate of an obscure bird above development. That criticism fundamentally misunderstood ecology. The survival of a seemingly insignificant species often reflects the health of an entire ecosystem. Just as the lion-tailed macaque became the symbol of the Silent Valley movement and the tiger transformed India’s conservation agenda, the Banasura Chilappan represents something much larger than itself.

Its survival would also protect the montane forests that hold the soil, prevent landslides, and release water slowly into Kabani River, which in turn replenishes the Cauvery. Nevertheless, the LDF govt had other ideas and went ahead with the project. This year’s landslide at the tunnel site, which claimed six lives, was a grim reminder of the human cost of development, and a probe has been ordered to determine the cause.

One can only hope that the roar of blasting inside the mountains does not permanently silence the tiny song of the Banasura Chilappan— inviting fresh tragedies in turn.

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