Repeated landslides: No lessons learnt

Excessive rains have caused widespread and severe devastation in all states along the western coast in the last few days. The impact has been in the form of flooding which destroyed crops, houses and infrastructure, landslides that killed people and caused entire settlements to disappear and major disruption of lives. In the midst of the paralysis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic the monsoon-induced calamities have posed serious challenges to the people and governments. Kerala, Karnataka and Maharashtra have suffered most by way of loss of lives and damage to assets and property. Last week’s landslide at Rajamala near Munnar in Kerala in which at least 80 people are believed to have been buried alive is the worst monsoon-related disaster in any state this year. There have been other landslides also of lesser impact in these states, and experts have warned of more of them occurring in the coming days.

Two factors have mainly caused the present disastrous conditions and events. One is the change in rainfall pattern resulting from climate change. The monsoon behaviour has changed, and rainfall that used to happen over many days occur in a day or even in hours, making it difficult for the soil in the plains and the hills and for many manmade structures to withstand the impact. The high altitude areas along the Western Ghats have been especially vulnerable, because of encroachments, destruction of forests, quarrying and mining, formation of human settlements, setting up of industries and other commercial enterprises, promotion of activities like tourism without checks and regulations and diminution of biodiversity. All these have separately and collectively contributed to the present situation in the Western Ghats region which is ecologically very sensitive and valuable. Kerala, the state which has inflicted most damage on the environment, has come to suffer the most.

The report of the Madhav Gadgil Committee which studied the destruction caused to the Western Ghats environment and made sensible recommendations to remedy the situation was thrown into the dust bin, and another committee under Dr K Kasturirangan was set up to water down its proposals. The recommendations of the Kasturirangan Committee were also not implemented. Gadgil had prophetically warned in 2013 that the tragedy that is waiting to happen will not take ages but only four or five years to happen. The abnormal natural events and the huge devastation caused by them now may only be intimations of bigger calamities lying in wait in future. Lives which are lost now will not be regained, and nature which is lost will take many hundreds of years to rebuild itself. The greater tragedy is that the lessons of the tragedy are not learnt at all.