Floods, landslides and cloudbursts have become more frequent and menacing with every monsoon. In the wee hours of July 30, a wall of mud, water and debris hurtled down the hills of Mundakkai and Chooralmala in Wayanad district, killing about 300 people. The landslides occurred due to an extraordinary ‘cloudburst’ of rainfall; the Wayanad region received over 40 cm of rain between the morning of July 29 and 30.
This saturated the soil in a region whose topography, according to the landslide mapping atlas prepared by the Indian Space Research Organisation last year, is landslide-prone . Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh are reeling under a similar onslaught. The disasters are, however, natural and man-made in equal measure. A combination of climate-induced weather events and environmentally disruptive activities has contributed to such disasters. Cloudbursts have become frequent on account of global warming, with warmer oceans and water bodies adding to atmospheric moisture and creating large masses of clouds that ‘burst’ over hilly regions in particular. These very regions, as the ISRO atlas shows, are prone to landslides owing to natural and man-made reasons. Of the top 30 such districts (in a mapping of 147 districts across 17 States), 10 are in Kerala alone, with Wayanad ranked at 13. Six of these are in Uttarakhand, while Himachal Pradesh and Sikkim are vulnerable. With such knowledge as well as advance weather warning systems, emergency as well as long-term steps to protect lives and property can easily be taken.
This is where governments and politicians have let the country down. For instance, population as well as economic activities in vulnerable areas, be it construction, quarrying, tourism and monocropping, should be kept to a minimum. Yet, governments have promoted the opposite, including tourism. There is no time to lose in taking corrective steps. Our knowledge of fragile zones once again brings into focus the Madhav Gadgil committee report (2011) on the Western Ghats. The report had suggested that 64 per cent of the 1.6 lakh sq km Western Ghats region be treated as ecologically sensitive, with few or zero activities. No State has accepted this, or even the subsequent Kasturirangan panel report which brought down the protected zone to 37 per cent.
Politicians of all hues have promoted resorts, homestays and construction. If zoning laws cannot be enforced other steps should be considered. These include limiting the number of tourist footfalls by issuing permits. Hotels and resorts could pay a higher GST in eco-sensitive zones. Above all, environmental concerns do not occupy the policy centrestage. Devastating floods and landslides, especially in the hilly regions, have become regular episodes every monsoon season. Yet, no lessons are learnt. There is an outcry when disaster strikes, and soon things return to the normal, bad ways. Until the next such episode.