The silence at the Puthumala burial ground on July 30, 2026, was heavier than the monsoon clouds hanging over Kerala’s Wayanad district. Families carrying flowers walked slowly between rows of graves where hundreds of victims of the Mundakkai-Chooralmala landslides were laid to rest on the second anniversary of the worst climate disaster in Kerala’s history. Others stood quietly, looking towards the mountains that had collapsed two years earlier, burying entire settlements beneath millions of tonnes of mud, boulders and uprooted trees.
The second anniversary was never going to be just another memorial. But this year, grief was compounded by fresh fear. Barely weeks earlier, eight workers were killed in another landslide and subsequent tunnel collapse at Kalladi, at the site of the Anakkampoyil-Kalladi-Meppadi twin tunnel project. For survivors, the tragedy that happened hardly five km away from Chooralmala and Mundakkai villages was a chilling reminder that the district’s relationship with its mountains remains deeply uncertain.
The official death toll from the Mundakkai-Chooralmala disaster of July 30, 2024 stands at 298. Another 32 people, who remained untraced despite months of search operations and extensive DNA profiling, were subsequently declared dead by the Kerala government following the recommendation of the Wayanad District Disaster Management Authority. As a result, no victims are now officially listed as missing, although many families never recovered the mortal remains of their loved ones.
Beyond the staggering death toll lay another humanitarian crisis which remains unresolved even after two years. More than a thousand people were displaced. Nearly a thousand houses were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, while coffee plantations, pepper farms, schools, roads, bridges and small businesses disappeared overnight. The disaster did not merely erase villages; it dismantled an entire local economy built over generations.
The Kerala government responded with one of the most ambitious rehabilitation programmes attempted after a natural disaster in the state’s history. Instead of limiting assistance to temporary relief camps, it decided to construct a permanent rehabilitation township with houses, schools, roads, community facilities and public infrastructure for affected families. The township project is still progressing in phases, with beneficiary lists continuing to be revised through appeals and verification. According to official rehabilitation records, over 400 families have been identified as eligible for permanent housing under different phases of the project. Many beneficiaries have already selected plots or accepted houses, while others continue to await allotment as successive appeal lists are processed.
Alongside the government’s rehabilitation township, political parties have also undertaken independent housing initiatives for survivors. The Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) has completed the first phase of its community-funded rehabilitation project at Thrikkaipatta, constructing 51 fully furnished houses out of a planned 105 homes on 11 acres of land. The beneficiaries, selected from the government’s approved rehabilitation list, moved into their new homes in April 2026. The project, financed through public contributions exceeding Rs 37 crore, has been widely noted for accommodating families across religious communities. Meanwhile, the Congress has finally begun groundwork for its long-promised 100-house rehabilitation project at Kunnampatta in Meppadi after acquiring land, marking the start of another parallel effort to supplement the state’s rehabilitation programme. Together, these initiatives reflect how the unprecedented tragedy has drawn support not only from the government but also from political parties and civil society to rebuild survivors’ lives.
Yet rehabilitation in Wayanad is far more complicated than constructing houses. Behind every beneficiary list lies another list of exclusions. Around 70 families living in areas such as Padavettikkunnu, Attamala and School Road in the landslide-hit area continue to demand inclusion in the government’s rehabilitation package. Many argue that, although they lost their homes, livelihoods, or access to their property, they were excluded because they fell outside the technical eligibility criteria or the prescribed geographical limits. Their struggle has become one of the most contentious aspects of post-disaster rehabilitation. Several estate workers, tenants and families without formal land titles have also found themselves trapped in bureaucratic grey zones. They may have lost everything they owned, yet proving legal eligibility for permanent rehabilitation has often proved difficult.
Another unresolved issue concerns debt. Many coffee growers, pepper farmers and small entrepreneurs continue to repay bank loans taken for plantations, shops and houses that no longer exist. Although banking institutions announced relief measures after the disaster and recommendations were made for writing off loans of deceased victims, survivors and farmers have repeatedly demanded comprehensive loan waivers, arguing that reconstruction cannot succeed while families remain burdened with debt incurred on properties buried beneath landslide debris. For many households, rehabilitation therefore has two distinct meanings. One involves receiving a new house, and the other involves recovering an economic life that disappeared forever.
Even as rehabilitation progresses, thousands of people continue to live in landscapes scientists classify as ‘highly vulnerable’ in Wayanad. The recent Kalladi landslide has intensified anxiety among residents of Neelikappu, Padavettikkunnu, Punnapuzha and neighbouring settlements, where cracks have appeared in houses and repeated slope failures have raised fears of further instability. Families who escaped the 2024 catastrophe now find themselves wondering whether they are living beneath another mountain waiting to collapse.
This anxiety is not without scientific basis. Mundakkai, Chooralmala and Punchirimattam lie below the steep escarpments of the Vellarimala massif.
Rising above 2,200 metres, the massif receives some of the heaviest monsoon rainfall in Kerala. The hills are composed largely of ancient charnockite rocks that have undergone millions of years of weathering. Over them lies a thick mantle of loose soil, laterite and weathered rock fragments. During prolonged monsoon spells, these soils behave like a sponge, absorbing enormous quantities of water until they lose their internal strength.
The tragedy of July 30, 2024, was therefore not a simple landslide. It was a chain of catastrophic debris flows. Slopes that had become saturated after days of incessant rain suddenly failed, sending millions of cubic metres of mud, rock and uprooted trees hurtling down narrow valleys. The debris gained volume and speed as it moved downhill, swallowing Punchirimattam, Mundakkai and Chooralmala within minutes.
Eminent geologist C P Rajasekharan has repeatedly argued that the Western Ghats should not be viewed as stable mountains but as evolving landscapes where geological weakness, hydrology and human intervention interact continuously. The Wayanad disaster, he has pointed out in a conversation with Down to Earth, was not caused by a single trigger but by the convergence of prolonged antecedent rainfall, extreme precipitation and decades of cumulative disturbance to fragile hill slopes. He has consistently cautioned that large infrastructure projects in such terrain demand rigorous geological investigations and continuous monitoring rather than one-time environmental clearances.
C K Vishnudas, director of the Hume Centre for Ecology and Wildlife Biology, who had warned local authorities about heightened landslide risk before the disaster, says the lesson from Mundakkai is not merely that rainfall is becoming more extreme but that vulnerability is increasing because land-use decisions have failed to keep pace with changing climatic realities.
In an interview marking the first anniversary of the disaster, he identified several other parts of Wayanad as requiring continuous monitoring and argued that preparedness, community awareness and scientific early-warning systems are as important as weather forecasts themselves.
Two years later, Wayanad stands at a crossroads. One path treats Mundakkai as an extraordinary event, mourned every July before returning to business as usual. The other accepts that the disaster fundamentally altered our understanding of the Western Ghats and demands that science, geology and ecological prudence become central to every future decision.
For the people of Wayanad, this is no longer about commemorating a tragedy. It is about ensuring that no community in the Western Ghats ever has to build another burial ground like Puthumala.