On the night of July 30, 2024, the hills of Mundakkai, Chooralmala, and Punchirimattom in Meppadi Gram Panchayat of Kerala’s Wayanad district gave way with a roar that was heard for miles. These environmentally fragile hamlets, perched on the steep slopes of the Western Ghats, were buried in mud and rock, leaving behind a silence broken only by elephants straying into what was once human habitation. Official reports from August this year confirm the staggering toll: 231 bodies and 212 body parts recovered, with 119 people still missing.
Nearly a year later, scientists are framing the catastrophe as a classic example of a “grey rhino event”—a highly probable, high-impact disaster that loomed in plain sight but was ignored by policymakers and institutions until it trampled everything in its path. The phrase, coined by policy analyst Michele Wucker, is used to distinguish foreseeable disasters from so-called “black swans,” which are rare and unpredictable. In Wayanad, the grey rhino was charging for years. The state knew the risks but looked away.
The indictment comes from a landmark report titled Sliding Earth, Scattered Lives, released on September 13, 2025, by a People’s Scientific Study Committee convened by Transition Studies and the Western Ghats Samrakshana Samiti. The independent panel included geoscientist C P Rajendran, climatologist S Abhilash, risk analyst Sagar Dhara, biodiversity expert C K Vishnudas, forest scientist T V Sajeev, rice conservator Cheruvayal Raman, and activist-botanist Smitha P Kumar, among others. For 10 months, they investigated the causes and aftermath of the tragedy, piecing together rainfall data, land-use changes, and institutional responses. Their findings are unambiguous: the Wayanad landslide was not an unavoidable act of nature, but a direct consequence of reckless human interference with fragile ecosystems and the failure of governments to act on known risks.
The slopes that collapsed had long been identified as unstable. Vythiri taluk (subdistrict), which includes Mundakkai and Chooralmala, was classified as Ecologically Sensitive Area Zone 1 by the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel and nearly half its terrain was designated ecologically sensitive by the High-Level Working Group. Both panels recommended restrictions on development, but successive governments ignored these calls. Instead, settlements expanded, plantations climbed higher up the slopes, and a wave of resorts, roads, and tourist facilities transformed the terrain. What should have been a buffer against climate-driven rainfall extremes became a human-dominated landscape, stripped of its resilience.
The final days before the landslide made the risk glaringly visible. In the 48 hours preceding the collapse, Wayanad received extreme rainfall: more than 200 mm on July 28 and 372 mm on July 29. The Kalpetta-based Hume Centre for Ecology and Wildlife Biology, which has tracked rainfall across 200 villages since the 2019 Puthumala landslide, had already modelled that Mundakkai was at risk if rains exceeded 600 mm within two days. That threshold was breached, but warnings were neither issued effectively nor acted upon. The Kerala State Disaster Management Authority had no site-specific plan for Meppadi Panchayat. Evacuations were limited to a single ward, leaving other vulnerable villages in harm’s way. As the committee notes, lives could have been saved had even the most basic emergency protocols been in place.
The roots of the disaster lie deeper than rainfall. Wayanad once had more than 1,800 sq km of forest, but by 2018 two-thirds of that cover had been converted into coffee, tea, and cardamom plantations. Deforestation along riverbanks, particularly the Punnapuzha, destabilised slopes and reduced their water absorption capacity. Roads were cut into fragile hillsides without adequate drainage. Quarrying and construction chewed away at hill flanks. And tourism pressure soared: hilltops became adventure playgrounds for off-road jeep rides, while homestays and resorts spread across sensitive terrain, often without serious environmental scrutiny. “We have seen fragile mountains treated as adventure playgrounds,” says activist Smitha P Kumar, who has long campaigned for stricter land-use rules in the Ghats. “This disaster is the cost of that indifference.”
The landslide itself was monumental in scale, releasing energy comparable to the monthly electricity consumption of a large Kerala district. Mud, boulders, and uprooted trees thundered down the slopes, scouring entire valleys and erasing villages within minutes. To stand at Mundakkai or Chooralmala today is to see barren brown scars where life once thrived, the land stripped of both people and vegetation. For geoscientist C P Rajendran, the event is a textbook case of science ignored. Every major ecological report of the past decade had pointed to the instability of these slopes. Yet land use changes continued unchecked, and disaster preparedness was tokenistic. “This was governance sleepwalking into tragedy,” he says.
The committee’s report spares no institution. The India Meteorological Department has made strides in rainfall prediction, but it still does not provide hyper-local forecasts for landslide-prone zones. The state disaster management authority, despite lessons from earlier disasters in Puthumala and Kavalappara, failed to create a ward-level evacuation strategy. Local governments were left paralysed in the face of calamity, lacking both authority and capacity to respond. The result was a breakdown of trust, with communities feeling abandoned as the hills collapsed around them.
Rehabilitation efforts have not healed the wounds. The state is building a model township for survivors at Elstone Tea Estate in Kalpetta, but many complain that compensation is inadequate, and livelihoods are ignored. Families are being offered small plots and houses, but many demand cultivable land to resume farming. Critics argue that the government has reduced rehabilitation to the delivery of housing units, while ignoring the debt burdens, loss of income, and psychological scars that survivors carry.
The committee goes beyond criticism to sketch a path forward. It calls for empowering local panchayats to prepare their own emergency response plans, for upgrading meteorological forecasting to the scale of one-kilometre grids, and for halting reckless development in ecologically sensitive areas. It urges Kerala to align its policies with the recommendations of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel and related ecological reports, rather than treating them as irritants. It also demands that Kerala commit to full decarbonisation within the next two decades and press the Union government to bring environmental justice to the core of climate negotiations. Above all, it insists that settlements in active landslide pathways must be removed, however politically difficult that may be, to prevent further loss of life.