Kerala is under water again. In the four days since July 31, torrential rain has hit almost every district, from the Karnataka border to the polders of Kuttanad below sea level. Landslides tore through Idukki, Pathanamthitta and Kottayam within twelve hours; rivers including the Periyar, Chaliyar, Pamba and Achankovil rose together, flooding central and northern Kerala before the water reached the already vulnerable floodplains of Alappuzha. As of August 5, 28 people are dead, four missing, and 18,434 people are sheltering in 418 relief camps. Only Kollam and Thiruvananthapuram have been spared.
This is not simply a story of extreme rainfall. Kerala received 13.9 cm of rain between July 31 and August 2, more than three times the seasonal norm, with some stations recording cloudburst-like totals — 361 mm in a day at Vadasserikkara, 340 mm at Anakkampoyil, and a fresh battering for Meppadi, still recovering from this July’s tunnel landslide at the Anakkampoyil-Kalladi-Meppadi project site. Yet CUSAT’s S Abhilash points out that Kerala’s total annual rainfall has stayed broadly stable, even declined slightly, over the past century. What has changed is how it falls — concentrated into a few violent hours instead of spread across four months.
The deeper story is what has happened to the land in between. Geologist C P Rajendran notes that nearly 10,000 sq km of Kerala is landslide-prone, and the Kerala Legislative Assembly’s own Environment Committee, after the Wayanad disaster, recommended tighter regulation of hill construction — recommendations only partially acted on. Kerala has also lost close to three-fourths of its paddy fields since the 1970s, from 876,000 hectares down to barely 200,000, along with large stretches of the Vembanad wetlands that once absorbed monsoon surges. Add concretised towns, choked canals and a Thottappally Spillway running below capacity, and — as Kochi researcher C Jayaraman puts it — the same rainfall now has far fewer places to go before it turns into a flood peak.
