The 2024 Wayanad landslides, which killed hundreds, are described as largely man-made; earlier warnings from the Gadgil (WGEEP) panel to protect vulnerable Western Ghats slopes and empower local village councils (gram sabhas) were ignored in favor of centralized clearances.

Centralized decision-making prioritized development projects and administrative efficiency over local ecological knowledge, weakening slopes through deforestation and construction and leaving communities exposed when heavier rains arrived.

The author argues that true resilience requires devolving real authority to gram sabhas, combining local knowledge with technical support, so that development respects the land’s limits rather than being imposed from distant capitals.

(UCA News) — I remember a monsoon that used to feel familiar — the steady rhythm of rain, the smell of wet earth, and the comfort of paths we had walked a thousand times.

In July 2024, a different monsoon arrived in Wayanad, in southern India’s Kerala state: a slope gave way, villages were swept away, and hundreds of lives ended in mud. The grief reopened a question we keep averting: could this have been prevented in July 2026? The harder question is political: who gets to decide what happens to the land?

More than a decade earlier, the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP), also known as the Gadgil panel after its chairman, ecologist Madhav Gadgil, mapped the Western Ghats and flagged the most vulnerable stretches. Its clearest recommendation was simple and unsettling: give gram sabhas — the village councils — the decisive voice over projects that touch their land.

This was not sentimental. It was practical. People who live on a slope notice what maps cannot: a spring running lower each year, a terrace that shifts after a heavy downpour, and the trees that no........

© Eurasia Review