“Remote Sensing Not Enough…”: Shashi Tharoor On Predicting Landslides

The landslides in Kerala’s Wayanad – which have killed at least 150 people and flattened villages – underline the importance of developing technology to predict such ecological disasters and give authorities time to evacuate people, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor told NDTV Wednesday.

Mr Tharoor, a multiple-term MP from Kerala capital Thiruvananthapuram, pointed to the southern state’s ecologically fragile terrain and the impact of floods in 2017 (due to Cyclone Ockhi), and 2018 and 2019 too, and said the challenge is to predict such events.

“I am hearing of over 200 deaths and 500 houses destroyed… and perhaps a couple of hundred more people trapped under debris. So it is really a very sad day,” Mr Tharoor began.

“It is very difficult to predict (landslides)… because the fundamental reality we have to live with is that Kerala is ecologically very fragile. In the last few years alone we have had major challenges, including climate change. The devastation of Cyclone Ockhi in 2017 and significant flooding in 2018 and 2019… amid all of this there were landslides in Wayanad then too…”

“It is not as if we haven’t seen this before… the challenge is how do we predict these so we can evacuate people before the worst. And that is something we surely ought to be able to do…”

“We rely heavily on remote sensing… but experts are saying this is not enough and that we need to have sensor grids on the ground to be able to anticipate landslides. We don’t have that… we don’t have an on-ground sensor grid. We need more real-time data gathering…” he stressed.

This should not be beyond the technological capacity of the country, he said.

Kerala is a mountainous state in which over half of the terrain consists of slopes exceeding 20 degrees, he said, “So you can imagine how susceptible it is to soil erosion and landslides.”

Mr Tharoor also spoke about the challenges of global warming and climate change. “Due to warming of the Arabian Sea there are deep cloud systems that release sudden and extensive rain over shorter periods… which means the soil gets saturated quickly and landslides result.”

“The forecast (for the landslide-hit areas in Wayanad) was 62 mm but they got 322 mm… now what do you do with that much rain?” the Congress leader asked.

To further underline this unpredictability, he referred to the Gadgil Commission Report that was submitted to the centre in 2011. It recommended large sections of the Western Ghats have ‘ecologically sensitive’ zones, which would require re-settling existing human populations.

However, he pointed out, even that report failed to identify villages wiped out in these landslides as existing in ecologically fragile areas. And the complications, he said, didn’t end there.

Mr Tharoor underlined the need to understand the difficulties of resettling people, including ensuring livelihoods were not affected or, if they were, to ensure they had access to alternatives.

On the spat between Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan – about the centre’s warnings to the state about potential landslides in the area – the Congress leader said it is necessary to keep politics apart from humanitarian issues like this.

“I don’t think a blame game is where we should be going when lives are at stake and we are trying to rescue people,” Mr Tharoor said.