LANDSLIDES

1. Context

2. Key Points

• A new report looked at landslide-vulnerable regions in 17 states and two Union Territories of India in the Himalayas and Western Ghats.
• Rajouri, Thrissur, Pulwama, Palakkad, Malappuram, South Sikkim, East Sikkim and Kozhikode in Kerala, Jammu Kashmir and Sikkim are other high-risk districts found in Landslide Atlas of India 2023.
• Hyderabad-based National Remote Sensing Centre created the all-India database of nearly 80, 000 landslides that occurred from 1998 to 2022.

• The recent cases of land subsidence in Joshimath, Uttarakhand, captured the spotlight.
• On June 29, 2022, at least 79 people were killed in a landslide in the Noney district of Manipur.
• The risk analysis in the report was based on the density of human and livestock populations, which indicates the impacts on people due to these landslides.
• The disaster in Kedaranath in 2013 and the landslides caused by the devastating Sikkim earthquake in 2011 are also included in this atlas.

• Globally, landslides rank third in terms of deaths among natural disasters.
• However, deforestation due to unplanned urbanisation and human greed increases the risk of such incidents.
• In 2006, about 4 million people were affected by landslides, including a large number of Indians.
• India is among the four major countries where the risk of landslides is the highest; it added. If we look at the figures, about 0.42 million square kilometres in the country are prone to landslides, which is 12.6 per cent of the total land area of the country.
• However, the figure does not include snow-covered areas. Around 0.18 million sq km of landslide-prone areas in the country are in North East Himalayas, including Darjeeling and Sikkim Himalayas.
• Of the rest, 0.14 million sq km falls in North West Himalaya (Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir); 90, 000 sq km in the Western Ghats and Konkan hills (Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Goa and Maharashtra) and 10, 000 sq km in Eastern Ghats of Aruku in Andhra Pradesh.

4. Reasons for landslides

• Sudden heavy rains due to climate change are also increasing landslides. Around 73 per cent of landslides in the Himalayan region are attributed to heavy rains and reduced water-absorbing capacity of the soil.
• Global climate change is causing heavy rainfall that erodes steep slopes with loose soil found in a 2020 study by the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi.
• Therefore, the increasing number of landslides can no longer be termed as just natural disasters, as human actions have also played a major role in it.

• Uttakarkhand, Kerala, Jammu and Kashmir, Mizoram, Tripura, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh reported the highest number of landslides during 1998 – 2022
• Mizoram topped the list, recording 12,385 landslide events in the past 25 years, of which 8,926 were recorded in 2017 alone
• Likewise, 2,071 events of the total 2,132 landslides reported in Nagaland during this period occurred during the 2017 monsoon season
• Manipur, too, showed a similar trend, wherein 4,559 out of 5,494 landslide events were experienced during the rainy season of 2017, Of the total 690, Tamil Nadu suffered 603 landslide events in 2018 alone
• Among all these states, an alarming situation is emerging from Uttarakhand and Kerala

• While Uttarakhand’s fragility was recently exposed during the land subsidence events reported from Joshimath since January, this Himalayan state has experienced the second highest number (11,219) of landslides since 1998, all events since occurring post 2000
• The year-wise number of landslide events in the state is: 2003 (32), 2010 (307), 2012 (473), 2013 (6,610), 2017 (1), 2021 (329) and 2022 (1)
• The number of districts with the maximum landslide exposure are in Arunachal Pradesh (16), Kerala (14), Uttarakhand and Jammu and Kashmir (13 each), Himachal Pradesh, Assam and Maharashtra (11 each), Mizoram (8) and Nagaland (7)
• Kerala has been consistently reporting massive landslides since it suffered the century’s worst floods in 2018
• The year-wise landslide events here are 2018 (5,191), 2019 (756), 2020 (9) and 2021 (29).
• From the events and images obtained, the NRSC ranked Rudraprayag in Uttarakhand at the top of 147 vulnerable districts
• It has the highest landslide density in the country, along with having the highest exposure to total population and number of houses

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Source: The Down to Earth