>Malin succumbed to a 300-foot landslide after two days of rain, >crushing over 150 people and 40 houses on July 30. The facts on the ground indicate torrential rain measuring 450 to 600 mm to be a trigger, but the Geological Survey of India (GSI) will take a week’s time to study the area and come to some conclusion on the causes of the landslide. There can be no single reason for the disaster, and the jury is still out on whether it is human interference alone or a combination of land-levelling using heavy machinery on the hilltop, and the rain. The GSI will examine the gradient of the hill, the geology and weather patterns. Though there is enough reason to believe there is a correlation between the frequency of landslides and the monsoon, there are other factors including prolonged seismic activity in the Western Ghats. From preliminary observations, the GSI points to vibrations from heavy machinery which can loosen topsoil, cause cracks in the ground and make for a deadly combination if there is heavy rainfall. It also found that the slope of the hill was flattened halfway, which made it more vulnerable to landslides in the heavy rain. Deforestation and land use changes in Ambegaon taluk could be a >contributing factor and large tracts of land in the reserve forests near Malin have been diverted for the erection of windmills. The village is located in an ecologically sensitive zone near the backwaters of the Dimbhe dam, and environmentalists point to the links between water levels in reservoirs and landslides which need to be investigated in this case.
The region has been prone to landslides in the past, and nearby is the thickly forested Bhimashankar hill which is a protected area. While police cases have been filed against the Agriculture Department for permitting land-levelling for agriculture, the landslide should at least prompt the government to take more seriously the recommendations of >Dr. Madhav Gadgil’s Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) Report , which remains all but shelved. At the same time, people’s livelihoods are also important and deserve attention. The area is ecologically fragile and the government has to ensure on a priority basis that further haphazard land use changes do not wreak havoc in an already stressed area. It is too late for the people of Malin who could not leave their homes as tonnes of mud and rock came crashing down that rainy morning, but for the powers-that-be it is a wake-up call to conserve the region and not encourage anymore insensitive human interference. The government’s reluctance to accept the WGEEP report seems indefensible in this light. Malin, which has been wiped off the map, will be a tragic reminder of that inertia.
