The earth moved again in Wayanad.

On Tuesday, a major landslide struck the Kalladi area near Meppady in Kerala's Wayanad district, burying workers at an active tunnel construction site that is meant to eventually link the hill district to Malappuram on the coast. Kerala Fire and Rescue Services confirmed the slide hit near Meenakshi Bridge, where excavation for the tunnel road project was underway. At least five people are confirmed dead. Several others remain missing, with rescue teams working in difficult terrain through shifting debris and the constant threat of further movement.

Local residents, not waiting for official machinery, pulled at least three survivors from the rubble before the National Disaster Response Force and state teams arrived. That detail — civilians first on scene, bureaucracy second — is worth holding onto. The NDRF has since deployed, and Kerala Chief Minister P. Satheesan has announced a visit to the site. An expert committee probe has been ordered into the circumstances of the landslide, and state ministers have made public promises of accountability. Union Home Minister Amit Shah spoke to the Chief Minister and assured full central government support for relief operations.

An unnatural death case has been registered by local police, the standard legal procedure when deaths occur outside natural or medical circumstances — a formality that nonetheless places the incident inside a formal chain of inquiry that could, in theory, travel upstream toward contractors, project approvals, and geological surveys.

None of that will move quickly. What moves quickly in Wayanad is mud.

The district sits within the Western Ghats, one of the world's eight designated biodiversity hotspots and a zone that the Gadgil Committee — a high-level expert panel that submitted its findings to the central government over a decade ago — classified as Ecologically Sensitive. The committee's recommendations, which would have imposed strict limits on construction, mining, and quarrying activity across large swaths of the Ghats, were substantially diluted before any policy reached implementation. The Kasturirangan Committee that followed produced a more palatable but narrower protection map. Neither framework has been fully enforced on the ground in Wayanad.

The tunnel project itself is a state infrastructure priority — pitched as a connectivity solution that would reduce travel time between the two districts and open economic corridors for a region historically dependent on agriculture and tourism. Infrastructure advocates are not wrong that Wayanad needs connectivity. What the project's proponents have been less forthcoming about is the geological character of the terrain being drilled through: steep slopes, high rainfall, laterite and clay soil profiles that become unstable under saturation, and a documented history of mass-wasting events. The July 2024 Mundakkai-Chooralmala landslide — which killed over two hundred people and remains the deadliest single natural disaster in Kerala's modern history — occurred less than thirty kilometers from Tuesday's site.

Investigating officials and the ordered expert committee will face a familiar pressure: produce findings that assign blame to an act of nature rather than an act of policy. Landslides are easy to call inevitable. They are harder to call inevitable when human excavation has destabilized a hillside during a monsoon season, in a district that every serious geological survey of the past two decades has flagged as high-risk. The families of workers killed at a government-sanctioned construction project deserve a probe that asks not just what collapsed, but what was approved, by whom, and on what basis.

Rescue operations are ongoing. The missing have not been found. And in Wayanad, the monsoon is not finished.