“The ‘Experimental Rainfall Induced Landslide Forecast Bulletin’ for Wayanad district forecasted only a ‘low possibility of occurrences of landslides,’ which did not indicate the potential for widespread or moderate landslides,” said P.M. Manoj, press secretary of the KSDMA.Kerala approved three pilot projects for state-specific landslide early warning systems in 2020, but none have been completed. The GSI reports that about 0.42 million square km (nearly 12.6% of India’s land area) is prone to landslides, including all Himalayan states, sub-Himalayan terrain of the northeast, and the Eastern and Western Ghats states.Effective evacuation protocols are also crucial. Despite KSDMA’s network of locally trained disaster management personnel and mechanisms to disseminate early warnings, many residents in hilly areas did not evacuate when advised, as they did not anticipate the disaster’s severity.In December 2017, the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) launched a pilot project for ‘Low-Cost Landslide Monitoring Solutions,’ but it was limited to Himalayan states and has seen little progress since.A community-run effort, Satark, in Maharashtra, aims to improve landslide awareness and issue alerts in the Sahyadri ranges. The Pune-based non-profit Centre for Citizen Science (CCS) started Satark in August 2015, after the Malin village landslide in Pune district left 151 dead. The CCS has mapped landslide incidents over the past 20-25 years in the Sahyadri ranges and monitors rainfall daily during monsoon seasons.The CCS issues notifications at three levels: Watch, Alert, and Warning. “After continuous rainfall, we monitor the accumulated rainfall and issue specific village-level alerts using radar images,” said Mayuresh Prabhune, a founding member of CCS. The Satark model showed 76.5% success in predicting landslides one day in advance, according to a March 2022 study published in the journal Land.
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