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After the Wayanad Tunnel Collapse, How Can we Rethink Development in Kerala’s Eco-sensitive Mountain Landscapes?

I grew up in Wayanad believing its mountains would always be there. They surrounded our villages and caught the first monsoon clouds that came in from the Arabian Sea. The mountains fed the streams and rivers that irrigated farms. To me, they were a sign of the landscape’s prosperity, but heavy rain now carries a different meaning for many people in Wayanad.

The monsoon still supports agriculture and keeps the forests vibrant, but it also brings memories of landslides, rescue operations, lives lost and upended. In recent years, disasters linked to extreme rainfall have become all too familiar. This has rightly prompted difficult questions about how we should build and plan infrastructure in one of India’s most ecologically significant mountain regions.

For many readers outside Kerala, Kalladi is probably only the latest village to appear in the news. It is located near Meppadi in Wayanad district in the Western Ghats, a mountain range stretching over 1,600 kilometres across six states. The Ghats are older than the Himalayas and are recognised globally as one of eight global biodiversity hotspots. They regulate rainfall, recharge groundwater, and are also the place from where many of peninsular India’s major rivers originate. The Ghats play a function that is vital for mountain communities and for millions living downstream.

The July 7 landslide near the Anakkampoyil-Kalladi-Meppadi twin tunnel project has once again drawn national attention to this landscape. It is a major infrastructure project to improve connectivity between Kozhikode and Wayanad. The tunnel promised shorter travel times, safer access and economic opportunities. After intense rainfall earlier this month, part of the slope near the tunnel portal gave way, claiming eight construction workers’ lives. For those of us who have reported on Wayanad for many years, the accident brings to mind a broader set of questions: How, if at all, should large infrastructure projects be planned in ecologically sensitive areas?

As someone who has spent more than two decades reporting from Kerala’s hill districts, I have learnt that disasters don’t arrive without warning. In many cases they are in fact preceded by scientific studies and environment impact assessments. Long before construction of the Kalladi tunnel began, geologists, environmental researchers and residents had asked whether a project of this scale was suited to one of the most landslide-prone stretches of the Western Ghats. They were not opposing better roads and connectivity, but were trying to understand how large infrastructure projects interact with mountain systems that are under immense climatic stress.

The questions have become sharper in the aftermath of the landslide. Publicly available documents from the environmental clearance process indicate that the project alignment was described as not passing through a landslide-prone area. At the same time, the appraisal process recognised the ecological sensitivity of the landscape and prescribed safeguards relating to excavation, slope stability and the disposal of excavated material. Understanding how these assessments were made, and whether they adequately reflected the terrain’s known vulnerabilities, is now an important public question.

That is why the conversation should not end with whether construction practices at the site were adequate. We should also ask: how routes are selected, how geological risks are assessed, what evidence informs environmental clearances. As rainfall patterns become more erratic, relying only on baseline historical data may no longer be enough. Planning needs to account for how climate change is altering the behaviour of previously stable landscapes.

Kalladi also needs to be viewed in the wider context of Wayanad’s recent history. The tunnel site lies close to Chooralmala and Mundakkai, where devastating landslides in 2024 claimed hundreds of lives. Before that came disasters at Puthumala, Pettimudi and elsewhere across the Western Ghats. Scientific studies have shown that while Kerala is witnessing fewer rainy days overall, rainfall is becoming more intense over shorter periods, increasing the likelihood of flash floods and landslides.

Then there’s the overarching question of what development means for districts like Wayanad. Better connectivity is a legitimate aspiration that can improve access to education, healthcare, markets and employment. But conversations about development should consider everyday challenges that residents identify as equally urgent: declining farm incomes, recurring human-wildlife conflict, limited public transport, gaps in healthcare etc. The framing should not be one of “development vs conservation”, which centres on large, visible projects. Instead, we should look at development as that which responds to the realities of the landscape.

This also requires creating space for disagreement. Environmental assessments, scientific evidence and local knowledge can be used most effectively when they are treated as part of decision-making rather than as obstacles to it. Regions such as the Western Ghats demand a more nuanced conversation so that the infrastructure we build is safer.

For me, Wayanad remains the place where I first learnt to read a landscape through its seasons. I hope future generations inherit mountains that continue to sustain lives and livelihoods rather than becoming known for recurring disasters.

K. A. Shaji is an environmental communications consultant with Asar and a South India-based journalist. A native of Kerala’s Wayanad district, he has extensively chronicled rural distress, caste and tribal realities, environmental conflicts, and the fault lines of development, connecting local struggles to broader national and global questions of justice, equity, and survival.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Asar or its employees. Asar publishes contributions from partners and members of its wider network to encourage informed dialogue on issues related to climate, environment, and development.

Death by Panels: Why Climate Conversations Need to Move Away from Conferences

Key takeaways

Climate and development conferences tend to reproduce one-way hierarchies instead of real collaboration.
Panels tend to constrain informal exchanges and collective problem-solving.
Spaces built around equality, conversation, and experimentation can create stronger collaborations in the climate space.
The success of informal “climate mixers” in Mumbai and Bengaluru suggests a growing hunger for third spaces outside institutional formats.

If you work in the development sector, particularly in the climate or environment space, you have almost certainly attended a panel discussion in the last 30 days.

Conferences and panels have begun to feel like the development sector’s equivalent of a wedding season. You see the same familiar faces every time, exchange pleasantries, drink tea, hit the buffet counters, and then do it all again next weekend at a different venue. I know this fatigue-inducing routine well; I’m guilty of organising a few of these events myself and have participated in many more.

If you’re a panelist with something interesting to say, you might even be approached by a few curious folk who want to pick your brain. This isn’t without reason. We are all doing critical work and want to talk about it, but the format has come to feel a bit hollow and transactional. I was invited to your wedding, so now I must return the favour with a shagun ka lifafa and implore you to attend my own shaadi… Sorry, I meant conference.

The power structure

There’s an implicit hierarchy to panels. Being an audience member feels like sitting in a durbar, hearing a small group of chosen ones espouse their agendas. The only way to push back, contribute, or even compliment is by fighting for the microphone at the end, or mustering the courage to approach your chosen expert for a quick chat (if they do not make an Irish exit).

Most of these gatherings are branded successes. Experts spoke, people heard, tea and biscuits were had, event over. If you weren’t offered a chance to make your voice heard, too bad. Go home and write a long LinkedIn post about it.

The missing “third space”

The problem with this format is that discourse only flows in one direction. It’s a classroom, not a canteen.

This hit me in February during Mumbai Climate Week, where over three days there were multiple panels with hundreds of speakers talking to thousands of attendees. Historically significant, but something was clearly missing. A third space for climate folks, outside of offices and conference halls, where we could converse freely, without an agenda. A where everyone is both an expert and an amateur and the operative principle is to learn from one another and perhaps build something together.

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That’s how the idea of a Climate Mixer was born.

On day 2 of the climate week, we put together an event at a pub within walking distance of the glass-fronted convention centre (which is, in fact, also a wedding venue). I was expecting 50 to 60 people to show up. 150 did. Barely any standing room, but nobody was complaining. We kicked off the evening with some stand-up comedy about climate change, a quick take from a communications study, a spotlight on a young volunteer-run climate publishing agency, and a goosebump-inducing performance by Prakash Bhoir ji, an Adivasi folk singer from Aarey Colony. After that, it was open season. Walk up to anyone, talk about your work, pitch an idea, find a collaborator. I’ve since worked on two projects with people I met for the first time that evening.

The second mixer followed in Bangalore on May 21 at Indiranagar Social in Bengaluru, on a rainy evening. 85 people. Conversation was light, there was music and games, and faces other than the usual suspects.

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Based on feedback from both the mixers, we’re thinking of making this a regular thing and adding more cities. We also know we can’t do all of this alone, so in the true spirit of decentralisation, we’ll be looking for organisations and individuals who want to host one in their city. We’re happy to share a statement of purpose to get them started.

Panels, webinars, and conferences have their place. But crazy ideas and unlikely collaborations are born in spaces where everyone’s an equal, where there’s no pressure to perform expertise, and the only agenda is to find others who share your values.

Why Climate Action in India Needs Culture to Succeed

In Mumbai, stand-up comics now joke about air pollution in their sets. While the air quality outside remains “poor”, the audience in the theatre laughs. This is just one example that shows how climate change and culture are slowly becoming enmeshed.

Much of the climate conversation still sits within reports, technology pathways, finance frameworks and market signals. These are important in responding to climate challenges, but remain expert-heavy and distant, especially for people, communities, local leaders and governments This creates a gap between lived experience and how climate is formally discussed.

The conversation also requires relatable anchors that connect climate action to everyday experience.

Why does climate action often fail to connect with people’s lived realities and what role can culture play in bridging this gap?

Pop culture has always played a powerful role in social transitions. A phrase used, a joke shared, a story seen or a song heard; these shape how we see the world. Climate discourse is yet to actively travel through this cultural bloodstream.

Public health transitions were shaped not only by epidemiology but by communication and social norms. Sanitation, digital payments, tobacco reduction and financial inclusion have also depended on trust, messaging and shared narratives. Major societal shifts have had a cultural dimension.

Culture creates shared vocabulary that helps complex issues travel more easily.

Climate change often enters public discourse through the language of crisis or complexity. Sometimes, this creates distance, fatigue or worse still, cynicism and disengagement. The challenge is not so much about the lack of awareness but the lack of emotional connection. A scientific graph might tell us temperatures are rising while a song will tell us what that feels like. Both matter. Research increasingly shows that emotional engagement, storytelling and contextual narratives shape how people respond. Facts inform. Culture enables movement.

India’s climate story is deeply local and embedded in everyday experience. Heat stress affects school classrooms and outdoor workers long before it appears in policy documents and plans. In cities like Mumbai and Nagpur, outdoor workers are already adjusting shifts to avoid peak afternoon heat.

Air pollution is joked about in everyday conversations even while it shapes public health outcomes. Changing monsoon rhythms are discussed in farmer WhatsApp groups. Water scarcity is understood through lived memory rather than rainfall and aquifer charts. In all of these contexts, language, metaphors and stories matter.

A conversation on heat may travel differently through theatre than through technical language. Air pollution often resonates more through humour than statistics. Stories and songs allow climate anxiety to be expressed without technical vocabulary

Pop culture does not simplify climate realities. It translates them, allowing climate to be felt, not just understood. In many ways, culture functions like behavioural public infrastructure; shaping what feels normal, possible and worth acting on.

Early explorations

Our work sits at the intersection of climate, governance and everyday decision-making, helping shape pathways that are equitable, economically sensible and grounded in reality. We work with governments, industry, academia, civil society and communities to translate evidence into implementation approaches that are locally rooted yet systemically relevant. Alongside this, we have been exploring how culture can expand the climate conversation.

The Climate Culture Collective is one such effort —a growing network of musicians, comedians, journalists and storytellers exploring ways to express climate complexity in accessible formats and narratives. Early explorations included Laughs Per Minute, which brought stand-up comics together to explore air pollution and climate anxieties through humour. Fever Dream, a theatre production, gently questions whether technological optimism alone can keep pace with the scale of the climate challenge. Culture Shift India is creating conversations with artists such as Ankur Tewari on how creative practice can bridge emotion and action. The evolving Climate Emergency Mixtape draws on multilingual rap traditions to create space for younger voices to express climate hope in ways that feel authentic.

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Signals from elsewhere

Globally, similar approaches are emerging across cultural contexts. The Good Energy initiative works with writers and producers to integrate climate narratives into film and television storylines, helping mainstream entertainment engage with climate realities without becoming didactic. The Tempestry Project turns temperature data into knitted pieces, helping people experience climate change in a tangible way. Laboratório de Emergência in Brazil and the HEVA Fund in East Africa support artists, filmmakers and storytellers translating climate realities into accessible cultural forms.

India too is seeing signals of this shift. Films such as Kadvi Hawa and the animated short Wade explore drought, migration and climate futures that allows audiences to engage with climate realities through character and emotion. Michelin-starred chef Vikas Khanna’s book Ceremony of Aromas shows how changing climate patterns are already shaping the availability and memory of spices — reminding us that climate change is also about taste and tradition. Netflix India’s recent initiative, India’s first climate scriptwriting lab, mentors writers to integrate climate themes into mainstream stories. That a major global entertainment company has initiated such an approach suggests that climate narratives are also entering mainstream economic logic.Research increasingly shows that narrative and emotional connection influence how complex issues are understood and acted upon.

Across these efforts runs a shared intuition – stories, humour, food, music travel easier across languages, geographies and generations.

India’s Regional Language opportunity

Perhaps one of the most undexplored frontiers in this space is India’s extraordinary linguistic diversity. With over twenty two officially recognised languages and hundreds of dialects, India’s cultural landscape is not a single canvas but many each with its own idioms, oral traditions, musical forms and storytelling conventions. A climate story that travels in Hindi may not land the same way in Bhojpuri, Kannada or Tamil not because the underlying reality differs but because the emotional vocabulary does. Bhajans, lavani, Baul music, folk theatre these forms carry deep community trust and reach audiences that neither English-language media nor policy documents can.

The opportunity lies not just in translation but in genuine cultural rootedness; in climate narratives that emerge from within these traditions rather than being adapted into them. As India’s climate challenge plays out most acutely at the subnational level in villages, small towns and peri-urban spaces it is precisely these local cultural forms that hold the greatest potential to make the climate conversation feel like one’s own.

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A closing reflection

When climate narratives travel through culture, people begin to see their lived realities reflected. It becomes more personal and transitions feel more collective and possible. Participation and engagement expands when people recognise their own stories in these transitions.
Meaningful and effective climate action will continue to require infrastructure, finance, institutional capacity and political will. But it will also require imagination. To borrow from Peter Drucker, if pop culture eats strategy for breakfast (and possibly lunch and dinner too), then it deserves a seat of equal standing at the climate table.

When Panchayats Lead: Stories from the Frontlines of Climate Action in India

Sharda Gaydhane-Shende had been speaking for about four minutes when I realised the 300-seat room had gone quiet in a particular way. The kind of quiet that settles when something real is being said, the whole room arriving at the same moment together.

She was speaking about trolley bags.

Free trolley bags had become the unexpected doorway through which Bela Gram Panchayat entered its journey toward rooftop solar. Sharda tai, the Sarpanch, had used them as a conversation starter, going door to door. She knew her neighbours. She knew what would get them talking. That turned out to be enough. Today, Bela is Maharashtra’s first net-zero village, and the Panchayat has been recognised at the state and national levels, receiving Majhi Vasundhara Abhiyan awards worth ₹3 crore and the First Prize in the Carbon Neutral Vishesh Panchayat Puraskar category of the National Panchayat Awards 2024, a testament to what becomes possible when government missions meet local leadership that is ready and willing.

This was the session we were building towards: From the Frontlines: Panchayats Leading India’s Climate Charge, hosted as a main session at the Mumbai Climate Week 2026 at the Jio World Convention Centre, BKC. Six Panchayat leaders and representatives from Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Odisha had come to share what they had built in their own villages and what it had taken for them to build it.

The stories were different in their details and in the languages they were narrated in, but recognisable in their shape.

Sachith KK described how Perinjanam in Kerala had become a Solar Gramam, with 850 households now functioning as rooftop prosumers – generating solar energy, consuming it, and feeding the surplus back to the grid. Ramvriksh Murmu spoke of Siyari in Jharkhand, where solar streetlights now line the roads and lift irrigation systems have changed the relationship between farmers and water. Jayanti Nayak from Koraput, Odisha, brought to the room the quieter but no less significant work of restoring commons and rebuilding water security. Kapil Deo Prasad from Katauna in Jamui, Bihar, and Suryanarayana Rao from Huledanahalli in Kolar, Karnataka, represented their respective Panchayats and states.

Suryanarayana’s account had a particular texture. In Huledanahalli, the pandemic years had forged something that outlasted the crisis, a solidarity network of young people who came together and chose to stay together for the long work of village development. They are still there, exploring new ideas with the same enthusiasm. What began as collective care had become collective agency.

We had six pioneers in that room that day. India has so many more; Panchayat leaders quietly doing this work at the village level whose names and work rarely appear in climate policy discussions, let alone on international stages. And yet, these are precisely the communities that did not cause the crisis they are now asked to navigate. They still contribute the least to the emissions reshaping their seasons, their harvests, and their water. What they have built in Bela, in Perinjanam, in Siyari, and in Koraput is an act of collective self-determination in the face of a problem they did not have much to do with but have simply inherited.

Each story pointed to the same thing: climate mitigation or adaptation, when they work, is built through the accumulation of deliberate, community-led decisions made by people who understand their land, their neighbours, and what is actually at stake. No single scheme or top-down intervention can conjure that.

At one point during the session, one of the representatives said something that has stayed with me. They said they were happy about the opportunity to speak on a stage like Mumbai Climate Week, and sad that there was a timer in front of them. They just had so much to share.

The audience laughed, gently. I laughed too. But in that laughter, I also heard the beginning of something. The appetite in the room, the leaning-in, and all the people who reached out to us before and after the session made it clear that more platforms and longer sessions are both needed and inevitable. These Panchayat leaders have been building and adapting long before any conference took notice and will continue to do so long after. But the right rooms, at the right moments, can shorten the distance between what they already know and the policies, partnerships, and resources that have yet to catch up.

This session was, in many ways, an expression of what Asar and Policy & Development Advisory Group (PDAG) set out to do when we co-initiated the Conference of Panchayats, our own COP. The premise was simple: Panchayat leaders hold real agency in shaping decisions affecting their communities. The kind of agency that goes well beyond implementation, well beyond being “beneficiaries”. The insights generated when Sharda tai, Jayanti di, Sachith, and Suryanarayana are in the same room; learning from each other, seeing their struggles reflected, building on one another’s work. These may be among the least measured and most consequential parts of our response to climate change.

At Asar, we think about our theory of change as mycelium – the vast, largely invisible network beneath a forest floor that connects trees, carries nutrients, and makes the whole ecosystem more resilient than any single organism could be alone. What I witnessed in that room in Mumbai felt exactly like that. For 10 years now, a network has been growing below the surface, without fanfare, Panchayat to Panchayat, state to state, one story feeding the next.

India’s climate ambitions are often measured in gigawatts and megatons. They should also be measured in the number of platforms where a Sarpanch from Maharashtra can sit beside a Panchayat representative from Jharkhand and say: here is what we did, here is what was hard, here is what we learned. This is where the world stops to listen – not for four minutes, but for as long as it takes.

The mycelium is real, and somewhere right now, in a village whose name no one has heard yet, a Sarpanch is knocking on a door. That is where India’s climate story begins.

To explore more stories of how Panchayats across India are shaping climate action from the ground up, visit our Roots of Resilience series on the Asar website. These blogs bring together voices, experiences, and lessons from local leaders working at the frontlines of change.

By Vishwajeet Poojary, with inputs from Suhas Joshi.

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