A landslide triggered by heavy monsoon rain killed three members of a family — a couple and their young son — in Karnataka’s Shivamogga district early Sunday, one of at least 14 deaths recorded across southern India as floods and landslides swept through Kerala and its northern neighbor over the weekend.
In Kerala, the rain-related death toll climbed to 11 by Sunday, and nearly 7,700 people were moved into roughly 275 relief camps across the state, a government minister said. Districts including Idukki, Kottayam, Malappuram and Kannur bore the brunt of the flooding, with rescue teams working through the weekend to reach families cut off by swollen rivers and blocked roads. Among the earlier fatalities reported from the state, two children drowned after being swept into rain-swollen streams in Malappuram district, and a third child died after falling into floodwater in Kottayam, according to local reports citing district officials. In Kannur, floodwater entering homes forced 26 people from eight families into relief camps, while local disaster authorities imposed a nighttime traffic ban on roads considered vulnerable to landslides.
The India Meteorological Department had placed most of Kerala’s districts under red or orange alert over the weekend, warning of extremely heavy rainfall and wind gusts up to 50 kmph, before easing the warning for Monday to strong winds and moderate rain in some areas, the state’s disaster management authority said. Kerala’s government reported that at least 27 houses had been completely destroyed and nearly 200 more partially damaged by Sunday, with dozens of roads and bridges submerged or washed out.
The Karnataka landslide struck at around 2:30 a.m. in Thirthahalli town, when a hillside collapsed onto a shed where a laborer family was sleeping, according to the Hindu newspaper and local police accounts. The victims — identified as Mallikarjun, his wife Nagaveni and their three-year-old son — were migrant workers originally from Koppal district who had relocated to the Malnad region for work. A fourth person trapped in the debris was pulled out alive and taken to a hospital in Shivamogga. The India Meteorological Department recorded 197 millimeters of rain in nearby Agumbe over the 24 hours preceding the landslide, among the heaviest tallies in the district. Separately, heavy rain triggered another landslide between two railway stations in Karnataka’s Hassan district, burying tracks under mud and boulders and forcing authorities to suspend seven train services linking Bengaluru with coastal towns including Mangaluru and Kozhikode. In Karnataka’s Kodagu district, rising water levels submerged bridges and roads, prompting officials to urge residents to stay alert for further flooding.
Kerala Chief Minister V D Satheesan said Monday he would meet district officials to review the state’s relief camp arrangements, after saying a day earlier that cleanup operations had already begun in flood-affected areas. The state’s disaster management authority forecast strong winds and moderate rainfall for parts of Kerala on Monday, a step down from the weekend’s most severe alerts.
The flooding disrupted daily life well beyond the immediate rescue effort. Kerala’s government postponed a state-level teacher recruitment examination and ordered the closure of numerous schools across affected districts. In Karnataka, the disruption to rail service also complicated travel for candidates scheduled to sit for a civil police constable examination in the state.
Southern India’s monsoon season has produced far deadlier episodes in recent years. Kerala’s 2018 floods, described at the time as the state’s worst in a century, killed more than 400 people and displaced over a million into relief camps, while a 2019 deluge in neighboring Karnataka killed 61 people and caused an estimated $4.95 billion in damage. Weather officials have not characterized this weekend’s rainfall as approaching that scale, but the recurring pattern of landslides in the hilly Western Ghats region, which cuts through both states and is prone to soil erosion after heavy downpours, has kept disaster management authorities on alert each monsoon season since.
Even as the rains caused destruction, they carried at least one practical benefit for the region: continuous downpours across Karnataka and Kerala have significantly boosted inflows into reservoirs along the Cauvery river basin, easing water-scarcity concerns that had persisted in the area before the storms arrived.
