On the morning of July 30, 2024, one of Kerala’s deadliest landslides tore through Chooralmala and Mundakkai in Wayanad. As hillsides collapsed under relentless monsoon rain, entire neighbourhoods were swept away, killing 298 people. Among the dead were 33 students from the Vellarmala Government Vocational Higher Secondary School (VHSS). The school campus itself disappeared beneath mud and boulders, taking with it classrooms, a playground, a library and years of childhood memory.

When classes resumed months later, the children had a school again — but not the one they remembered. Friends were missing. Familiar surroundings were gone. The laughter that once filled the corridors was buried alongside students who never returned.

That was when the teachers realised they were not simply reopening a school. They were helping children rebuild a childhood that a disaster had shattered.

When Learning Had to Wait

The Meppadi school today has 331 students and 28 teachers. But in the weeks after the landslide, when the school community was still grappling with loss and displacement, the staff knew that returning to textbooks could not be the first priority.

Ninety-seven students from Classes 1 to 10 had been directly affected by the landslide — either injured, displaced, or bereaved — split almost evenly between girls and boys. Others had lost relatives or friends, including classmates who sat beside them every day. For the first month, the school itself was pressed into service as a relief camp. With the original campus destroyed, students were relocated to the kitchen and dining hall of another school compound.

For two months, academics were set aside entirely. Instead, the teachers focused on one thing: keeping the children together, and giving them a routine. Students arrived in the morning, ate breakfast and lunch, took part in activities, had evening snacks, and stayed through the day.

“We did not give the students a chance to overthink anything,” Unnikrishnan, a teacher who has worked at the school for 20 years, told EdPublica.

But even with the children physically back together, something was missing. “Both children and teachers have a sense of sadness regarding the disaster,” the headmistress Jesna Jose told EdPublica. “Even though they don’t show it often, we can feel it.” The children were together again. The school did not yet sound like itself.

Then Came the Smile

The change began with something that had nothing to do with textbooks.

Two teachers from a government school in Pathanamthitta, a district in south-central Kerala—Manoj Sini and K.S. Binu—arrived at Vellarmala dressed as clowns. They walked into a Class 1 classroom, played music, and began performing comic routines. The children laughed. Then the teachers laughed too.

“All of a sudden, the children started laughing. Seeing the children laugh, the teachers also started laughing,” Unnikrishnan recalls. It was a small moment. But after months of grief, it meant something far larger.

“That’s when we understood that art was the medicine,” he says.

The insight that followed was a quiet but important one: recovery did not have to begin with talking about the disaster. Sometimes, it could begin with giving children a reason to laugh.

“Once there was a smile, we could carry things forward. That was the turning point in rebuilding the school.”

Finding What Each Child Could Do

From there, the teachers began looking beyond what the children had lost and toward what they still had to rebuild the childhood.

They individually studied the 97 directly affected students to identify their interests and abilities. Some were drawn to craft, others to computers, art, sport, or science. Children were grouped by interest, and outside experts were brought in to train them — many arriving without any fee, through the teachers’ own personal networks and friendships.

The school became, for a period, a working studio of drama, oppana (a traditional Muslim wedding dance performed by women), nadan pattu (Kerala folk songs) and vanjippattu (traditional boat songs). A science expert ran demonstrations. A craft teacher introduced bookbinding and art. Students were entered into science exhibitions and arts festivals.

This was not simply keeping children occupied. It was giving them a structured way to discover themselves again — and it is the detail that separates what happened at Vellarmala from a generic “art therapy helped” narrative: the intervention was individually mapped, expert-led, and sustained, not a single feel-good workshop.

The results reached a public stage. Students from the school delivered the first dance programme at the State School Art Festival, and later performed Vellapokkathil (In the Flood) at the Kerala State School Youth Festival 2024 — all seven performers survivors of the Chooralmala landslide themselves.

Based on a story by the Malayalam writer Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, the play depicts communities and animals caught in a catastrophic flood. For the students performing it, the story was inseparable from what they had lived through months earlier — making the performance both intensely personal and difficult to watch as fiction.

Where Research Meets the Ground

What the Vellarmala teachers arrived at through instinct and trial finds independent confirmation in a study published in 2025 in the journal Development in Practice. Researcher V. Akhila and colleagues, drawing on direct involvement in the relief camps set up after the landslide, documented the same emotional terrain the teachers describe: survivors carrying acute guilt at having lived when neighbours and family did not, a disruption to “sense of security, identity, and hope,” and heightened anxiety, sleep disturbance and fear that did not resolve quickly.

The study examines the toll on first responders, many of whom were themselves survivors or had lost people they knew, and who were frequently deployed into relief work without any prior debriefing — carrying the emotional weight of that period into their daily lives long afterward. It is a reminder that “recovery” in a disaster zone is not a category that applies only to the visibly affected; it extends to everyone who worked to hold the response together, including, arguably, teachers like Unnikrishnan.

The researchers also flag something the Vellarmala experience illustrates directly: that mental health impacts fall unevenly across a population — hitting children, older residents, people with disabilities, and those relocated from outside the immediate community hardest — and that longer-term psychological support after landslides remains patchy and poorly coordinated almost everywhere it has been studied.

When Grief Returned

But there is no single fix for what these students had endured. The return of laughter did not mean the children had forgotten what happened.

As the SSLC (Secondary School Leaving Certificate, Kerala’s Grade 10 board examination) approached, seven students — three girls and four boys — told their teachers they did not want to sit the exam. Many of the friends who should have been sitting beside them had died in the landslide, and the exam hall itself was a reminder of who was missing.

The teachers went to each of the seven students’ homes and persuaded them, one by one, to take the examination. They did. The school went on to record a 100 percent pass rate. At the farewell ceremony that followed, many students cried uncontrollably.

The episode is the clearest evidence that recovery here was never a straight line. There could be laughter one day and grief returning without warning the next. What the teachers had learned by then was not to expect children to simply “move on.” They stayed present through the difficult moments, and kept building spaces where students could learn, participate and be heard.

“Teachers gave them 24-hour support,” Unnikrishnan says. “It was survival. It was also a challenge for the teachers.”

Children and Disasters: A Global Problem

What happened at Chooralmala is a single, closely observed instance of a far larger pattern. UNICEF’s most recent global analysis found that at least 242 million students across 85 countries and territories had their schooling disrupted by extreme climate events in a single year — 2024 — through heatwaves, tropical cyclones, storms, floods and droughts. At least one in seven students worldwide experienced some form of climate-linked disruption to their education that year.

South Asia was the worst-affected region, with 128 million students facing climate-related school disruption in 2024 alone; heatwaves by themselves affected an estimated 171 million students globally. The disruption is rarely confined to missed classes. Extreme heat and other hazards damage school infrastructure, make the route to school unsafe, and measurably affect children’s concentration, memory and physical and mental health — the visible tip of a much larger iceberg of harm.

The scale behind these numbers is worth sitting with. A 2024 narrative review co-authored by researchers at the World Health Organization, synthesising over a decade of peer-reviewed evidence on climate change and child health, notes that 2022 alone saw 387 climate-related disasters worldwide — storms, floods, wildfires and droughts — that killed more than 30,000 people.

The review’s consistent finding across the literature it examined is that these events measurably affect children’s mental and physical health, nutrition, safety, learning, and the caregiving relationships that hold a childhood together — precisely the five domains Vellarmala’s teachers found themselves rebuilding one at a time.

Speaking to EdPublica, Dr Kavitha G. Bhaskaran, a guest faculty member in the Department of Psychology and Disaster Management at Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, said children exposed to recurrent landslides can experience withdrawal, fear, nightmares and a loss of interest in activities they once enjoyed, along with a lasting fear of loud sounds, rain or even the night itself.

Dr Upasona Ghosh, Technical Expert–Climate Change and Health at the Centre for Environmental Health and a member of the WHO South-East Asia Regional Expert Group on Environmental Determinants of Health and Climate Change, told EdPublica she has observed the same patterns working with children in the Indian Sundarbans, where communities face recurrent flooding. In that setting, children were simply given colours and notebooks and asked to draw their fear — no explanation required. They could draw the sea, the floodwater, or the destruction they had witnessed, without needing the vocabulary to describe it. “The entire page might be black,” Ghosh says. “That could reflect the state of their mind.”

Ghosh also points out that the damage does not stop with the child. When a disaster disrupts a parent’s livelihood, access to healthcare and the ability to seek care for a child both suffer. Children can simultaneously lose access to school-based nutrition, health and hygiene programmes when education itself is disrupted — and they lose something harder to name. “Their school, friends, teachers and other people in their village form an important part of their social world,” she says. When that world is disrupted, recovery requires far more than reopening a classroom door.

Two Other Disasters, Two Other Answers

Wayanad is not the first place to confront this problem, and the responses elsewhere are instructive — both for what worked and for what the Vellarmala teachers had to invent on their own because it did not yet exist as institutional practice.

After Typhoon Haiyan (known locally as Yolanda) devastated the central Philippines in November 2013 — one of the strongest tropical storms ever recorded, affecting some 16 million people — the country’s Department of Education partnered with UNESCO and the Psychological Association of the Philippines to produce a formal teachers’ manual on psychosocial intervention for disaster-affected students.

The underlying premise mirrors exactly what Unnikrishnan and his colleagues discovered through trial and error: that teachers, positioned closest to children day after day, are often better placed than outside specialists to help a child begin processing trauma. In the immediate aftermath, volunteers in Cebu were running storytelling and “bibliotherapy” sessions with children in evacuation centres even before the typhoon made landfall — art and story as a first response, not an afterthought, much as the clown routine became at Vellarmala.

Nepal’s 2015 earthquake response took a more structural approach to a problem the Wayanad school solved through personal goodwill. Finn Church Aid and its Nepali partner CMC-Nepal built a peer-support network for teachers across 61 schools, training “psychosocial focal teachers” who could escalate serious cases to specialists in Kathmandu.

A needs assessment following the earthquake found more than 60 percent of affected children suffering sleep problems, alongside bullying, anxiousness and bedwetting — a set of symptoms that closely tracks what Bhaskaran describes seeing in Wayanad. What Nepal built was, in effect, an institutionalised version of what Vellarmala improvised: a formal mechanism for identifying which children need more than a routine and a smile, and where to send them.

The comparison is worth sitting with honestly rather than folding into the uplift: the expert network the Vellarmala teachers built by calling in personal favours was remarkable, but it was also contingent — a product of one community’s specific relationships and one headmaster’s persistence. Nepal’s model suggests what it might look like scaled and made durable rather than dependent on individual goodwill.

The Losses That Cannot Be Counted

There is a reason the language around this issue keeps reaching for something beyond the vocabulary of disaster economics. A damage assessment can price a destroyed school building, a washed-out road, a flattened home. It is far harder to price a child’s lost friendship, a familiar playground, or the emotional security that came from an intact community.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has a formal category for this: non-economic loss and damage (NELD) — harm that resists financial quantification, spanning loss of life and health to the erosion of territory, cultural heritage, and social and cultural identity.

For children, these losses are acutely personal. Harjeet Singh, climate activist and founding director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, told EdPublica that the destruction of a school should never be filed simply under lost infrastructure. “For children, a school is a sanctuary, a site of identity, and an ecosystem of emotional safety,” he says. What a disaster like Wayanad’s takes, in his framing, includes shattered social bonds and the sudden disappearance of the developmental environment a child grew up inside — which is why, he argues, recovery cannot stop at concrete and steel. “Recovery cannot just be about pouring concrete,” Singh says. “It must be about restoring the social fabric.”

This is no longer only a conceptual argument. The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, operational under the UNFCCC since 2022 and hosted in the Philippines with the World Bank as its interim trustee, holds close to $488 million, with a first round of disbursements — roughly $250 million — scheduled to begin rolling out in 2025 and 2026. Mental health and psychosocial support is explicitly listed among the categories countries can submit project proposals for, alongside cultural heritage preservation and dignified relocation.

In principle, this means the kind of psychosocial infrastructure Nepal built with international NGO funding after 2015 — and the kind Vellarmala’s teachers had to invent themselves in 2024 — now has a formal funding channel it could be built through, if Kerala or the Government of India chose to apply.

What India’s Own Guidelines Say

India is not without a policy framework for exactly this problem — which makes the Vellarmala story more pointed, not less. The National Disaster Management Authority, working with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences’ Rahbar programme, updated its National Disaster Management Guidelines on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Services in Disasters in 2023, setting out a trauma-informed, whole-of-society approach meant to be built into every stage of the disaster management cycle, not bolted on afterward.

Alongside it sits the older National School Safety Policy Guidelines of 2016, which task School Management Committees and a designated “Safety Focal Point Teacher” in each school with disaster preparedness — including, on paper, psychosocial elements, though the bulk of that programme’s implementation history runs toward physical safety: building codes, mock drills, evacuation plans.

Two things are worth sitting with here. First, the guidelines exist — India is not starting from zero the way some of its neighbours were in 2015. Second, none of what the guidelines describe appears to have reached Vellarmala in July 2024. What the teachers built — the interest-mapping, the expert network, the sustained follow-through into exam season — was invented on the ground, by people with no formal psychosocial training, drawing on personal contacts rather than a state or district implementation plan.

That gap between the guideline and the ground is, in its own way, the story: India has written down roughly what Nepal built through international NGO funding, but writing it down and delivering it to a village school in Meppadi panchayat during the actual emergency turned out to be two very different things.

What This Adds Up To

Set side by side, Wayanad, Tacloban and the villages of rural Nepal point toward the same conclusion from three different directions: formal mental health infrastructure for children after a climate disaster is, almost everywhere, arriving late, underfunded, or not at all — and the gap is being filled, when it is filled, by whoever is standing closest to the child. Sometimes that is a trained peer-support teacher network built with international funding. Sometimes it is two teachers in clown costumes who happened to believe art might help.

Both approaches worked, to a point. But only one of them is replicable on demand, in a district that doesn’t happen to have a headmaster with the right personal contacts. That is the uncomfortable finding underneath the uplifting parts of this story: what saved Vellarmala’s children was extraordinary improvisation under pressure, not policy — and extraordinary improvisation is, by definition, not something the next disaster-hit school can count on.

Rebuilding a Childhood

Chooralmala’s teachers never had the power to restore everything the landslide took. They could not bring back the children who died. They could not recreate the old school, or return the community to what it was before July 30, 2024.

What they did was give children back a routine when their lives had been upended. They found each child’s individual talent when grief had become the only story anyone was telling about them. They brought artists, scientists and experts into children’s lives who would otherwise never have crossed paths with a village school in Wayanad. They encouraged children to dance, sing, perform, experiment and compete — and when children struggled, as the SSLC refusals showed they still would, the teachers stayed rather than declaring the recovery finished.

What Chooralmala’s teachers proved is not that children are resilient. That word is used too easily after disasters, as though recovery is something that simply happens with time. It isn’t. Resilience had to be built—patiently, deliberately, by teachers who chose to replace silence with music, grief with art, isolation with friendship, and fear with purpose.

The tragedy is that none of this should have depended on extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. By the time the next flood, landslide or cyclone tears through another school, children should not have to wait for a headmaster with the right contacts or two teachers willing to arrive dressed as clowns. They should find a system that already knows how to help them heal.

Climate change is making disasters more frequent, putting schools in the path of floods, landslides and storms. When classrooms disappear, books are lost and playgrounds are buried, rebuilding the school is only the beginning. The harder task is helping children rebuild the sense of safety, routine and childhood that the disaster took from them.

The Centre has reissued its draft notification proposing an Ecologically Sensitive Area (ESA) across the Western Ghats for the seventh time in more than a decade, as differences with the six Western Ghats States over the boundaries of the proposed zone remain unresolved.

The Union Environment Ministry issued the fresh draft on July 27, 2026, after the previous draft lapsed on the same day without being finalised. The new notification will remain open for public objections and suggestions for 60 days before the Centre considers issuing a final notification.

The proposed ESA covers 56,825.7 sq. km across Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. However, there are no substantive changes in the proposed area, State-wise extent or regulatory provisions compared with the draft issued in July 2024.

The latest reissue therefore highlights the central problem that has kept the proposal unresolved for years: the Centre and the States have yet to agree on which villages and areas should be brought under ecological protection.

What Will the ESA Restrict?

If finalised, the notification would prohibit mining, quarrying and sand mining, along with new thermal power plants, certain industries and large construction projects within the proposed ESA. Activities such as hydropower generation would be regulated.

The restrictions have been a major concern for the six States, which have raised questions about their implications for agriculture, plantations, infrastructure and development.

The notification states that an expert committee constituted in 2022 is continuing to examine objections raised by State governments, including concerns over “the correct names and area of villages to be included in the ecologically sensitive area”.

The disagreement is therefore not over whether the Western Ghats are ecologically important, but largely over where protection should apply and what activities should be permitted within those areas.

Why the Western Ghats Matter

The Western Ghats stretch along India’s western coast and are recognised as one of the world’s important biodiversity hotspots. Geologically, they are among the oldest mountain systems in the world, formed during the breakup of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana, and are estimated to be around 150–200 million years old, far older than the Himalayas. This long evolutionary history has contributed to their exceptionally high levels of endemism, supporting a rich concentration of plant and animal species found nowhere else.

The mountain range also plays a crucial role in regulating the region’s water systems. Several major rivers originate in or are fed by the Western Ghats, making the landscape important for drinking water, agriculture and livelihoods across peninsular India.

The ecological significance also intersects with growing concerns over environmental degradation and disaster vulnerability. Parts of the Western Ghats have experienced recurring floods, landslides and extreme rainfall events, particularly during intense monsoon spells.

This makes land-use decisions in ecologically fragile mountain landscapes increasingly significant. The ESA proposal is intended to restrict activities that can cause environmental degradation, but States and local communities have repeatedly raised concerns about how such restrictions would affect people living and working in these areas.

Kerala’s Proposed ESA Remains Unchanged

Kerala accounts for 9,993.7 sq. km of the proposed ESA. The figure is lower than the 13,108 sq. km recommended for Kerala by the high-level working group headed by K. Kasturirangan. Kerala subsequently conducted its own field verification exercise, following which the proposed ESA area within the State was reduced.

In Wayanad, the latest draft retains the 13 villages across Mananthavady, Sulthan Bathery and Vythiri taluks that were included in the previous draft.

Karnataka has the largest proposed ESA area, followed by Maharashtra and Kerala.

A Dispute Dating Back to 2011

The debate over protection of the Western Ghats dates back to 2011, when the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel headed by ecologist Madhav Gadgil recommended treating the entire 1.29 lakh sq. km mountain chain as ecologically sensitive, with different levels of protection.

The recommendation faced opposition from the States over concerns that extensive environmental restrictions could affect development and livelihoods.

The Centre subsequently appointed a high-level working group headed by K. Kasturirangan to review the proposal. The group recommended designating about 37% of the Western Ghats, covering 59,940 sq. km of natural landscape, as an ESA.

Kerala later carried out its own field verification, reducing the proposed area in the State from 13,108 sq. km to 9,993.7 sq. km.

Since then, the proposal has gone through multiple rounds of consultations, revisions and draft notifications. Yet, more than a decade later, the Centre and the six States have not reached an agreement on the precise boundaries.

The latest notification is therefore less a revision of the government’s proposal than another attempt to move forward with a process that has remained unresolved for years.

The Centre has now opened another 60-day window for objections and suggestions. The outcome will determine whether the latest draft can finally move towards a final notification or whether the Western Ghats ESA proposal will enter another round of consultations.

For families across Upper Assam, the latest flood has brought homes surrounded by water, crops submerged and livestock moved to safer ground. Seven people drowned in Sivasagar on Tuesday, taking Assam’s flood death toll to 75. As of July 28, 3,32,639 people across 622 villages had been affected and 45,342 hectares of crop area submerged, according to the Assam State Disaster Management Authority (ASDMA).

The worst-hit districts of Assam’s flood are Sivasagar, Charaideo, Golaghat, Jorhat, Nagaon, Sonitpur and Kamrup Metropolitan. Charaideo has the highest number of affected people, followed by Sivasagar and Jorhat.

For families dependent on farming, however, the crisis will continue after the water recedes. A destroyed crop can mean a lost season’s income; damaged livestock, homes and farmland can make recovery harder.

Nearly 40% of Assam is Flood-Prone

Assam’s flood is not unusual. The state’s Water Resources Department estimates that 31.05 lakh hectares, or 39.58% of Assam’s total area, is flood-prone—nearly four times the national proportion of about 10.2%.

A 2026 study on Assam’s flood vulnerability in the Brahmaputra Valley also uses the figure to illustrate the Assam’s flood exposure. But exposure alone does not determine the damage. Household income, dependence on agriculture, housing, access to services and the ability to recover all shape how severely families are affected.

Heavy Rain Upstream Triggered the Latest Surge

The immediate trigger for the current flooding was heavy rainfall in neighbouring Nagaland and parts of Assam. Rain in Nagaland’s hill districts generated rapid runoff into Assam’s river system, raising tributaries including the Dikhow, Disang and Dhansiri. The already high Brahmaputra added to the problem by restricting how quickly these tributaries could drain into the main river.

The Assam Water Resources Department notes that flooding can become particularly severe when tributaries rise at the same time as the Brahmaputra.

So, the current crisis is not simply a case of the Brahmaputra overflowing. Heavy upstream rainfall triggered the surge; swollen tributaries carried the water into Upper Assam, while high Brahmaputra levels worsened drainage.

For farmers, the Losses Outlast the Flood

The 45,342 hectares of submerged cropland represent immediate agricultural losses. For farmers, those losses can mean months without income and fewer resources to prepare for the next season.

Floods can also kill livestock, damage homes and equipment, deposit sand on fields and accelerate riverbank erosion. When farmland itself disappears, recovery becomes even harder.

Assam’s Flood: Relief Measures Taken

As of July 28, 81 relief camps were sheltering more than 32,000 displaced people, while relief distribution centres were operating across affected areas.

The state government has announced ₹9 lakh for each family that lost a member, including ₹4 lakh in ex-gratia assistance and ₹5 lakh from the Chief Minister’s Relief Fund. More than one lakh severely affected families will receive ₹15,000, while students in the worst-hit districts will receive book grants.

The assistance can help families meet immediate needs. But compensation cannot prevent another flood from causing similar losses.

What Can Reduce the Damage?

Since Assam cannot control heavy rainfall in neighbouring states, better preparation upstream and faster action downstream are critical. Real-time monitoring of rainfall and river levels in Nagaland and other upstream catchments can provide earlier warnings. Those warnings must reach villages quickly, with clear instructions on evacuation routes and safe shelters.

Flood-prone communities also need safer housing, accessible evacuation centres and infrastructure designed around local flood levels. Protecting livelihoods through crop insurance, livestock support, emergency credit and flood-tolerant farming can reduce the financial shock.

Flood management also needs to follow the river system rather than administrative boundaries. Rainfall in an upstream catchment can quickly affect communities hundreds of kilometres downstream.

The Losses That Remain.

Assam’s flood follows multiple flood waves in 2025, with the last recorded wave continuing into October. That matters because households may still be recovering from one flood when another arrives. A lost crop, dead livestock or eroded farmland can leave a family with fewer resources to face the next season. With 39.58% of Assam’s land already classified as flood-prone, the challenge is not simply getting people through this year’s flood. It is reducing the losses that families carry from one flood season to the next.