Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is changing how governments deliver healthcare, education and social services. Much of the global conversation focuses on large national systems, but Kerala offers a compelling sub-national example of how strong public health systems and hybrid energy solutions can support digital governance. In a state known for its social indicators, high literacy and decentralised administration, the pairing of solar-powered clinics with digital health platforms is emerging as a small but effective model for delivering robust public services.

Why Digital Public Infrastructure Needs Energy Resilience

Kerala’s healthcare system has long been considered among the best in India, regularly posting strong health statistics, with life expectancy above 75 years and near-universal literacy. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed a common weakness across many regions: the dependence of digital health systems on continuous power and network access. Telemedicine platforms, digital health records, vaccination databases and real-time surveillance systems all require reliable electricity and internet connectivity — infrastructure that remains patchy in Kerala’s rural and coastal regions, which are also vulnerable to power failures and severe weather.

Kerala has been piloting solar-powered primary health centres and community clinics in remote and disaster-prone areas, with mixed results. In Kadamakkudy panchayat in Ernakulam district, a solar-powered floating ambulance-cum-dispensary — billed at its 2025 launch as India’s first such service — was expected to serve more than 2,400 patients across the panchayat’s islands. It stopped running within months after developing engine and maintenance problems, a reminder that pilot ambition and long-term upkeep don’t always move at the same pace. Elsewhere, clinics have installed rooftop solar panels with battery storage to keep vaccine refrigeration, diagnostic equipment and digital health platforms running when the grid fails or during floods and cyclones, which have grown more frequent in recent years.

This energy transition is not only an environmental intervention; it is also an enabler of Digital Public Infrastructure. Kerala’s health system increasingly relies on digital platforms such as eHealth Kerala, which maintains electronic health records for millions of people, and telemedicine services that connect rural patients with specialists in metropolitan hospitals. For these systems to work, they need to remain operational at all times — solar power reduces the risk of interruption during emergencies, making services more accessible and reliable.

This matters in the wider South Asian context. Digital health initiatives are expanding rapidly across the region, but infrastructure gaps remain a major constraint: an estimated 12% of health-care facilities in South Asia have no electricity access at all, according to a 2023 WHO, World Bank, IRENA and SEforALL report. Kerala’s hybrid model is a useful counter-example, showing that energy resilience and digital governance need to be built together rather than treated as separate problems.

Kerala’s experience also illustrates the benefits of decentralised governance in building robust DPI ecosystems. Panchayats and municipalities — the state’s local self-government bodies — play a central role in implementing health and energy projects. This structure allows for context-specific solutions, such as solar systems in flood-prone coastal clinics or digital health kiosks in tribal communities, and it can adapt to local needs faster than more centralised approaches.

Kerala’s high literacy, combined with its emergence as India’s first fully digitally literate state under the Digi Keralam initiative, has created favourable conditions for the adoption of digital health tools. Citizens’ familiarity with digital public services has made it easier to scale electronic health records, telemedicine and other Digital Public Infrastructure. That digital readiness also has a direct bearing on disaster response: healthcare systems are often among the first services disrupted when floods or cyclones strike, making solar-powered clinics with battery backups and offline digital systems critical for maintaining care and public health surveillance when central grids and communication networks go down.

Kerala’s experience suggests that digital platforms alone cannot build Digital Public Infrastructure — they require a supporting ecosystem of physical infrastructure, particularly reliable, decentralised and sustainable energy systems. Hybrid solutions combining solar, grid power and backup storage offer one way to guarantee continuity of critical services. The implications extend beyond healthcare: solar-powered digital classrooms could support continuous learning in rural schools, and energy-efficient digital kiosks could widen access to welfare and financial services. In each case, energy infrastructure functions as the silent backbone of digital governance.

Many governments across South Asia are racing to roll out digital ID systems, financial platforms and e-governance tools, yet still struggle with basic infrastructure stability. Without dependable electricity and internet access, Digital Public Infrastructure risks becoming patchy and exclusionary. Kerala’s experience is a reminder to build resilience into digital systems from the outset, rather than retrofitting it later.

At the same time, the model is not without its flaws — Kadamakkudy’s stalled floating dispensary is a case in point. Large-scale solar infrastructure requires sustained investment, and hybrid systems need continuous local technical expertise to stay operational; without it, even flagship pilots can go dark within months of launch. Energy policy and digital governance frameworks are also often built in silos, and closing that gap will be necessary to scale the model beyond pilot projects.

Kerala’s solar-powered clinics point to a larger truth: digital transformation is not only about data and platforms, but also about energy, resilience and local governance. By combining renewable energy with Digital Public Infrastructure, the state is quietly building a more resilient and equitable model of public service delivery — one with real lessons, and real cautionary tales, for a region where millions of people still contend with power outages and limited internet access. The future of South Asia’s Digital Public Infrastructure may depend less on how fast governments digitise services, and more on how reliably — and durably — they power them.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of EdPublica

Climate-resilient agriculture is gaining policy attention in India as experts advocate water conservation, crop diversification, and digital technologies to help farmers adapt to increasing climate risks and strengthen long-term food security.

As climate change continues to threaten agricultural productivity through erratic rainfall, rising temperatures and increasing water stress, experts have called for stronger evidence-based policies and investments in climate-resilient farming to safeguard India’s food security and rural livelihoods.

The discussion took place at a workshop organised by the Nation First Policy Research and Change Foundation (NFPRC) for Members of Parliament and State Legislators in New Delhi, where policymakers, agricultural scientists and researchers examined strategies to strengthen climate resilience across India’s farming sector.

“Our focus must be on evidence-based policymaking, climate-resilient governance, crop diversification, water conservation, irrigation and insurance coverage to strengthen India’s agricultural resilience,” Tarun Chugh, Member of Rajya Sabha and Chairperson of the NFPRC Foundation, said while inaugurating the workshop.

During a technical session, Praveen Kumar Singh, Agriculture Commissioner at the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, and Rajbir Singh, Deputy Director General at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), emphasised that adapting Indian agriculture will require region-specific crop diversification, wider adoption of millets, pulses, oilseeds and horticultural crops, along with investments in watershed development, rainwater harvesting, groundwater recharge and micro-irrigation.

Experts also highlighted the growing role of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, drones, Internet of Things (IoT) devices and digital supply chains, in improving weather forecasting, precision farming, irrigation management and crop insurance delivery. Speaking on agricultural innovation, Ramesh Chand, Distinguished Professor at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) and former Member of NITI Aayog, said technology, finance and governance must work together to build a more resilient agricultural system.

The workshop concluded with a call for closer collaboration between policymakers, scientific institutions and farming communities, underscoring that climate resilience will depend not only on technological innovation but also on translating research-backed policies into effective action at the farm level.

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.