This festive season, the hills of northern West Bengal — Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Mirik were carved by catastrophe. Torrential rains triggered over 100 landslides, killing number of people, homes were swept away, bridges collapsed, and thousands of tourists were stranded. Lives, livelihoods and fragile ecosystems were upended in hours.

Satellite-based mapping by ISRO’s National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) has catalogued roughly 80,000 landslides across India between the late 1990s and 2022, concentrated in Himalayan and Western Ghats provinces. Between 2015-22, India recorded 3,782 landslides, with West Bengal accounting for 376.

Nearly 13 per cent of India’s land area, about 0.42 million sq. km is landslide-prone, with three-fourths of this in the Himalaya. Yet many small slides go un

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