In July 2024, heavy rainfall triggered landslides that struck the southern Indian state of Kerala’s Wayanad district, killing 392 people, with at least 273 injured and 150 missing. Many of the victims were tea and cardamom estate workers and their families, communities descended largely from Dalit and Adivasi workers brought from the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu during British colonial rule. Dalit and Adivasi communities, officially classified as Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST), are among India’s most marginalized groups.
For decades, experts have warned that the Western Ghats, the mountain range where Wayanad is located, are ecologically fragile. Therefore, Wayanad’s vulnerability was well known. What happened and who lost their lives was not surprising.
What came after the disaster made it even clearer that this vulnerability was structural and not accidental. A draft beneficiary list excluded around 200 families who lost their homes in the flagship resettlement township. Those excluded were tribal families.
While the government eventually gave 13 ST families five acres of separate land in March 2026, nearly two years after the disaster, they were kept apart from the main township project.
The Kerala government projected a narrative of climate-resilient rebuilding. But in reality, the families most exposed to the disaster remained at the margins of the plan meant to address it. This pattern is embedded in Kerala’s State Action Plan on Climate Change 2023-2030 (SAPCC 2.0), the official document that guides Kerala’s climate future.
The Plan’s Blind Spot
Kerala’s SAPCC 2.0 is a sophisticated piece of subnational climate governance. It draws on 220 nodal officers from 91 sectoral departments, and identifies district-level vulnerability across 17 parameters, ranking Wayanad as one of the most vulnerable districts. It has a dedicated section on “Gender Responsiveness and Inclusivity in the Action Plan” that invokes the language of intersectionality and lists “race” as a dimension of exclusion. But it does not name caste, which is a significant factor in environmental discrimination in India.
That omission is not a minor oversight. In India, caste is the primary axis through which climate risk is distributed. Dalit and Adivasi communities are not merely “vulnerable” in the abstract sense. Their vulnerability is historically produced through land dispossession, forced settlement on hazard-prone slopes and riverbanks, confinement to plantation labor, and denial of formal land titles. Research shows that marginalized caste groups experience 25-150 percent greater heat stress exposure per hour of outdoor work compared to dominant caste groups, even after controlling for income, education, and gender.
Kerala’s SAPCC 2.0 reproduces this erasure with a particular irony. Its Gender Responsiveness and Inclusivity section lists “race or ethnicity,” a language clearly drawn from global frameworks reflecting North American and European social categories, while omitting caste entirely. Race does not map onto caste hierarchies in Kerala’s plantation belts. Using the language of race without naming caste narrows the plan’s reach. The document invokes an intersectionality approach, but does not acknowledge the role of caste behind it.
Who Lives on the Slope
Wayanad’s disaster geography is not geologically neutral. Over 40 percent of Wayanad is vulnerable to landslides and floods, with 17 of 25 gram panchayats (village-level administrative units) classified as environmentally fragile. The Chooralmala area is the highest ecologically sensitive zone in the Western Ghats. Its recommendations for restricting development were opposed by several states, including Kerala, in 2012. Dalit and Adivasi communities settled on those slopes during colonial expansion, had no voice in those debates.
The World Weather Attribution coalition found that human-induced climate change increased rainfall in the region by 10 percent, exacerbating the 2024 disaster. Climate change does not pick and choose its targets. But decades of caste-structured land use, denial of forest rights, and the channeling of Adivasi and plantation-worker families onto the most hazard-exposed land created the population that bore the cost.
The state’s rehabilitation response centered on two townships, high-quality concrete construction on 115 hectares of acquired tea plantation land, which is meaningful for communities whose relationship to land is primarily economic. But for Indigenous Adivasi families, it was an offer to trade forest rights, livelihood access, and cultural ties for a concrete unit in a township disconnected from the forests that sustain them. Several Adivasi families declined this plan. The tension between development-as-concrete and development-as-rights reveals the gap that Kerala’s climate policy has yet to close.
Borrowed Language, Local Erasure
The broader pattern extends beyond Kerala. India’s subnational climate governance treats vulnerability as a technical and socioeconomic category, not a caste-based category. The result, as documented across heat action plans, is that institutions use neutral categories like informal workers, slum dwellers, and outdoor laborers, which obscure the caste hierarchies and systemic exclusion structuring who lives and works in heat-exposed conditions.
Kerala occupies a particular position in this landscape because its progressive social policy credentials – like universal literacy, strong public health infrastructure, and institutional capacity – make this erasure of caste in its climate plans harder to explain as incapacity. This is not a state that lacks analytical tools. Rather, in SAPCC 2.0, it has made a deliberate rhetorical choice to adopt the language of global climate justice while omitting the social category that such frameworks must confront in India.
The Electoral Signal
The political context shifted in May 2026 to make this analysis timely. In the Kerala Assembly elections, the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) swept to power with 102 of 140 seats, ending a decade of Left Democratic Front rule in Kerala. The UDF’s path to that majority ran directly through Dalit and Adivasi constituencies. For example, the Ambedkarite Democratic Front, a coalition of 65 SC/ST organizations, backed the UDF, explicitly alleging that the Left government had sidelined marginalized communities and that around $770 million earmarked for SC/ST welfare had been wasted over nine years.
That electoral verdict here is more than just a political statistic, and it can be read as a community-level indictment of how the Left handled the gap between its rhetoric of inclusive governance and the lived realities of Dalit and Adivasi communities, including in climate-related areas such as post-disaster rehabilitation. The new UDF government inherits the SAPCC 2.0 as its operative climate framework. Whether it revises the document’s vocabulary or inherits the erasure with a different party’s name will reveal what “inclusive climate governance” means in practice in Kerala.
What a Caste-Conscious Climate Plan Would Require
Fixing Kerala’s SAPCC is not a matter of adding “caste” to a list; it also means rethinking what vulnerability mapping should look like in India. It includes disaggregating district-level risk data by caste alongside gender, income, and land tenure status, making Dalit and Adivasi communities named subjects, not as residual beneficiaries of adaptation interventions; and tying rehabilitation frameworks explicitly to the Forest Rights Act and SC/ST protection mechanisms.
India’s Supreme Court has, in recent years, documented in detail how institutions invoke neutral language that replicates the very erasure it claims to address. Climate policy is one of those institutional domains in India. As India positions itself as a climate justice leader in international negotiations on loss and damage and on fair transition finance, the refusal of state plans to name caste is a structural choice that decides whose vulnerability counts.
The Wayanad landslides did not need a framework to identify who was most at risk. The communities living on the slopes already knew. The question is whether Kerala’s next climate plan will know it too.
