After Malappuram, NH 66 works bring trouble for Taliparamba people as slush floods homes

Kannur: After two sleepless nights and a second wave of slush flooding their homes, residents of Kuppam - 2 kms north of Taliparamba - blocked the under-construction NH66 Wednesday morning, demanding immediate action.
Their demand was simple and desperate: Collector Arun K Vijayan should visit Kuppam, see their plight firsthand, and offer a lasting solution.

Nearly 100 residents - women and men - sat in the rain, halting traffic on the busy highway for 45 minutes. They only let vehicles pass when Revenue Divisional Officer Ranjith T K assured them the Collector would meet them at 2 pm.
By 4 pm, they resumed their protest as no one turned up. The RDO returned with another promise: an expert committee from the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) would inspect the site on Thursday. With that assurance, residents returned to the slush-filled houses for another sleepless night. "This highway is a threat not just to us but also to the vehicles," said a woman, trudging home after a full day of protest.

No-show at crisis talks
Meanwhile, in Kasaragod, Collector Inbasekar K called a meeting to discuss cracking and sinking along the Chengala-Nileshwar stretch of NH66, specifically at Arangadi, Kooliyangal, and Kalyan Road near Kanhangad. But for the third time in a row, no NHAI official attended the meeting. The absence undermined a meeting of elected representatives, department heads and engineers.

The stretches between Chengala and Nileshwar and Nileshwar and Taliparamba -- under construction by Hyderabad-based MEIL -- have seen repeated embankment failures, cracks, and cave-ins, claiming one life and several narrow escapes.

Kuppam: The bypass nightmare
Kuppam straddles Taliparamba municipality and Pariyaram grama panchayat, separated by the Kuppam river. Heavy rain began pounding the area around 10 pm on Monday. By midnight, the loose earth dumped for the highway embankment began sliding downhill.

A few houses in Chalathur ward (No. 34) of Taliparamba municipality and many houses at CH Nagar in Ward 12 (Mukkunnu) of Pariyaram panchayat were affected.

Usman M K’s old house was among the first to be inundated by slush in CH Nagar, a residential neighbourhood 200 metres downhill from the highway. He and his family fled in the dark to a relative's home.

The destruction escalated Tuesday morning. By 11 am, Mariyam's ancestral four-bedroom house was engulfed. A single mother, Mariyam listed what she lost: certificates, her daughter's laptop, fridge, washing machine, furniture, beds, mattresses, utensils -- everything. "The slush is up to my knees inside the house," she said.

Her sisters, Shabana and Bushra, weren't spared either. Shabana's borewell was clogged with debris. In Bushra’s house, mud surged into the kitchen and two bathrooms. "The JCB sent by the company broke our outdoor plumbing -- pipes to the overhead tank are gone," said Bushra's son Shahabaz.

Their elderly parents, recovering from abdominal surgeries, were shifted to Shabana's first floor from Mariyam's house.

Even as RDO and MEIL (Megha Engineering & Infrastructures Ltd) officials visited that morning and promised a solution, the situation worsened overnight. Around 20 of the 60 houses in CH Nagar were hit again by another flow of earth.

By Wednesday, ankle-deep mud covered most of the colony's main road. M V Usman's house, 30 metres off the main lane, became nearly inaccessible under debris. Of the 500m road through CH Nagar, 400m is now slush-covered. "Last monsoon, we faced the same problem and complained to the Collector," said Salmath K P,  Pariyaram panchayat member from the affected ward.

That morning, as residents protested again, a portion of the old NH that is being bypassed -- designated to become a service road on the eastern side -- began caving in.

Shahabaz said the soil from that side ended up in houses on the western side, 200m away.

'Unexpected rain,' says MEIL
A MEIL official, when contacted, said two separate issues were being conflated at Kuppam: the washout of the embankment fill and the collapse of the old national highway, which is being repurposed as a service road. The collapsed stretch, he said, was already marked for excavation to lay the foundation for a new retaining wall. "We need to cut down three metres from the eastern side before starting the wall," he said, adding that access to the elevated old road had been blocked five days ago. "But the media is reporting it as if a completed road has collapsed."

The slush entering houses was the real issue, he said. "The rains caught us off-guard," he quickly said, to explain the cause of the issue.

When asked if it wasn’t seasonal monsoon rain, he said MEIL only gets eight workable months in a year -- four months are disrupted by rain.

He admitted that MEIL had not yet constructed the drainage system or the retaining wall on the western side -- two crucial structures that could have prevented the slush from flowing into the houses downhill.

The soil, residents pointed out, made things worse. Unlike the sticky laterite found elsewhere, the embankment soil at Kuppam is loose, powdery silt. MEIL, they said, dumped tonnes of this excavated soil on the western slope without a retaining wall -- leaving homes below vulnerable to even a single downpour. "Only half a metre of soil has slid so far. There are tonnes of soil there," said Shafeekh Thundakkachi Puthiya Purayil, a contractor with Kerala Water Authority. "And the monsoon has not even begun."

Ebrahim Kutty T P, panchayat member of Kuppam (Ward 11), said a one-km stream that once carried water from Kappanathatt to Kuppam river, skirting the residential colony is now choked.

"NHAI may have planned to use this stream to drain stormwater from the highway to the river," he said.

From 2 metres, it is now barely half a metre wide. Both the highway and the panchayat road projects have encroached on this natural drain, he said. With the stream blocked, the stormwater and silt found their own path -- straight into people's homes, he said.

'No way to reach Ayesha’s house'
Taliparamba municipality ward 34 councillor K M Latheef said six houses in his ward were damaged. "But V M Ayesha's house is completely cut off," he said. "We can’t even get a tanker in to wash the slush. There’s no way to reach her house."

Ebrahim Kutty alleged that MEIL's lacked the empathy to understand people's problems. "They’re not from here. Maybe that’s why they don’t feel for the people."

Sandbag bund is the solution?
MEIL told Onmanorama that a temporary 30-metre-long bund made of sandbags and covered with tarpaulin is being planned to stop further washouts. "It's a stopgap fix," said the MEIL official. But unless the rains relent, nothing will hold, he said.

Residents, however, called the sandbags futile. "The pile of earth is far too large for sandbags to hold back," said a female protester. "We had to protest today because tomorrow, there may be none of us left to protest. Just as Shirur took Arjun, we too may become martyrs of the highway."