Environment · 8 min read

Fragile Hills: Munnar's Environment and How to Travel Gently

Water towers, landslides, elephant corridors and plastic: the pressures on Munnar's mountains, and what every visitor can do.

By GK Global, Adimali, Munnar · Trails & Tales by GK

Munnar's beauty is the beauty of a fragile place: steep slopes, thin soils and some of the heaviest monsoon rain in India. The hills have been reshaped by 150 years of plantations, dams and roads, and more recently by tourism. Understanding those pressures makes for a better trip, and helps keep the hills worth visiting.

The water towers of Kerala

The high-range shola grasslands act like a giant sponge. Grass and moss capture mist and rain, and the shola forests release it slowly through the dry season. Rivers that rise here feed Kerala's hydroelectric dams and, eastward, the farms of Tamil Nadu. When grasslands are replaced by plantations of fast-growing exotic trees, or when slopes are cut for buildings, the sponge loses its power.

Much of the original grassland was planted over in the 20th century with eucalyptus, black wattle and pine for fuel and timber. Wattle in particular has spread aggressively into the grasslands where the tahr and the Neelakurinji live. Forest departments now remove invasive trees and restore grassland in several protected areas.

A history of floods and landslides

• 1924The Great Flood of '99 destroys the Kundala Valley Railway and reshapes Munnar town.
• 2018Kerala's worst floods in nearly a century cause landslides across Idukki and cut Munnar off for days.
• 2020On the night of 6 August 2020, a landslide buries the workers' line houses at Pettimudi near Rajamala. 66 people lost their lives and four were never found, most of them tea plantation workers and their families.

Pettimudi showed how rain, steep slopes and poor connectivity can combine. There was no mobile coverage that night, and the bridge on the road had been washed away. Since then, rainfall warnings and road closures in Idukki are taken seriously, and so should visitors take them.

Sharing the hills with elephants

Elephants were walking these ranges long before tea. As settlements, farms and resorts spread into their corridors, encounters have become more frequent, with crop raids, damaged homes and, sadly, deaths on both sides. The 2023 capture and relocation of the tusker Arikomban from Chinnakanal made national news. Most experts agree the lasting answer is not moving individual elephants but protecting and reconnecting corridors and managing waste and food that draw elephants into towns.

Tourism's footprint

Munnar receives huge numbers of visitors in peak season, and traffic jams on the Mattupetty and Top Station roads are now common. Unregulated construction on steep slopes has been the subject of court cases and government action for years. Plastic waste is another constant battle: bottles and wrappers thrown from cars end up in streams and in the stomachs of animals.

Travel gently: our checklist

1. Carry a refillable bottle and take all your wrappers back with you.
2. Never feed wildlife, from tahr at Rajamalai to monkeys at viewpoints.
3. Stay on paths in grasslands and sholas. Never pick Neelakurinji or other wildflowers: it is illegal in protected areas.
4. Share a jeep instead of driving many cars to the same viewpoint, and start early to avoid traffic.
5. Respect weather warnings and closures, even if the sky looks clear where you are.
6. Buy local: estate tea, Marayoor jaggery, local spices, and local guides and drivers keep money in the hills.
7. Keep it quiet at night. No loud music or fireworks near forests.

The hills give us tea, water, wildlife and wonder. The least we can do is leave them as we found them.