The Year They Bulldozed a National Geological Monument

In early June 2024, bulldozers arrived at Varkala Cliff and demolished part of it.

This was not an encroacher. It was the district administration of Thiruvananthapuram, and the stated purpose was to prevent landslides. The cliff they cut into had been a National Geological Monument for ten years.

“Shocking”

The Geological Survey of India — the body that had notified the site in 2014 — was not consulted in any way that stopped it. Its Deputy Director General V. Ambili called the demolition shocking, and put the objection simply: the cliff is a prestigious site with immense geological and geomorphological relevance.

The work was carried out near a stretch used for cremation ceremonies, on a shore where families have performed ancestral rites for centuries. So the operation managed to be, at once, a heritage problem and a local one.

The awkward part is that the stated motive was not absurd. Kerala genuinely is getting more intense rain, hillslopes genuinely are failing, and an administration facing a slope above people has a real problem. The objection is not that they wanted to prevent a landslide. It is that cutting into the structure is close to the opposite of what keeps this particular structure standing.

Why cutting the cliff makes it worse

The cliff is not a solid mass. It is a sandwich: three to four metres of hard, iron-rich laterite lying over much softer sandstone, sandy and plastic clays and thin lignite seams.

The laterite is the roof. It is what stops rain reaching the soft material and washing it out from underneath. K. S. Sajinkumar, who works on exactly this coast, states the mechanism plainly: building activity destroys the top laterite layer, exposing the softer sandstone beneath to weathering.

Which means the failure sequence at Varkala is rarely the sea undercutting the base. It usually starts at the top — a crack in the cap, water finding it, the soft beds below saturating and giving way, and the cap collapsing into the gap it was holding up.

Anything that breaks the cap is therefore an intervention on the wrong side of the problem: foundations, drainage, septic tanks, parking, and a bulldozer.

What is already built on it

The demolition was the visible event, but it sat on top of a longer-running one. Unauthorised construction along the cliff has been documented repeatedly and includes restaurants, resorts, parking lots and a helipad.

Every one of those is load and drainage placed on a three-metre lid over soft rock, at the edge of a drop. The café strip that makes Varkala famous is, structurally speaking, the pressure on the thing people come to see.

This is the genuine bind of the place, and it is worth stating without pretending there is an easy answer. The cliff created the tourism. The tourism pays for a great many livelihoods here. And the tourism is measurably degrading the cliff.

The tribunal

On the strength of a news report dated 30 October 2024, the National Green Tribunal took suo motu cognizance of the deteriorating condition of the Varkala cliffs — meaning it opened the case on its own initiative rather than waiting for anyone to file one. The matter was registered before the Southern Bench at Chennai.

Suo motu is the detail worth holding on to. A tribunal does not usually reach for it. It is what happens when the situation is visible enough that waiting for a petitioner looks like a poor use of time.

What a visitor should take from this

Not guilt, and not the idea that going there is wrong. But it is worth knowing that the cliff is actively eroding, that stretches of the edge are unfenced, that slumping has occurred, and that the safety advice about keeping back from the lip is not decoration.

And it is worth adjusting one assumption. National Geological Monument sounds like a guarantee. In June 2024 it did not prevent the local administration from bulldozing part of the site it names.