On 30 July 2024 landslides destroyed Chooralmala and Mundakkai, in the hills above Meppadi. It is the worst disaster in Wayanad’s recorded history, and its long consequence has landed on Kalpetta — because Kalpetta is where the survivors are being rehoused, on ground that was until recently a tea estate.
We are writing this because a visitor to Wayanad will drive past the site, will very likely stay in Kalpetta, and will find almost nothing about it in travel writing. It is the largest thing happening in this town.
What is being built
The state took about 64 hectares at Elstone Tea Estate near Kalpetta for a rehabilitation township — around 150 acres in the acreage the project usually quotes. The Chief Minister laid the foundation stone in March 2025.
The township, in the published figures
| Land | about 64 hectares of Elstone Tea Estate, near Kalpetta |
| Beneficiary families | 459 after the cabinet added 49 more |
| Families who opted out | 104 |
| Houses to be built | 410 |
| Each house | three bedrooms, about 1,000 sq ft, on a seven-cent plot |
| Cost per house | about ₹30.79 lakh, excluding GST |
| Also planned | community centres, a market, primary health centres, anganwadis, solar power, treatment for contaminated water |
Separately, the Elstone group is to receive about ₹24 crore to settle arrears and emergency benefits owed to its own estate workers — the people whose workplace the township is being built on. That is a detail worth holding: a rehabilitation scheme for one displaced community is taking the land of another, and the state has had to deal with both.
Where it has got to
Slowly. Completion of the houses was announced for the end of December, and close to two years after the landslides families were still waiting to move in, with the project under construction and a change of government midway raising fresh concerns about handover timelines.
We are not going to give you a completion date, because the ones that have been given have moved. What can be said plainly is that the land was taken, the foundation was laid in March 2025, 410 houses are the target, and as of the most recent reporting we can find the township was not finished and people were not in it.
The 104 families who opted out are worth a sentence too. A rehabilitation township is a single answer to a problem that people experience individually — some want to be near where they were, some want compensation rather than a house, some have already rebuilt elsewhere. A fifth of the eligible list choosing not to take a free three-bedroom house is not a failure of the scheme so much as a reminder of what it is trying to replace.
What a visitor should do with this
- Chooralmala and Mundakkai are not sights. People died there in large numbers and people still live around there. Disaster tourism is not welcome and should not be arranged.
- The township at Elstone is a construction site and a future residential area, not a viewpoint.
- If you want to help, give to established relief and rehabilitation funds rather than to individuals encountered on the road.
- The most useful thing most visitors can do for Wayanad is to keep coming and keep spending in the district, which is what the local economy has been asking for since 2024.
That last point is made repeatedly by people in the trade here and is worth taking seriously. Wayanad’s tourism collapsed after the landslides and the collapse hurt households that had nothing to do with the affected villages. Staying in Kalpetta, eating in Kalpetta and hiring guides in Kalpetta is a more useful response than a detour to look at a scar.