On August 8, a particularly heavy monsoon rain began in Kerala, the southernmost state of India. Kerala, known as “God’s Own Country” because of its verdant natural beauty — from its rolling hills to its coastal backwaters — began to experience flooding unlike anything it had seen in recent history. Over the next weeks, dams filled beyond capacity, mountains began to collapse over entire towns, and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced.

Amidst this, thousands of people across India and around the world began to mobilize. Among them was Robin Abraham, a pediatrician at Al Azhar Medical College in Kerala’s Idukki district, an agriculture-intensive region located in the state’s highlands.

Idukki is estimated to have been set back 40 years by the floods; water that burst from the dams decimated crops, buildings, and infrastructure. Abraham has been working in Idukki for the last three years, and when the floods began, he and his wife Dr. Priyadharsini Pillai began a flood relief initiative. They’ve focused their efforts on bringing food aid to remote villages in Idukki, and expect to soon provide medical aid. As Abraham put it, “the diseases are currently incubating,” and Kerala will likely soon be dealing with an outbreak of waterborne diseases.

Abraham talked to BRIGHT Magazine about what he’s been doing since the flooding began, why so many private citizens in Kerala stepped up to help, and what the state needs to do to prevent future tragedies of this scale.

NNobody had any idea it was going to be this bad. Not since the Great Flood of 1924 has Kerala seen such a serious natural disaster. This came as a shock to everyone.

I’ve been working in Kerala’s Idukki district for about three years. When it started raining heavily around the 15th of August, I called the local government and asked them what I could do to help. They asked me to concentrate on a hilly area called Adimali, where there was a severe food shortage because even before the flooding, the agriculture sector had almost collapsed. Many people are close to starvation there.

Adimali did not actually experience flooding, but the excessive rain and landslides washed out roads, cutting them off from the rest of the country and causing food shortages.

Our work started with doctors in my hospital organizing food packets for distribution. But by the time we raised enough money and got enough food, we couldn’t deliver it to Adimali because the whole road had collapsed. We tried getting in touch with the government officials in Adimali, but all of their phones were off because the electricity supply was cut. We ended up having to keep the supplies for a few days until the road opened again. Even then, we could only reach two villages.

Then we received money from Malayali expatriates living in Kuwait, and we bought 3 tons’ worth of food with it. Volunteers in our hospital worked one entire night to create 450 packets filled with rice, pulses, oil, and sugar. Then we returned to Adimali, and government officials helped us locate villages with severe food shortages where to deliver the packets.

The road we used is a lifeline for this place — it’s still dangerous, but the government has opened it. In one portion, the whole road collapsed and the government had to build an emergency path through it.

Deforestation and quarrying have made Adimali prone to this kind of disaster. Whenever there’s massive rainfall, a portion of the mountain just collapses, blocking all the roads and making the villages inaccessible, even by foot.

The villagers are afraid because their houses and land aren’t stable anymore. These problems are manmade — they are the result of human sprawl, our neglect of the environment, deforestation, and rampant and unplanned construction. So when it rains in excess, the land becomes unstable.

I met one family whose house was constructed on a hillside, and they were stuck in landslide. Now they are living in a community hall. The daughter is schizophrenic and has seizures every month. Her father is an alcoholic, so the daughter gets completely neglected. People are living in extreme poverty.

The agriculture sector has collapsed, the land is unstable, there’s rampant poverty — all of these were chronic stresses that Adimali citizens were already living with. It is now compounded by the acute stress from the rains and landslides.

OOne of the fascinating things about this disaster is the number of private citizens who have mobilized to help.

A driver in our hospital, along with about 60 other people, has gone to the interiors of Kuttanad, where the worst flooding occurred. They made makeshift rafts and used them for distributing food. Another estimated 50,000 volunteers are now helping to rebuild the region.

And of course, there are the fishermen who saved 65,000 lives by picking people up in their boats and getting them to dry land. They did work that the army and the government couldn’t have done — and they did it completely spontaneously. When the government tried to offer them money for helping, they refused to take it. They said they can’t take money for saving someone’s life.

When this flood happened, I knew I couldn’t sit back and do nothing while a tragedy unfolded. I’m not the only one who had that thought. When the food started arriving at the hospital, I didn’t have to call people to help; hospital staff and medical students just showed up.

Kerala is a unique state. Literacy is almost 100 percent, so the level of awareness and information is very high. The second thing is that people are very engaged — there are lots of residents’ associations, farmers’ groups, cooperatives, and student bodies, all of which are very active. When the crisis happened, that spirit helped. That was one positive thing about the relief in Kerala.

We’re struggling with what the needs are. Each place has different needs, depending on the local situation. Adimali, which is in the highlands, has different needs from Kuttanad, which is below sea level. If you want to help, you have to talk to people in those places.

The floods had an emotional impact, and people from around the world are sending containers of food. My colleague got a large shipment of rice out of the blue, which came from Andhra Pradesh, India. Now what does he do? Some of it will reach the right hands, some of it won’t.

I believe the best approach is to go to the people on the ground — the government officials and civil society organizations who have volunteers who know how to get to the people who need help the most. For example, I got a call from a school in need of bags and books. Many people have lost their homes and everything in them. Now, the children need supplies so they can go back to school.

Local actors are important. The rehabilitation process will be long, and without them, it won’t be effective.

EEverybody was shocked by the scale of these floods, but in hindsight, we’re responsible for a lot of the problem.

I’d put the people who lost their homes in two classes: Ones who are in debt, who will never recover without government assistance, and those who are rich enough to build another house. A lot of people will go into lifelong poverty because of this.

We cannot control the amount of rain that falls on the land, but we can control our behavior. We need to study the human actions that exacerbate these problems. After we understand that, we need to think about what mitigation strategies can help prevent this kind of damage. These problems are here to stay; climate change and patterns of rainfall are changing. We expect this to happen again, probably in the next five years.

Have we learned the lessons? Are we prepared to take on the next challenge? That is the question for Kerala to answer.