Describe the various causes and the effects of landslides. Mention the important components of the National Landslide Risk Management Strategy.

Introduction: A landslide is the downslope movement of rock, debris or earth under gravity. About 12.6% of India's land outside the snow belt is landslide-prone, concentrated in the young Himalaya, the Western Ghats and the Northeast hill states.

Causes:

• Natural: Intense rainfall and cloudbursts that saturate slopes, steep immature Himalayan terrain, seismic shaking, and weathered, fractured rock that loses cohesion.
• Anthropogenic: Unscientific road-cutting and tunnelling, deforestation that removes binding roots, mining and quarrying, and unregulated hill construction that overloads and undercuts slopes.

Effects:

• Human: Loss of life and displacement, as in the 2018 Kerala and 2024 Wayanad slides.
• Economic: Severed highways and rail links, damaged hydropower projects and tourism, and costly rescue and relief.
• Environmental: Temporary river damming and outburst floods, heavy sediment loading downstream, and loss of forest cover and farmland.

National Landslide Risk Management Strategy components: Released by the National Disaster Management Authority, it lays out a comprehensive approach covering landslide hazard mapping and zonation, monitoring and early-warning systems, awareness generation among communities, capacity building and training, regulation of land use and construction in vulnerable slopes, and engineering works for slope stabilisation and mitigation. It assigns clear roles to the Geological Survey of India as nodal agency, alongside states, line ministries and other stakeholders, and is aligned with the Sendai goal of more national and local risk-reduction strategies.

Conclusion: Pairing the strategy's mapping with rainfall-threshold early warning, and firmly enforcing hill-construction norms, offers the most cost-effective path to cutting losses.