Landslide early warning on the Serchhip road
Rain gauges, slope sensors and a village phone tree on the stretch of road that closes every monsoon.
Why this work
The highway closes somewhere along this stretch most years, usually at night and usually with no warning. People walk the slip and carry goods across, which is when the second slide takes someone. The district knows which slopes fail; what it does not have is the hours of notice that would keep people off them.
Warning is cheap compared with stabilisation, and it works only if the last hundred metres of the chain is a person a village already trusts. The instrumentation is the easy half of this project. Deciding who makes the call to close the road, and what happens to the person who calls it wrongly, is the half that will determine whether it lasts.
What the project does
Timeline
What we will measure
Targets were set at design stage. The achieved column shows the latest verified figure, and is not adjusted when it disappoints.
Who runs it
Partners
District disaster management authority; seven village councils; a geotechnical group at the state university
Safeguarding & monitoring
All field staff work under the foundation's child protection and grievance policies. Data is collected against the indicators above, reviewed twice a year with the community, and published in the annual report whether or not it is flattering.
Documents
This project is running, and open to scrutiny.
We will share the full project report, expenditure statements and monitoring data with any serious enquiry, and we are content to be diligenced hard. Visits to the site can be arranged.
Talk to us about this project