Wayanad landslides: A photographer’s harrowing assignment of capturing over a 100 bodies in disaster zone

Police photographer Mithun Vinod faces emotional turmoil while documenting devastating landslides in Wayanad, Kerala, capturing historical evidence.

When he assumed charge in his native district Wayanad, Kerala, following a much sought-after transfer on July 15, Mithun Vinod, a police photographer, was over the moon.

The very next day, his first daughter was born and the 36-year-old could not have been happier. However, it proved short-lived.

Just a fortnight later on the morning of July 30 when it was bucketing down, Mithun was in a hospital in Meppadi panchayat taking the inquest photographs of victims, among them babies roughly of his daughter’s age, killed in the devastating Wayanad landslides.

“The next time when I held my daughter, those memories came rushing in and it was unbearable. I did not go to see her for a few days,” says Midhun who had a stint as a news photographer before joining the police force in 2017.

When he first came across the news of the landslides on the fatal morning, only around three deaths were reported. So, when he was called up, he left without having breakfast thinking that his service may not be needed for long. But he was to have his first meal of the day only around 8 p.m. What he saw at the small primary health centre in Meppady not just killed his spirit but his appetite as well.

Ambulances with blaring sirens kept rushing in, depositing heavily mutilated bodies and body parts caked in mud. They were lined up on benches pulled together as the hospital hardly had the infrastructure to handle a tragedy of such a scale.

“I have never seen so many bodies. There was not enough space and manpower. Even I had to put on gloves to help move the bodies,” Mithun remembers.