With a steeply pitched tiled roof piercing misty green hills in southern India and a stream gushing through rocks nearby, the Stone House Bungalow was one of the most popular resorts in the Wayanad area of Kerala state.

It was empty when two landslides early on Tuesday washed away the 30-year-old stone building: staff and tourists had left after rain flooded its kitchen a few days earlier.

But neighbouring dwellings in Mundakkai village were occupied and 205 people, almost all locals, were killed and scores are missing. Tourists had been warned to leave the day earlier because of the rain.

Local authorities are now counting the cost of the disaster and questioning whether the rapid development of a tourism industry was to blame for the tragedy. Weather-related disasters are not unusual in India, but the landslides in Kerala state this week were the worst since about 400 people were killed in floods there in 2018.

Mundakkai, the area worst affected by the landslides, was home to some 500 local families. It and neighbouring villages housed nearly 700 resorts, homestays and zip-lining stations attracting trekkers, honeymooners and tourists looking to be close to nature, a local official said. Cardamom and tea estates dotted the hills.

Experts said they had seen Tuesday’s disaster coming for years and several government reports in the past 13 years had warned that over-development in the ecologically sensitive areas would increase the risk of landslides and other environmental disasters such as floods by blocking natural water flows. The warnings were largely ignored or lost in bureaucratic wrangling.

A fast-growing India is rapidly building infrastructure across the country, especially in its tourist destinations, including the ecologically fragile Himalayan foothills in the north where there has been a rise in cave-ins and landslides.

Just three weeks before the latest disaster, Kerala state Tourism Minister P A Mohamed Riyas said in the local legislature in answer to a question that Wayanad was “dealing with an influx of more people than it can handle, a classic example of a place facing the problem of over-tourism”.

The area is just six hours by road from Bengaluru, India’s tech hub, and is a favoured weekend destination for the city’s wealthy IT professionals.

However, officials were unable to share any documentary evidence of resorts and tourist facilities flouting building regulations, although they said some had done so.

Noorudheen, part of Stone House’s managing staff, said no government or village authority had warned the management against building or operating a resort there.

There was no sign that the landslides were directly caused by over-development. Residents said regions higher up in the hills were loosened by weeks of heavy rain and an unusually heavy downpour on Monday night led to rivers of mud, water and boulders crashing downhill, sweeping away settlements and people.

But experts said the unbridled development had worsened the situation by removing forest cover that absorbs rain and blocking natural runoffs.

“Wayanad is no stranger to such downpours,” said N Badusha, head of Wayanad Prakruthi Samrakshana Samiti, a local environment protection NGO.

“Unchecked tourism activity in Wayanad is the biggest factor behind worsening such calamities. Tourism has entered ecologically sensitive fragile areas where it was not supposed to be.”

Wayanad received more than 1mn domestic and foreign tourists last year, nearly triple the number in 2011 when a federal government report warned against over-development in the broader mountain range the district lies in, without clearly spelling out the consequences.

“The geography is really too fragile to accommodate all that,” K Babu, a senior village council official in Mundakkai, said in his office this week as he co-ordinated rescue efforts. “Tourism is doing no good to the area...the tourism sector was never this active.”