How Gattumeedapalle in Andhra Pradesh turned into a ghost village

Seven bends above Kosuvaripalle panchayat of Tamballapalle mandal in Annamayya district, the tarred road comes to an abrupt end. At the top of a 200 feet hill is the village of Gattumeedapalle. It exists on paper, with street lights still burning every evening until dawn, a village temple and a primary school.

Strange, not a single inhabitant to be found. All sixty houses are empty, surrounded by an eerie silence broken only by the wind over the hill.

This hamlet, once home to 60 joint families and about 500 people, is now a textbook example of quiet rural collapse.

A cluster of stout stone houses, locally called ‘banda middelu’, built some six to eight decades ago, remains a testament to the passage of time, standing dilapidated, engulfed by weeds and the walls by the carelessness of age.

Upon entering any imposing structure, one would find cold hearths, empty grain bins and faded family photographs on the cracked walls. Even the temple bells were said to have been stolen long ago.

In recent months, geologists, the media and nature lovers have turned their attention to this phenomenon. What happened? There is no flood, no famine, no terrifying past behind it.

Gattumeedapalle was a groundnut village, known since pre-independence days. When the monsoons were favorable, each household harvested 200 bags. Agricultural laborers from as far as Punganur, Kolar and Palamaner used to camp here during the harvest.

It is said that people from nearby villages visited the hill for loans. Ironically, today its former inhabitants make a living as hill farmers.

“The problems started in the 1980s. The rains failed monsoon after monsoon. Our people used to go to borewells by the dozens, each 800 feet deep. They all failed,” sighed Ramasubba Reddy, who left the village in the early 2000s.

“Although we had drinking water, there was not a drop on our crops. We realized that even our investments would not translate into returns,” he says.

With the gradual decline of cultivation, the village economy began to decline. No transportation, no work. The nearest provision was 2 km down the hill on foot. Migration for livelihood has gradually become a trend. First, in the 1990s, a family came down from the hill and settled in Kosuvaripalle, the immediate assembly panchayat. Then another, then five, ten and twenty and all. At the beginning of the new millennium, the whole hill was empty.

Many families migrated to Bengaluru, Kolar, Madanapalle and Tirupati to seek livelihood and education for their children.

Just before the 2024 elections, a freshly tarred road was laid on top of the hill. “None of us asked any official for a ride, which sounds like a big joke to us,” says a former resident who now lives in Kosuvaripalle, requesting anonymity.

“There is no plan for scientific groundwater mapping in this hard rock terrain. No official bothers to look into the core of the village’s plight,” he added.

Tax officials dismiss the observations as a mere “blame game” and try to silence curiosity that “people may have left for better facilities and education”.

Professor T. Madhu, Professor and Head of the Department of Geology, Sri Venkateswara University, told The Hindu that the older generations settled on the hilltop and explored groundwater sources using traditional methods of stick scanning and coconut cracking, while hydrogeological surveys were unknown at that time.

“Essentially, the entire hillock and the surrounding strip of several kilometers is a combined formation of quartzites, dolerites and dykes. With climate change and the reckless drilling of wells from the hill and its surrounding areas, the surface of the hillock and the entire outcrop naturally dried up, the existing waters seeped down, which eventually suffered hydrological desertion,” he said.

Published – 27 Aug 2026 23:41 IST