THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, July 10 -- Five construction workers remained missing Thursday in the rain-swelled hills of Wayanad district after a landslide buried part of a tunnel construction site in Meppadi on July 7, killing at least three people and hospitalizing seven more in what Kerala's agriculture minister has called not an act of nature but an act of negligence.

Video footage from the site showed a massive wall of mud giving way in heavy rain, uprooting trees and sweeping away metal barricades erected around the tunnel worksite. By nightfall, disaster response teams and sniffer dogs were working across zone-divided search areas, their efforts repeatedly hampered by the same rains that had triggered the slide. Police official Devamanohar...