The full scale of devastation from the landslides that nearly obliterated the entire Mundakkai settlement and two nearby villages early Tuesday morning became evident as the death toll climbed to 288.
The numbers likely to rise as rescuers continue to sift through the massive debris. Over 200 people have been reported injured.
Indian rescue crews scoured mud-caked tea plantations and villages Thursday with little hope of finding more survivors from successive landslides.
Days of torrential monsoon rains have battered the southern coastal state of Kerala, with blocked roads into the Wayanad district disaster area complicating relief efforts since Tuesday.
The number of fatal floods and landslides in India has increased in recent years and experts say climate change is exacerbating the problem.
Army teams were working around the clock to build a temporary bridge over raging waters to help search efforts after earlier relying on jury-rigged ziplines to transport bodies that had been recovered.
Saraswathy, one of hundreds of labourers on the tea estates struck by a wall of mud before dawn on Tuesday, said she had been unable to contact her sister and niece in the days since.
"After this many days, we've lost hope," Saraswathy, who goes by one name, told AFP.
"I came back from the hospital, I kept looking for their bodies but couldn't find them," she said. "Eventually I couldn't stand it. Seeing all these bodies, I almost fainted."
Wayanad is famed for the tea estates that crisscross its hilly countryside and which rely on a large pool of labourers for planting and harvest.
Brick-walled row homes built to accommodate seasonal workers were inundated by a powerful wall of brown sludge as labourers and their families slept.
'High rainfall events'
Monsoon rains across the region from June to September offer respite from the summer heat and are crucial to replenishing water supplies.
They are vital for agriculture -- and therefore the livelihoods of millions of farmers and food security for South Asia's nearly two billion people -- but also bring regular destruction.
At least 572 millimetres of rain fell in the two days before the landslides, according to state chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan.
"The rainfall pattern is changing in recent years with a higher frequency, intensity and spread of high rainfall events," environmental expert Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People told AFP.
Damming, deforestation and development projects in India have also exacerbated the human toll
India's worst landslide in recent decades was in 1998, when rockfalls triggered by heavy monsoon rains killed at least 220 people and buried the tiny Himalayan village of Malpa.
