14 years after the dilution of the Gadgil report, devastation continues in the Western Ghats

The world is facing a climate emergency, and on July 31, the people of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve woke up to the stark reality that they may be inhabiting a dangerously vulnerable landscape.

Maladaptation – development that is blind to climate change – is converging with heavy monsoonal activity to trigger landslides. On July 30, landslides in Wayanad flattened an entire valley and claimed over 400 lives (as per NDTV on August 7).

A theatre of causes now plays out in the media.

The Union home ministry blames the Kerala government for ignoring adverse weather advisories; atmospheric scientists put the disaster down to a warming Arabian Sea and deep cloud systems that release intense rain in short bursts; and some geologists point to deforestation and soil cavities, while others note a river that reclaimed its course. But everyone collectively blames this tragedy on the non-implementation of a certain expert committee’s 14-year-old report: the Gadgil Report.

The Western Ghats Ecology Authority was proposed by the Western Ghats Expert Ecology Panel in its 2011 report – also known as the Gadgil Commission Report, or, simply, the Gadgil Report. The name was derived, of course, from Madhav Gadgil, renowned ecologist and founder of the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, who led the group.

The panel envisioned the Western Ghats Ecology Authority operating through local consultations, embodying procedural or deliberative justice. Ideally, this would mean that the suggestions and wishes of Kodai and Ooty citizens, for instance, would inform the Authority’s regulations and restrictions on seasonal traffic or even land use changes.

The mandate of the Western Ghats Expert Ecology Panel included deciding the criteria for notifying Eco-Sensitive Zones. In doing so the panel was to build upon the recommendations of the Pronab Sen Committee Report, 2000.

It developed a national ecological sensitivity database, based largely on species endemism. For the Western Ghats Expert Ecology Panel, this meant recognising the entirety of the Western Ghats as an Ecologically Sensitive Area – ESA is a larger spatial configuration, within which falls zoning or Eco-Sensitive Zones.

The Western Ghats Expert Ecology Panel proposed that the Western Ghats Ecology Authority be constituted under the Environment Protection Act, 1986, and that its mandate be designed through a consultative process.

The Report features detailed geospatial analyses of diverse data sets and sophisticated methods of gridding, grading and zoning the Ghats, and adopted a grassroots approach, enabling communities to read the report in their native languages, weigh in on the final demarcation of Eco-Sensitive Zones, and provide inputs on the functioning of the Western Ghats Ecology Authority. In tax-payer terms: good work and a sincere effort in public interest.

The ultimate fate of the Western Ghats Expert Ecology Panel and its public work is general knowledge: a High-Level Working Group replaced it and diluted its recommendations. How the recommendations compare with each other are study topics for UPSC exams. They need to be seen, instead, as an opportunity for young bureaucrats to do good work, if only the government had formed the Western Ghats Ecology Authority.

How I became an environmentalist

The legacy of Gadgil was part of the focus of a conference in the mountains of the Western Ghats, just a year ago. On the final day of the inaugural NilgiriScapes conference in August 2023, held at the Resource Centre for Tribal Culture on Ooty’s Garden Road, researchers, scientists, farmers, journalists and schoolchildren gathered together to mark the 200th anniversary of the modern Nilgiris, a landscape “discovered” in 1823 by the East India Company.

I was in attendance to speak about the political economy of environmental change in the Nilgiris: for a seemingly peaceful place, the Nilgiris boast a complicated history, their ecology and society shaped by World Wars and the Cold War in many complex ways.

From the centre’s first floor, across the road, I could see the Breeks Open-Air Stadium. As a highschooler in the early 1990s, I had participated in the march past for my school’s annual sports days on this field. Life had marched on, and there I was now, pacing around as stiff-limbed as the teen I spotted practising for the occasion.

Among the speakers at the conference was renowned writer and historian Ramachandra Guha, the inspiration for my PhD on zamindari private forest abolition in the Nilgiri Wayanad (the lower-plateaued Gudalur) and an informal thesis mentor. My father, BJ Krishnan, an advocate who specialised in forest and wildlife law, had come to know Guha after they first met in the late ’80s, at a meeting in Bengaluru organised by the environmentalist SR Hiremath, founder of the Samaj Parivartana Samudaya (an environmental organisation led by volunteers).

Hiremath and my father were members of the Save the Western Ghats Movement in the late 1980s, and walked together in the Save the Western Ghats March that took place between November 1987 and February 1988.

Environmental doyens like Hiremath, Goa Foundation founder Claude Alvares, Pandurang Hegde of the Appiko movement and Sunderlal Bahuguna, Chipko movement founder, were frequent house guests. I cherish my schoolboy interactions with them. Decades later, my little son Yathi would go on evening walks with Alvares in the Aramby forest ridge near our Ooty home.

While I could not participate in the Tamil Nadu leg of the march, which in the Nilgiris took place in Gudalur, I eagerly anticipated the finishing Goa leg in 1987. But my parents, two uncles and three other members of the Save Nilgiris Campaign drove to Goa without me, leaving me at my grandparents’ home because attending would have meant missing my guitar lessons.

I was “home-schooled” in a sense – growing up in a public-minded family and surrounded by passionate, selfless patriots we called family friends. Regular school was uneventful and unkind. It was at home that I learnt my lessons for life.

I fondly recall Bahuguna, who often stayed at our home, affectionately calling me “Siddhartha Maharaj”. His gentle, Himalayan grace stood in stark contrast to my physics teacher at school calling me and my fellow backbenchers dullards or “useless, just standing there like Ooty trees”. As for Uncle Claude – as I addressed Claude Alvares then and still do now – his irreverence and anger towards the system were infectious. As a young boy, I was fortunate enough to sit and eat with such admirable figures.

After school and then a decade of college and university in Chennai, I headed to Bengaluru in 2005 to join the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment– ATREE – as a post-doctoral researcher. Over 18 years I have lectured and spoken in PhD and MSc classrooms and at conferences and seminars across India, Europe and North America.

But speaking at NilgiriScapes as an academic gave me a dearer sense of accomplishment. For these biologically and culturally diverse mountains gave me my invaluable heritage and a rich subject for research: the conflicts surrounding nature, and the nature of these conflicts. The occasion was also special because I belong to the Badaga community, a large, indigenous group in the Nilgiris.

Guha has argued persuasively in Varieties of Environmentalism (co-authored with the political ecologist Joan Martinez-Alier) that responses to environmental conflicts – including major mobilisations like the Narmada movement and local protests over natural resource access and control – constitute India’s environmentalism.

The dominant modes of protest have typically followed Gandhian principles: peaceful sit-ins or dharnas, walks and marches. Awareness-raising walks and even runs, along with appeals and petitions, serve as non-confrontational ways to counteract development trajectories that potentially degrade and pollute.

These approaches were adopted successfully by the Save Nilgiris Campaign. Founded by my banker uncle Dharmalingam Venugopal in August 1986, with my father serving as the other core member, the Save Nilgiris Campaign ushered in the environmental movement in these mountains. Before the emergence of the Save Nilgiris Campaign, the now defunct, distinctly colonial Nilgiri Wildlife and Environment Association promoted wildlife protection.

I was part of two awareness-raising events the Save Nilgiris Campaign curated: the Save Nilgiris Run in Ooty in May 1988, and the Save Nilgiris March through the rural Nilgiris from December 9-25 that same year. Beyond these two campaigns, which heightened environmental awareness among the Nilgiri public, two achievements remain etched in my memory.

In March 1990, the promoters of a proposed electroplating unit in Masinagudi withdrew their project after the Save Nilgiris Campaign communicated the environmental risks it posed to Governor P C Alexander, President R Venkataraman and the Pollution Control Board, highlighting the potential pollution of the Moyar River and the obstruction to elephant migration. The Nilgiri Wildlife and Environment Association and many civilians also rallied against the project.

Five years later, in February 1995, following an appeal led by the Save Nilgiris Campaign, J Jayalalithaa, then the chief minister cancelled a six MW hydro-electric project proposed for the Kallarpallam River with origins in Kotagiri. This project would have inundated vast evergreen forests. The Save Nilgiris Campaign’s work between 1985 and 1995 not only holds biographical significance for me but also historical significance for resident and settler citizens today, deeply invested in Nilgiri conservation and sustainability.

This is my heritage and its influence is considerable. Twenty-four years later, based on interdisciplinary environmental justice research I initiated on the pollution of the Sandynallah and Pykara rivers near Ooty, and the significant press it got, the district administration took decisive action. Led by Innocent Divya, the collector then, they shut down the Sterling Biotech factory that manufactured gelatine and had been discharging untreated effluents for over a decade.

Today, at the NilgiriScapes conference, however, I want to talk about good work being undone.

How do we preserve the special qualities of these mountains? How do we maintain their biologically and culturally diverse identity that keeps residents and tourists content? How do we stop the contempt and hostility the two groups currently hold for each other?

The erratic climate, the immigration of elite second-homers and livelihood-seeking working classes, and land use changes that cater to year-round tourism – immobilising residents with traffic snarls– are all changing the Nilgiris in ways only rivalled by the arrival of the British.

The situation is so bad that Shantha Thiagarajan, a senior journalist with The Times of India (also an aunt) who was an active member of the Save Nilgiris Campaign, filed a petition in the Chennai High Court. The court ordered a carrying capacity study for the Nilgiris and recommended an interim e-pass system requiring tourists to register online (the e-pass system was implemented from May 7 to June 30 this year, across the Nilgiris and the Palanis, as a data collection measure at this initial stage, then extended till September 30).

These matters need not have reached the courts had the recommendations of the Gadgil panel, which my father was fortunate to be part of, been implemented by the central and state governments.

The protection universe and the NBR

Nilgiri scholars and activists benefited from Guha’s perspective, both heartening and illuminating, when he argued in his concluding talk at NilgiriScapes that the Nilgiris do not have it as bad as the Western Himalayas. For him, comparing these two mountains is important for context. Unlike the Garhwal Himalayas, devastated by military- and religion-related infrastructure projects, the Nilgiris are lucky.

Indeed, the Nilgiris have been relatively fortunate, but they have not escaped considerable damage. The Western Ghats Expert Ecology Panel adopted a layered approach and gridded the Western Ghats; treating Protected Areas as a separate category, it demarcated Eco-Sensitive Zones based on sensitivity levels in each state: ESZ1 for high sensitivity, ESZ2 for moderate sensitivity and ESZ3 for low sensitivity. The Western Ghats Expert Ecology Panel classified 64% of the Western Ghats as an ESA.

You can call Gadgil India’s preeminent scientist of space, a veteran surveyor of sustainability. His Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve zoning hit a policy home run. But this time, his ecological zoning became a point of political contention and unfairly so. The space scientist K Kasturirangan replaced him. The High-Level Working Group that he headed reduced the Ecologically Sensitive Area coverage to 37%. This diminished area they called “naturalscapes”. The rest became “culturalscapes”. In Gadgil’s words, the aim was to “maintain oases of diversity in a desert of ecological devastation’”.

The Central Information Commissioner ordered in April 2012 that the ministry make the report public. The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change released the English version for public feedback; then, an uproar ensued in Kerala’s high ranges. Priests of the Syro Malabar Catholic Church in the districts of Idukki and Pathanamthitta mobilised farmers. Communist party members joined the protests: “Zoning will affect farmer livelihoods”, they claimed.

The panel insisted on demarcating zone boundaries through community consultation and participation. So, what spooked peasants, their priests and politicians?

There are two narratives: one the mainstream one, and the other, the veteran-insider story. According to the establishment, the Gadgil report, while environmentally friendly, was impractical. Critics claimed it would hurt energy needs, states would suffer revenue losses and that the Western Ghats Ecology Authority was not necessary when existing state laws could protect the ecology of the Ghats.

The second story is Gadgil’s own.

In his book’s chapter on the Western Ghats Expert Ecology Panel, there are grimmer insider perspectives of officialdom. They pivot around “information”– withholding crucial information, denying access to industry citing data and Protected Areas databases, not making the Western Ghats Expert Ecology Panel report public, and, when it was released, concealing public feedback on the report. There were charges that it contained “foreign” information– the report, released in English, was not accessible to all local communities, whereas mining interests were quick to respond. The idea of disinformation spread, playing up people's fears of increased administrative control, and with it, extortion and displacement.

The High-Level Working Group’s reduction of the Ecologically Sensitive Area did not temper political and social unease around it. The Ministry of Environment’s decision to implement this adjustment in November 2013 prompted hartals in Kerala. Other states like Karnataka also resisted the report.

Over a decade, five draft Ecologically Sensitive Area notifications were passed, the latest in July 2022. All of them lapsed due to state rejections. On July 1, a day after the landslides in Wayanad, the central government issued a draft notification declaring over 56,800 square kilometres across six states of the Western Ghats as Ecologically Sensitive Areas. The states have been given 60 days to respond.

Similar to the Special Areas Development Programme, which addresses development challenges faced by distinct geographies like the Nilgiris or Palanis, or the Hill Area Conservation Authority, which regulates Nilgiris’ development in “ecologically acceptable” and “environmentally desirable” ways, some propose a new Hill Area Development Authority, which represents an institutional solution.

I do not know if this special programme will gain legislative and budgetary support in the future – the government may argue that better implementation and enforcement of forest and wildlife laws and Hill Area Conservation Authority regulations suffice.

The ghost of good work

Thirteen years since the report, natural calamities have continued to ravage the Western Ghats. In 2019, monsoonal hyperactivity triggered floods and landslides in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala. Landslides are a common occurrence in the Nilgiris and Palanis during cyclones and severe monsoonal periods.

A year earlier, in 2018, devastating floods drowned Kerala. This July, it was the 86,000 square metres of land ravaged in Wayanad that sounded the alarm. Each monsoon brings a resurrection of the Western Ghats Expert Ecology Panel report’s relevance. Every time the Ghats’ vulnerable public suffers from sliding soil and swollen rivers, a ghost haunts the moisture-laden Western Ghats.

The ghost of good work.

Siddhartha Krishnan is an environmental sociologist with interests in environmental history and justice. A senior faculty member at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, ATREE, he leads its Ecosystems and Human Well-being Programme. He is also a documentary film-maker and is part of the organising committee of NilgiriScapes.

This article first appeared on The Kodai Chronicle.

Also read:

Ramachandra Guha: Why a sustainable future looks brighter for the Nilgiris than the Garhwal Himalaya