I was born in 1942 on the outskirts of Pune city. Situated on the Deccan Plateau 20 km east of the crestline of the Western Ghats, Pune is flanked by eastward spurs from that mountain range. Vetal hill, connected right up to the Western Ghats by a chain of hills, is the highest point in the city and was within easy walking distance from our house. From the terrace of our house one saw range after range of hills of the Western Ghats, many of them famous in Maratha history as Shivaji’s hill forts.

Baba, my father Dhananjay Ramchandra Gadgil was an economist who believed in working with people, and had collaborated with farmers of Ahmednagar district to help establish the first cooperative sugar mill in India in 1949. He greatly enjoyed bird watching and from a very young age initiated me into watching birds around our house and on walks on the Vetal hills. So, I fell in love with the Western Ghats at a tender age, perhaps of three years.

A bird I particularly enjoyed watching was the green bee-eater. When I was 14, I noticed some without the pin feather sticking out of their tails. I asked Baba if this was a different species; we looked up the bird books in our library including Salim Ali’s Book of Indian Birds. We could find no explanation; he said why don’t you write to Salim Ali, I know him and am sure he will respond. Indeed, Salim Ali did so three days later explaining that the pin feather would be missing for some time after the annual moult, but will regrow in a few weeks. Salim Ali regularly visited Pune to study the bay, a weaverbird. I met him on his next visit, found his enthusiasm infectious and decided to follow in his footsteps and become a field ecologist.

My parents and I spent two weeks every summer in Lokmanya Tilak’s bungalow on top of Sinhagad, one of Shivaji’s hill forts. There were no roads then and I eagerly looked forward to climbing up the steep slopes. Three-fourths of the way up the slope was the outer line of defence for the fort in the form of settlements on smaller side plateaus. Here in a few huts, lived the forest dwelling buffalo herders, Dhangar Gavlis, and the guards group of Kolis. We would enjoy refreshing glasses of buttermilk from the Gavlis and chat with them. Baba was greatly interested in the common people of our country and the two of us would occasionally venture to their settlements where I would admire their well nourished buffaloes and also meet the Kolis.

 

So, I grew up to be a very different person from the usual brand of nature lovers who view the common people of the country as enemies of nature. I was fascinated by birds and butterflies, but also by buffaloes and sheep and was at home with buffalo keepers. I joined Salim Ali on several of his bird study trips to the wetland of Bharatpur in the 1970s. On these trips he would always curse the buffaloes and buffalo keepers and declared that once the buffaloes and buffalo keepers were banished, the birds of Bharatpur would be secure.

I had my doubts because I knew he had no objective evidence to back up this prejudice. Indira Gandhi respected Salim Ali and at his urging declared Bharatpur as a national park in 1982, banning all access to villagers and their livestock. This was a great blunder for the wetlands were now choked by the growth of a water-loving grass Paspalum kept in check earlier by the grazing of buffaloes. Moreover, when the buffalo keepers protested there was police firing leading to tragic death of seven villagers.

Dam construction which had slowed down after the 1920s, resumed with full vigour post-independence with Jawaharlal Nehru declaring that dams were the temples of modern India. One of these was on Koyna, a major tributary of river Krishna in Maharashtra Western Ghats. In 1954, when I was 12 years old, construction of this project was in full force. The Maharashtra Irrigation Commission, of which Baba was a member, held one of its meetings at the project construction site.

Baba was at once a nature-lover and an egalitarian economist. He fully appreciated that the Koyna project was imposing severe external costs through large-scale destruction of the Western Ghats forests and destroying livelihoods of people whose lands were submerged as well as exacerbating economic inequalities by failing to properly compensate and rehabilitate them. He was normally a very cheerful person, but at dinner that evening, he was distraught and for the first time in my experience very depressed. He said, Madhav, I do believe that we need electricity to drive industrial progress, but surely we should not be paying these environmental and social costs. That is how, at the age of 12, I became dramatically aware of the environment and development conundrum.

Satara was even closer to the Western Ghats; my mother hailed from Satara so we frequently went there. Yavateshwara was a hill close by and one day, again in 1954, I went there for a trek with our gardener’s young son. Not having carried any water we were thirsty after a 3-hour trek in the hot sun. At last we had reached the lonely temple on the hill top. It had a large Gular tree and in the shade was a well and next to it the priest’s house. When we requested him for water, he curtly asked: ‘Are you Brahmins? I have water only for other Brahmins.’ It was then that I vividly realized why both Baba and my mother Pramila said that caste was an abomination. I replied that we are not Brahmins and we walked on.

I thus became even more acutely aware of the inequities of Indian societies and how the costs of environmental damage were being imposed on the weak and the powerless and how we must not let this go on in a country whose Constitution declares that people are its sovereign rulers.

 

I toyed with the idea of doing a PhD thesis with Salim Ali, but decided that I wanted to acquire a broader understanding of science and should join some first-rate university. Luckily my newly acquired wife, Sulochana, a mathematician, and I were admitted to Harvard. We proceeded there when I was 23 and Sulochana 21 years old. Harvard helped me imbibe the spirit of science so neatly captured in J.D. Bernal’s edict that ‘Science is a systematic enterprise of skepticism.’ Throughout my life I have always refused to take anything on authority, subjecting all assertions to careful scrutiny.

Having successfully completed a PhD thesis, which became a citation classic, I served as a lecturer on biology at Harvard for the next two years. This was an excellent opportunity to broaden my understanding of the discipline. The standard undergraduate ecology course at Harvard at that time dealt with living organisms and their physical environment without considering the role of human beings, clearly the most dominant of all the living organisms. I attempted to design a course that made up this deficiency.

Humans are a very complex species and have been playing a variety of roles in different ecosystems in different localities and at different times in history; these roles have depended on their social, economic and political organization, their values, their cultures and the science and technology at their command. It is an enormous challenge to understand all these complexities, but I made a serious attempt, and was gratified that a large numbers of undergraduates attended and enjoyed the course.

 

In 1971 I returned to India eager to get back to my beloved Western Ghats. I was initially attached to the Agharkar Research Institute in Pune and was delighted to have as a colleague my old teacher from my undergraduate days, V.D. Vartak, in whose company I had enjoyed botanizing on the Western Ghats. The natural heritage of the Western Ghats has been on a continual downslide since the British established their hold in early 19th century. This downslide had further accelerated thanks to the increasing pace of construction of river valley projects, the temples of modern India as Pandit Nehru called them. Vartak told me that the only patches of primaeval natural vegetation now intact on the Western Ghats close to Pune were sacred groves protected by the local people on religious and cultural grounds. We decided that we must survey these sacred groves, before they too vanish.

With assistance from Vartak’s classmates, deputy chief of the state forest department, we conducted a field study in the hills of Velhe, the catchment of the Panshet Dam. It was a fascinating experience: trekking up to villages with significant patches of sacred groves, making notes on their size, botanical composition, and animal life, talking to local people about their traditions, beliefs and ecological knowledge.

The moment we reached a village, the forest guard guide would vanish from sight only to appear the next morning. Our hosts informed us that he would go to a neighbouring village where he demanded a full chicken to be cooked for his dinner, enjoyed the meal washed down with a bottle of country liquor, and slept soundly till the next morning. On the third day we saw a small gathering of villagers being addressed by a forester sitting on a chair. We passed by and asked in the next village what that meeting was all about. They said that he was asking for bids for the amount of bribe to be allowed to encroach on the Reserve Forest.

 

While chatting with the villagers, the history of the hills unfolded before our eyes, a history very different from the common urban misconceptions. These misconceptions held that it was the short-sightedness, greed and improvidence of the villagers that had denuded the catchments of the dams on the Western Ghats, despite honest attempts of the irrigation engineers and forest officials to preserve the tree cover. In reality the villagers said that they left intact valuable trees such as mango, amla and myrobolan while clearing the plots for their 15-year cycle slash and burn agriculture.

 

As soon as roads reached these remote hills that had never been a part of any cash economy, the engineers accompanied by timber and coal merchants approached and told the villagers that they would have to leave and would be given land for cultivation somewhere else. So, they might as well cash all the trees on their land, persuading them to sell huge mango trees for as little as half a rupee. In a couple of years, the area had become largely treeless. In this way corrupt forest department officials liquidated much of the reserve forest in collusion with the timber merchants.

Apart from these valuable insights into the operation of the social, political and economic forces acting in the society, our data clearly showed that people perceived and valued the ecosystem services that the sacred groves offered and were continuing to protect them because they wished to avail themselves of these benefits. Most groves protected water sources, many sheltered valuable medicinal plants, while larger ones served as refugia for animals hunted outside the sacred groves.

Six months later, I received a letter from the people of Gani, a village on the western slopes of northern Western Ghats in Raigad district, who were shocked by Forest Department marking trees in their grove for felling. I reached the village post-haste and saw their grove of fifteen hectares, all of it in its primeval state: there had never been any felling in the grove within human memory. The entire surrounding region had been completely deforested, and people had no source of wood or leaf litter for preparing the paddy fields except for the grove. Moreover, apart from a village well, the only perennial water source for the cattle or for the people working in the field was a spring in the grove.

I spent a couple of days with them, documenting these facts and then met forestry officials. He had little interest in any details but remarked that while he would grant the request of the villagers since I pleaded for them, such groves were nothing but worthless ‘stands of over matured timber.’ This vividly brought to me how people at the grassroots valued ecosystem services and how the bureaucracy trashed such services.

Pune and field work with Vartak was enjoyable, but there were limitations. So, I was delighted when I was approached by Professor Satish Dhawan, Director of the Indian Institute of Science. He was thinking of establishing an interdisciplinary group of biologists, physicists, economists and linguists with interest in mathematical modelling. It was wonderful to be at IISc for the next 33 years.

 

On joining IISc in 1973 I told Professor Dhawan that while I was appointed as a mathematical biologist and would continue my work in that field, I was also keen on ecological field research. He was himself a friend of Salim Ali and was very supportive. So, I managed to set up a field research programme at Bandipur National Park.

One of my major scientific interests was methods for assessing animal and plant populations. I looked up the literature and discovered that there were absolutely no estimates of elephant populations from anywhere in India, and decided to attempt to estimate the elephant populations of the large and wildlife rich contiguous forest tract of Bandipur and Nagarhole in Karnataka, Mudumalai in Tamilnadu and Wayanad sanctuary in Kerala. M.Y. Ghorpade, then Finance Minister of Karnataka was an enthusiastic wildlife photographer and often visited Bandipur in pursuit of his hobby. So, I got to know him well at a young age.

The three elephants that carried the tourists around Bandipur would be left free for grazing with chains and bells in the forest for the night. Their mahuts would go get them back in the morning and I often accompanied them. I would ride on their bare necks sitting behind one of the mahuts, and listen to them chatting with each other. The elephants were fond of ficus tree leaves and as they rode back the mahuts would lop leaves of any ficus species that were readily accessible from the elephant back.

One day the mahouts’ conversation turned to the impact of their lopping ficus leaves. They said that the sanctuary was meant not just for elephant rides for tourists, but for birds and bats and squirrels and monkeys and all sorts of other wildlife. Ficus trees played a critical supportive role for wildlife because they fruited frequently, and often at times of the year when there was no other fleshy fruit available. Our lopping would reduce this fruit production and thereby hurt the larger interests of wildlife and that was undesirable. In 1974 they were saying exactly what was argued in a famous paper by John Terborga decade later when he discussed the role of ficus species as keystone resources in Amazon forest.

 

Ghorpade was gheraoed one afternoon in 1975 in his office by basket weavers of Karnataka complaining that excessive cutting of bamboo by the paper industry in the state was depriving them of their livelihood. He discussed this complaint with the forest department and the paper industry. They assured him that the complaint was totally unjustified and that they were prudently managing the bamboo resources. But Ghorpade knew better and did not believe them. So, he asked me to undertake an impartial assessment of what was actually happening. This took me to the West Coast Paper Mill at Dandeli, in the district of Uttara Kannada in Karnataka. The five-year bamboo resource study from 1976-80 was a most educative experience. It brought me into close contact with the managers of the West Coast Paper Mill, various forest officials, and because of my interest in the knowledge, practices and livelihood strategies of the people at grassroots with farmers, livestock keepers and people from the fishing communities of the district. The conclusion that emerged was that the paper mill, aligned to the foresters, was in fact rapidly exhausting the bamboo resources of the state.

 

During my school days I read Science and the Modern World by the mathematician-philosopher A.N. Whitehead and his edict that science must anchor itself firmly to the solid bedrocks of objective facts, however unpalatable had stuck in my memory; it is a precept on which I have acted throughout my life. Beginning with my undergraduate course at Harvard focusing on humans as components of ecosystems and my field studies of the sacred groves, elephant population and management of bamboo resources, I had continued to develop a holistic perspective, squarely facing truths unpalatable to powerful interests in the society on the environment-development challenge.

As environmental consciousness took root in the country in the early 1970s, the Planning Commission made Environmental Impact Assessment mandatory for all major projects in 1977. One such project was the Bedthi Hydroelectric Project in Uttara Kannada. I was a member of the EIA team and was shocked when the assessment was conducted in great haste, and the committee pressurized to clear the project. I was unhappy and decided to undertake an alternative assessment. This was possible because I had the Detailed Project Report and pertinent maps.

 

The exercise, however, required human resources and fortunately, because of my five years of bamboo study, I had many friends among farmers of the district. Some of them were going to be adversely affected by submergence of their land. They were all members of a well managed cooperative society, the Totagars Cooperative Society at Sirsi. Many of them were also teachers and students in the local college in Sirsi. This college community enthusiastically volunteered to provide the requisite human resource for undertaking such a public participatory open assessment. I also received valuable technical inputs from relevant disciplines such as economics and water resource management from my colleagues at the Indian Institute of Science and Indian Institute of Management in Bengaluru.

I grabbed this chance and over 15 months during 1979-80 we concluded a detailed ground level study estimating all the relevant parameters and cast it into a proper framework. The clear conclusion that emerged was that the project was not justified even on economic grounds let alone on grounds of environmental considerations. Armed with this material we organized a seminar hosted by Totagar Cooperative Society in early 1981. Among the distinguished participants were Sunderlal Bahuguna from Uttarakhand, M.K. Prasad, a leading figure of the popular science movement, Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad and Shivaram Karanth the great writer and Yakshagana artist of Karnataka. Several members of the Government of Karnataka, including senior officials of forest and planning departments, joined although the Power Corporation pulled out at the last moment.

 

The seminar triggered a very fruitful follow up development. In his speech Shivaram Karanth emphasized that while in this particular case the farmers were on solid ground, they themselves needed to do much more to take care of their local environment. A group of active farmers led by K.M. Hegde responded positively and the day after the seminar we held a discussion with the farmers of Bhairumbe village under a banyan tree. This led to the formulation and execution of the Uttara Kannada Ecodevelopment project. This was a most rewarding experience in participatory basic and action research that I pursued over the next 25 years. The activities focused on the sustainable use of the ecosystems of the rice fields, the betelnut orchards, and management of hills.

Having been recognized as an able exponent of environmental perspective in the context of the environment-development duality, I had many opportunities to engage in policy formulation and drafting of legislation. One such was as a member of the science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, from 1986 to 1989. Sam Pitroda in charge of the government’s Technology Missions was a fellow member and Jairam Ramesh was his right hand man. Moreover, he comes from Chikmagalur district in Western Ghats and was interested in my work. Naturally he asked me to chair the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel when it was established in 2010.

As a follow up of Earth Summit at Rio in 1992, I worked with World Wildlife Fund in conceiving the concept of People’s Biodiversity Registers (PBR), aimed at promoting folk ecological knowledge and wisdom by devising more formal means for their maintenance, and by creating new contexts for their continued practice and for providing a basis for generating management prescriptions to reflect the aspirations of the people. During 1996-1998, 52 such documents were prepared from village clusters distributed in eight states and union territories. They revealed a picture of generally declining productivity and diversity of living resources.

 

There were, however, notable exceptions; two of the case studies provided examples of self-organized systems of management that had successfully protected, and indeed promoted, restoration of forest and wildlife resources. The PBRs also indicated a widespread erosion of practical ecological knowledge and traditions of sustainable use and conservation because those most intimately dependent on and knowledgeable about biodiversity belong to the economically and politically most disadvantaged segments of the society.

In some cases, the PBR exercises encouraged people to put such measures for more prudent use of local biodiversity resources into practice. The committee to formulate India’s Biological Diversity Act in 1998 took on board these ideas and the establishment of Biodiversity Management Committees in Panchayats, Nagarpalikas and Mahanagarpalikas is now mandatory under the act. This entails genuinely empowering local communities. Unfortunately, this is anathema to the ruling classes and they have successfully sabotaged its implementation.

All over the world mountains, endowed as they are with high levels of environmental heterogeneity, are treasure troves of natural diversity. Thus, in the Western Ghats the annual rainfall ranges from as much as 8000 mm in the southwestern corner of the upper Nilgiris to a mere 500 mm in the Moyar gorge just 30 km to its east. In contrast, the annual rainfall spans a range of no more than 1000 mm over hundreds of kilometres across the Deccan plateau. Moreover, mountains, being less hospitable to human occupation, retain much larger areas under natural or semi-natural biological communities. This is why the Western Ghats and the eastern Himalayas are today the most significant repositories of India’s biodiversity.

Amongst them, the Western Ghats scores over the eastern Himalayas in harbouring a larger number of species restricted to India alone. Not only are the Western Ghats and eastern Himalayas biological treasure troves, they are also two of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, a hotspot being a biodiversity-rich area that is also under a high degree of threat.

 

In view of the environmental sensitivity and ecological significance of the Western Ghats region, and the complex interstate nature of its geography, as well as possible impacts of climate change on this region, the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India, constituted a Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) by an order dated 4 March 2010. The main objective was to assess the status of ecology, to demarcate ecologically sensitive areas and to make recommendations for the conservation, protection and rejuvenation of the Western Ghats based on extensive consultations with states.

The WGEEP report advocated replacing the current pattern of exclusionary development and exclusionary conservation by an inclusive regime by respecting the existing constitutional and legal provisions for environmental protection and democratic devolution of the decision-making process. The report’s objective assessment of the prevailing situation and the recommendation that it should be taken to all the concerned gramsabhas and appropriate regulatory as well as promotional measures be decided upon through a bottom-up democratic process were unacceptable to those currently benefiting from the perpetuation of the crony capitalism.

Apart from regulatory measures WGEEP proposed introduction of positive incentives. For instance, while suggesting that organic agriculture should be promoted throughout the Western Ghats it suggested that the farmers should be paid incentive payments for sequestration of carbon in the soil. It also proposed payment of conservation service charges to panchayats for continued maintenance of sacred groves.

 

Our account of Lote Chemical complex in Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra is an example of why those in power were unhappy with the report. I personally spent several days on a field visit and had a detailed discussion with the local Abhyas Gat (Study Group), and saw the Common Effluent Treatment Plant and surrounding areas, including the Dabhol creek and held discussions with community members. Contrary to information provided by authorities in the Secretariat in Mumbai, the Abhyas Gat had been totally inactive, with no meetings over more than two years. In spite of their demand, a representative of Kotavale village that had suffered maximally from pollution was not included in the Abhyas Gat. The CETP could not handle the quantity of effluent it was receiving, and its functioning was highly defective.

In 2000, 30 schoolchildren near Lote MIDC became unconscious due to inhalation of poisonous gases. People also reported that many industries at Lote were pumping toxic waste into ground water through bore wells. There had been significant decline in fish landings from Dabhol creek due to pollution, and severe loss of employment opportunities for members of fishing communities. Our quick estimates suggested that while 10,000 people were employed in the chemical industry 20,000 people from the fishing community had lost their livelihoods. People of Ratnagiri district frequently demonstrated peacefully against recurring pollution problems. We examined the records for 600 days in Ratnagiri district collector’s office and found that there were protests on as many as 191 days. In every case these were suppressed by invoking police powers.

 

Unhappy with such facts being brought out in an official report, the ruling dispensation attempted to first suppress and then subvert the report. The central and the state governments concerned refused to honour the WGEEP recommendation that any decision relating to it must be taken only after extensive consultations with the gramsabhas of the Western Ghats who must be provided pertinent regional language versions.

In Maharashtra, the government uploaded a deliberately distorted summary in Marathi on its website that gave the utterly misleading impression that WGEEP prescribed that a set of draconian restrictions be imposed on the people without their having any say in the matter. There were other strong vested interests engaged in forest encroachments that joined the governments in protesting against WGEEP. However, the report’s message slowly got across to the people, thanks to a Malayalam translation by Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad.

 

Disasters floods affected all of Kerala in 2018. However, the authorities assured the people that this was a once in a century event unlikely to repeat. But there have again been serious floods accompanied by landslides that killed a number of people in the northern parts of Kerala in 2019 and again in 2020.

With these the tide has begun to turn with even politicians admitting that the WGEEP report deserved serious attention. In the landslide incident at Pettimudi in Rajamala near Munnaron 6 August 2020 a big rock overtopping the tea plantations slipped down over the settlements of Tamil dalit labourers, claiming the lives of 62 people, including 19 children. Around eight people were missing, with their bodies yet to be retrieved.

The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel had designated this locality as a region of highest ecological sensitivity, ESZ1, with increase of rainfall in steep elevation. High rainfall and steep slopes render localities susceptible to landslides; hence ESZ1 areas are susceptible to landslides. The extent of intact natural vegetation is a third component for assignment of ESZ1.

Landslides are under check in areas with intact natural vegetation because of the binding of the soil by roots. However, any disturbance to natural vegetation renders a locality with high rainfall and with steep slopes susceptible to landslides. Such disturbances may include construction of buildings and roads, mining, replacement of natural vegetation or levelling of the land using heavy machinery. We strongly recommended avoiding these kinds of disturbances. Unfortunately, not only were our recommendations to halt these activities ignored, the pace at which these disturbances are taking place has also increased since 2011.

The ruling clique has been rejecting the report on grounds of being against development, essential to alleviate poverty in the country. But the objective evidence clearly indicates that the ongoing pattern of development is merely lining the pockets of a small number of already immensely rich people. If this were not so, and economic development was genuinely benefiting all segments of the society, then surely poorly paid tea garden labourers forced to live in shacks, not on level ground, but in the ravines, would not be getting crushed under landslides as has been happening in Puthumala in 2019 and in Pattumudi 2019.

 

The process of warming of the earth led by climate change has increased the frequency of cyclones over the Arabian Sea, but so far, all these were going west towards Oman. In an unprecedented development, a severe cyclonic storm, Nisarg, made landfallon the Konkan coast for the very first time. While Nisarg is the first ever severe cyclonic storm to make a landfall on the West Coast of India, it will surely not be the last since the Arabian Sea is bound to continue getting warmer and warmer. So, many more severe cyclones will hit the West Coast, perhaps of Goa or Karnataka or Kerala in the coming years and inflict colossal economic damage.

The continuing downslide of the natural heritage of Western Ghats will hopefully be stopped, even reversed in the near future by its educated youth seizing the initiative. While the educational facilities for the vast majority of its people in rural and forested areas have been thoroughly unsatisfactory, a significant proportion of youth from the disadvantaged sections of the society have by now acquired basic education so that they can for the first time pursue learning on their own. This sea change has resulted from the information communication technology that has created the smartphone, which can be wisely used for enhancing the assets of natural resources.

 

It is this youth who can become a strong force to stop the current pattern of development to benefit a small segment of the society at the cost of the vast majority of people in the unorganized sector mostly living in rural and forested tracts or pursuing fishing along the rivers or on the sea coast. They could ensure that industry and urban centres stop imposing the cost of their activities on the rural hinterland and on the rivers and the sea. They could ensure that the country moves towards empowering its entire population who would strive to recreate a healthy base of natural resources. One may then look forward to the day when the Western Ghats will regain its endowment of natural ecosystems.

With such a peaceful revolution India can come to resemble Switzerland with its verdure and direct democracy. The extensive forest cover of Switzerland has developed over the last 160 years. Prior to that only about 4% of that country’s lands had retained forest and there were disastrous landslides. This led to a public awakening and a restoration of the tree cover. But this regeneration was all managed by local communities and not by any government department. Working together, communities of Switzerland, practicing genuine participatory democracy, have revived the country’s ecology. I am sure that one day Western Ghats too will see its ecology revived through the exercise of a similar genuine participatory democracy.