IN the bland terminology of geographical sciences, the Western Ghats is just a prominent landform in peninsular India. Few in India would have heard of it. Far less would know of its present reality and only an insignificant few would feel concerned and would want to be more involved. Even its hybrid name does not strike a chord in us. Sahyadris perhaps would have been more apt. Irrespective of what we call it, this strip of land surface has had a much longer geological history and stronger influence on the evolutionary unfolding of life forms and human cultures in peninsular India than any other feature. In recent times, the Western Ghats has been in the news repeatedly. A few years ago, it was regarding a couple of controversial expert committee reports. More recently, it was in the news due to natural disasters.

The eyes of an individual cannot take in a topographic feature extending over 1500 km. No single mind can get a panoramic image of a landscape extending over a lakh and a half square kilometres with an extremely complex terrain and even more complex cloak of living communities covering it. Unlike the Himalaya, about which most of us in India have some notion embedded deep in our culture, there is no recollection of the Western Ghats in the minds of the people of this country.

Western Ghats has a very long geological history; some of it is inscribed on the rocks and the terrain. It is more faintly recapitulated in the bio-geographic kinships of plants and animals. Then there is a history of humans in these mountains, very unclear and difficult to unravel by genomic mapping alone. Then of course, there is the more recent history of organized assault on the mountains. This is a very complex story, which continues to play out even now. In the following account, a few veins alone have been followed on the assumption that they are important for us to see some glimpses of the future of the Ghats and of us. The future is often indicated by the past, if only we care to look at it in that way.

 

Geologically the Western Ghats and the peninsular India of which it is the western edge, is really ancient. It is a section of the earth’s crust, which broke away from its surroundings approximately 150 million years ago and drifted thousands of kilometres north-northeast. Beginning from about 60 million years ago it rammed into the Asiatic landmass and got partly driven under it in a process called subduction. This resulted in the lifting up of the Himalayas, the Tibet Plateau and vast areas of southwestern China. This massive collision resulted in a slight buckling of the western edge of the Indian peninsular rock slab, raising it up as a welt, which we now call the Western Ghats. The same process gave the Peninsula, the part we now call the Deccan, a south-south easterly slope. Over millions of years, continuous weathering carved out a complex topography for peninsular India, amidst which the commanding eminence of the Western Ghats gives it a modulating role.

Wind and rain, sunlight and shadows touched by the Ghats affect the lives of plants, animals and humankind in direct and indirect ways, individually and collectively, routinely and at times drastically adversely. Over a long span of time, this vast tract of land along this part of India including the Western Ghats has been geologically stable. Volcanism, burial under ice sheets or flooding by rising seas did not touch it. Spread across many latitudes and altitudes with a range of weather, climate, topography and rocks with various chemical compositions, living systems proliferated and diversified during this long span of time. Proximity to the Equator and the sea assured solar energy and moisture round the year. Hence it became biologically one of the most productive parts of the world. This richness has been its blessing as well as its vulnerability.

 

Western Ghats stretch north to south very close to and parallel to the west coast of India. By aerial distance, on an average, it is hardly 50 km from the coast and rarely wider than 50 km. It conforms to a mental image of a mountain only south of the Karnataka Plateau with steep slopes falling away to the lower plains towards the west and east. In the north, on the other hand, moving westward from the Deccan in Maharashtra, the land rises up gradually to an average elevation of 800 m. There are only a few peaks with elevations reaching to 1500 m or more in this part of the Ghats. South of the Kodagu Ghats, the average elevation of the crest of the main ridge is more than 1500 m. Most of the highest reaches of the Ghats are further south in the Nilgiris, the Palni Hills and the Anaimalais. The highest point in peninsular India is the Anamudi at 2695 m in the Idukky district of Kerala.

The main crestline of the Western Ghats is also the main watershed line for the entire peninsular India from near Kanyakumari in the south to the Tapi River in the north. This is the primary and critical importance of Western Ghats. For almost 43km, the Ghats disappear in the Palakkad district along the Kerala-Tamil Nadu border. This gap is the only discontinuity in the entire length of this mountain chain. The only river that crosses the Ghats is Bharatappuzha originating on the eastern slopes but escaping to the west through the gap. There are a few locations in Maharashtra where the tributaries of the Krishna River have eroded and carried away so much of the Western Ghats substratum that the watershed line has been pushed westward. This can be seen near Pune, south of Kolhapur and further south near Yellapur. In the Karnataka part of the Ghats, rivers such as the Kali and Gangavali have eaten into the crestline and captured extensive areas of the Deccans making them part of the western slopes. These dips in the crestline permit deeper penetration of monsoon winds into the Deccan and decide on flooding or drought in the hinterlands of these states.

 

Located so close to the Arabian Sea, the Western Ghats by blocking the southwest monsoon clouds, causes intense high orogenic rainfall along its western face. A large number of torrential hill streams originating from the Ghat forests flow west into the Arabian Sea. All major peninsular rivers such as Godavari, Krishna and Cauvery originate from the same forested crestline and flow east along the wide stretches of the Deccan. Then crossing the Eastern Ghats, they empty into the Bay of Bengal in extensive deltas. The southernmost rivers such as Vaigai and Tamraparni cross the Tamil Nadu plains to reach the Bay.

Earlier, before the peninsula became so dry, it is possible that the retreat monsoon also might have been heavier and all the rivers had a higher lean season flow. Otherwise the hoary civilizations of the Cholas and the Pandyas could not have flourished in these lands which are at present dry. In short, the entire water availability south of Narmada Valley in India is controlled by the Western Ghats and to be more precise, by its forest cover. Now most of the forest cover is gone. The primary value of the Western Ghats for our country is its watershed potential which will decide the destiny of one third of India’s population.

 

Depending on the perspective of the onlooker, seashore as well as mountain ranges may be a barrier or could also be a highway. Migratory birds remember and follow moonlit surflines along shores in their transcontinental migrations. Mountain goats traversed the great distance from the Alps to the Nilgiris and ended up as the Nilgiri tahr undergoing on the way all the adaptive changes we call evolution. Many Himalayan alpine plants have close relatives in the Shola grasslands so close to the equator. The only peninsular Indian gymnosperm, Podocarpus (Nageia) or the worm like amphibians, caecilians continue as unobtrusive minorities in the shelter of the Ghats where time apparently has stood still. The pioneers of old, who have drifted in, established and transformed themselves into indigenous species.

Refuge seekers whose roots are lost in time are many among plants, animals and even from within the human race. Flotsam and jetsam from past climate changes, conflicts and cultural collapses are often labelled vulnerable species or as tribal inhabitants of the Ghats. Todas of the Nilgiris or the Cholanaikas of the Nilambur forests sought lifestyles of minimum conflict with mainstream societies and survived with minimum of energy expenditure in manipulating their environment. The Kadas and the Malampandarams in the rainforests of the Southern Ghats might have been part of an early human wave along the now forgotten Veddas of the Central Sri Lankan forests. The Badugas, the Kurumbas and the Muduvas are all political refugees or developmental oustees of yore escaping from powerful civilizations whose centres imploded. They became subalterns.

From a vague notion to a composite picture, the Ghats emerged for us only when maps became available. The Survey of India set up by the British East India Company in 1767 consolidated the Western Ghats for the first time for us. The Western Ghats was placed on a sheet of paper with all its complex contours accurately traced by altitude, latitude and longitude giving it a three dimensional reality. This was the first crystallization of the reality of the Western Ghats – on a map.

 

From the very beginning of their arrival, some among the British East India Company officials documented every minute detail of the new lands and the people they encountered. So we have Ward and Conner, Buchanan, Innes, and so many others writing Gazetteers, which still remain the most reliable basic descriptive accounts of at least some sections of the Western Ghats. Even now we lack a comprehensive and cohesive account of the tract of land called Western Ghats, which a layman can understand. It is only very recently that a more detailed image of the Western Ghats began to resolve in our minds, helped by the satellite eye lending a very remote perception.

The Western Ghats with its humid tropical forest biodiversity has its role in accelerating the evolution of modern human culture. Pepper and cardamom, ginger and turmeric were all originally collected from these forests. These were the attractants that brought seafarers from various lands to Malabar. There were sophisticated civilizations in the Deccans and the Tamil Nadu plains, sustained by the forested river catchments in the Ghats, which had the ability to select and convert wild forest biodiversity to crop diversity and the incomparable pharmacopeia of Ayurveda. It was these materials sought by people from far away, which the Arab traders took out from the Malabar Coast.

 

Profits accumulating in the eastern Mediterranean city-states and the feeling of well-being as well as financial security helped many to become patrons of arts and sciences. This led to an explosive growth in the creative arts and analytical thinking we call Renaissance. The synthesis of knowledge from the East and the West transported along with merchandise resulted in an almost alchemical revolution in western science. The Western Ghats had played not a very unimportant role in this historical shift.

This also led to fierce competition and violence between the Christian Western European empires and the Near Eastern Muslim power centres. It was this competition that propelled Vasco da Gama in 1498 to seek the land of spices. There was a spurt in world explorations, colonizations and it also expanded fault zones across the world. Yet another step in this sequence of events was the registration of the British East India Company on 31 December 1600 and the voyages of James Lancaster.

The consortium of British merchants who came to India for trade had become landowners by 1751 thanks to Robert Clive. They became rulers of the eastern part of the country by 1764 by winning the Battle of Buxar. By 1773, Warren Hastings had become the Governor General of India. After the First War of Independence, the British Parliament imposed direct British rule in India in 1858. By 1 June 1874, the East India Company was dissolved. But this rapid progression of political events affected the very social fabric of the country and specifically the ecology of the Western Ghats. The implications of these political events on the Ghats are not fully grasped even now.

 

Hill produce from the Western Ghats has been in demand for long. But now, its availability must increase and plantations need be expanded and the previous sustainable land use patterns altered. For extensive cultivation of all of these require suitable lands and manageable cheap labour. Both of these were available in India. While cotton, jute and indigo expanded in the plains, a new set of crops moved up the peninsular hills, specifically the wet tropical Western Ghats in the far south. Tea, coffee, cinchona, and much later rubber, oil palm and so on competed for space with the indigenous forest vegetation. The practice of plantation agriculture and the impact of plantation based agro-economic changes totally altered the direction of Indian agriculture.

Soldiers, missionaries and mendicants always accompany merchant explorers. Recruiting and putting to work an enormous labour population in the newly raised plantations in the forest clearances had its own pandemic consequences, such as outbreak of malaria, cholera and so on. The demographic fallout of a sudden population spurt in the previously uninhabited higher Ghat forests and its corollary, damage to the remaining forests and the displacement of forest dwellers due to the newcomers, were all repercussions of the plantation culture.

Cash crops still dominate the agricultural land use of the Ghats especially from Karnataka all the way south. Their foreign exchange earning potential, ability to support large labour forces, the unusually long rotation nature of the crops and the present ecological status of the plantation lands create a complex vulnerable situation especially in the light of global climate change.

The colonial contact influenced the Indian ethos in other significant ways. The Abrahamic worldview that the world is exclusively for human use and we the humankind, the chosen ones, have the authority to do anything on earth percolated into us. This dictum absolved us from all environmental responsibilities and freed us from feeling guilty about all our violence towards nature. It also came about that economic justifications could anytime outweigh ethical or ecological arguments. Perhaps unstated, the argument is that if we are to permit natural forests or wildlife to survive, they have to pay for their upkeep.

 

The consortium of merchants who became unwitting rulers suddenly had to confront a subcontinent in strife due to floods, droughts, starvation and violence. Millions were getting displaced. They were compelled to take a series of measures, which curiously still remain most relevant. All these were with respect to the environmental security essential for agricultural security. Not surprisingly, most of them were related to forest protection.

The noteworthy measures included Dalhousie’s Memorandum of Government of India in 1855, which resulted in the establishment of the Forest Department for the country in 1865, the soil scientist Voelcker’s Report in 1893 on the Improvement of Agriculture in India, which dealt with the need to protect hill catchment forests for sustained river flow and the First National Forest Policy in 1894. Because of these measures, vast tracts of ecologically sensitive commons came under government custody.

The takeover of these commons had many plus and minus points. Although for a time people’s pressure on the forests was regulated, the people themselves were kept away from the responsibility of protecting their forests. This alienation still continues to hurt Indian forests. In the name of meeting public needs, Forest Departments officially exploited forests excessively.

 

The British forestry expertise borrowed from the Germans was developed essentially for temperate woodlands. Hence the forestry practices were unsuitable for the far more complex and fragile tropical forests of India. The trend set in to convert natural forests extensively to mono-culture plantations of native hardwood species such as teak or sal and later more of exotic species like eucalyptus. The clearance of natural forests for monoculture plantations accelerated after Independence specifically for providing industrial raw material.

The consequence of the occupation of the hills over the past couple of centuries has been in general disastrous. Landslides, siltation of reservoirs, unprecedented floods and drought, loss of biodiversity, fragmentation and degradation of natural forests, displacement of indigenous people are all part of the adverse impact resulting from the mismanagement of the natural vegetation in the Western Ghats. The vast areas of tree plantations specifically of teak, eucalyptus and acacia monocrops cover ecologically sensitive tracts especially in the lower valleys and also in the higher ridge tops. These are again long gestation crops and the sites occupied by them have been severely degraded needing long-term restoration efforts.

Simultaneously there have been many positive steps also. But for the reservation of forests, the sheer pressure from the expanding population and need for land for agriculture could possibly have wiped out all forests in India. There have been measures to regulate the hunting of wildlife, and safeguard wildlife habitats and scenic landscapes in the Western Ghats through the establishment of Game Reserves. At present, there is an extensive network of Protected Areas all along the Western Ghats.

The major issue, which we all should be concerned about in these times is the unpredictable changes in the climate which have a far more serious impact in India with its enormous land dependent population. But for the Indian establishment, it is not a major issue. Mountains magnify climate change impact through their influence on the atmosphere, through controlling river behaviour and physically directly through landform changes. As Western Ghats is a coastal mountain range, the western coastal plains from Cambay to Kanyakumari will be severely affected by whatever is happening on the Ghats. This is specifically so for Goa and Kerala.

 

The ground situation in the Western Ghats warrants well planned comprehensive corrective interventions. Of course, this is true for the entire country and much of the world. Any environmental issue to be tackled at the root of the problem demands three things. First is the attitude – the way we look at the world and the way we want the world to be. The second is the actual action plan in phased detail with explicit measures to be taken. This depends on the availability of reliable ground data. The third requirement is the basic understanding of what is happening so that our interception point with the ongoing trend is appropriate. This requires deeper understanding of ecological and environmental sciences.

We have to accept that there are serious inadequacies in these fields in understanding what is taking place in the Western Ghats. Of course, for any corrective measure to be sustained needs public support. Here again we have to concede the point that there is only very superficial penetration of these scientific aspects through education and communication into the body of the general public.

 

The restorative action, if it is to be meaningful, has to be implemented in the entire mountain tract. For a massive action programme for the entire Western Ghat tract, this has to be a national priority plan. Western Ghats is only one of the many physiographic regions of the country with a relatively small population. This population may not be able to make this almost regional issue into a national priority action programme. In actual fact, we do not even have a clear-cut demarcation of the boundaries of the Western Ghats. There are a few million people surviving within this 1.5 lakh sq km undulating landscape extending for almost 1600 km spanning six states. Administratively the Ghats is subdivided into states, districts, taluks, panchayats and so on with all governmental activities parcelled out on the basis of these political-administrative fragments.

Democratic decision, at least in theory, has to be on the basis of representative political debate. In every part of our country, where the states have hill regions, those regions are considered backward and the people of these regions have little say in deciding their present or future. This is especially true where the citizens of the hills are Adivasis. It will take a lot of time and effort to marshal public support for many of the drastic sweeping corrective measures. In recent times there had been a few hesitant administrative moves such as that of the Expert Group on the Western Ghats. These so far have failed to achieve any tangible constructive results. In fact the public reaction in general has been rather adverse, specially in Kerala.

 

On a purely theoretical consideration, restoring the ecology of the Western Ghats needs a few concrete steps. The first is to develop a comprehensive picture of the landscape labelled as Western Ghats. There has to be some criteria by which we have to define whether an area is part of the Ghats or not. It could be elevation, bioclimate, or geology.

The next step is to develop a picture of the exact current situation. A mere compilation of present satellite images would not give us a live portrait of the Ghats. There is a geological, biological as well as human historical antecedents stamped on each segment of the Ghats which continue to influence its change. So the depiction of the current scenario has to be on the basis of a detailed ground study – a time consuming effort.

The third step is to prioritize sectors of activities such as forests, agriculture, water resources, human habitations, communication networks and so on. Some sectors need a long gestation period to achieve any tangible result. Different locations in the Western Ghats may have different sectors of priority. We have to pinpoint the most vital, vulnerable as well as valuable sectors for prioritizing intervention and for planning long-term action.

The fourth measure is in a sense an economic auditing. For more than a century, a huge monetary investment has been made in the Western Ghats as in the construction of dams, laying out communication arteries, in developing urban settlements, raising plantations and so on. All of these past developmental activities would have downstream linkages, command area dependencies and supply commitments that cannot be severed abruptly. The exercise is to shore them up as long as possible, enhance their viability and effectiveness in achieving the intended objectives. Restorative activities to be taken up for example should be able to improve water availability in a dam, prolong the lifespan of a road, and through multiple end-use management of a plantation enhance its monetary returns.

Any activity on the land must enhance its watershed value, biodiversity protection, recreational use and so on. The required data for implementing these measures may not be readily available but on the basis of a prior outline plan, it can be collected on the basis of landscape units, drainage basins or administrative units. This data collection also has to be through field surveys because it has to be location-specific.

 

The fifth step is to identify all ongoing governmental schemes such as Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, tribal development in agriculture or forestry sectors. Most of these ongoing programmes have no integration or a regional geographic perspective. They can all be integrated for eco-restorative action through enhancing the biomass production potential of the areas. There are existing laws, institutions, and sectors of activities, which could be adopted for the above stated objectives without further extensive planning or gestation period. Redesigning forestry operations is easier as there is only one custodian – the Forest Department. All existing forest laws and most of the routine procedures are for conservation. Agricultural land use changes in private land holdings on the other extreme end is a more difficult intervention but not altogether impossible. It may be easier to intervene in corporate plantation land holdings.

The sixth measure involves awareness creation and education to enhance public concern as well as improve the knowledge base for the people involved in the actual work so that there is ground support as well as expertise to plan and implement the required action programmes. Redesigning training in agriculture or forest management is easier than inducting the current environmental scenario of India or even basic geographical details of the Western Ghats in school or college curriculum.

 

Unquestionably the Western Ghats is the most vital geographical entity in peninsular India. Its forest cover holds the key to the long-term habitability of the entire peninsular India. The biodiversity potential of the remaining forests demands total protection because it is the heritage of humankind. There are a whole host of problems in setting right the current chaotic scenario but we have no choice but to confront it. The first step is the intention and the conviction to do what is needed for this land. There has to be prioritization on the basis of what is immediately feasible and what would be possible only later on. Nothing would be impossible if we really set our hearts and minds to improve the health of this mountain range.

A lot of information is available though scattered, very many initiatives have been taken, but many of our efforts have not borne fruit because we wanted too much in too little time without even being sure of what is to be our priority. Looked at critically, all the past measures can contribute positively to future measures and help us feel that the Ghats are getting back to the way they should have been.