Fear revisits residents of Western Ghats

Why in the News

The Centre has issued its seventh draft notification proposing to declare 56,825.7 sq km of the Western Ghats an Ecologically Sensitive Area (ESA). Of that, 29,668 sq km spread across 1,449 villages in ten Karnataka districts falls in the State. Hundreds of farmers in the Malnad region have marched against the draft, and their central demand is not that the notification be dropped. They want the Karnataka government to conduct a physical survey of the land and to exclude human settlements and cultivated areas from the proposed ESA boundary. The tension is that the people most opposed to the notification already live under forest restrictions that deny them roads, schools, electricity and clear title, and they read the ESA as freezing those unsettled claims permanently.

What is an Ecologically Sensitive Area?

1. The legal basis: An ESA is an area notified under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, within which specified activities are prohibited, restricted or made subject to closer scrutiny.
2. How it is created: The Centre issues a draft notification proposing the boundary and the restrictions, and allows a fixed period for objections before a final notification can issue. The seventh draft allows 60 days.
3. What it is not: An ESA is a land use regime layered over existing ownership, so it does not by itself transfer land or extinguish a title.

How did the Western Ghats ESA proposal originate?

1. A march, not a ministry: On 1 November 1987 two groups of scientists, ecologists, environmentalists and activists began walking simultaneously from Navapur in Maharashtra’s Dhule district and from Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu towards a common meeting point in Goa, documenting the ecological condition of the landscape along the route.
2. The Goa conference: The effort culminated in a conference in Goa in February 1988, where the ecologist Madhav Gadgil of the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru chaired the technical session on the region’s ecological status.
3. The demand for an expert panel: The group stayed active through a 1998 yatra and meetings in 2009 and on 18 February 2010 at the Keystone Foundation in Kotagiri, Nilgiris, where the then Union Minister for Environment and Forests was asked to constitute an expert panel on the Western Ghats.
4. The panel: On 4 March 2010 the Ministry of Environment and Forests set up the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) under Gadgil, with nine non-government and five official members, to assess the ecological status of the Ghats, demarcate areas to be notified as ecologically sensitive, and recommend conservation measures through wide consultation.

What did the WGEEP recommend, and how was its report handled?

1. A people-oriented model: The report went beyond regulation to propose science-based incentives, including financial rewards for individual farmers and payments for ecosystem services to communities. It cited the Australian Soil Carbon Accreditation Scheme, under which farmers were paid retrospectively for verified increases in soil carbon on regeneratively managed farmland.
2. The restrictions it proposed: These included a complete ban on mining and sand extraction with existing operations phased out within five years or on expiry of lease, restrictions on housing and construction projects exceeding 20,000 sq m, a ban on all “red category” highly polluting industries with existing units to close or relocate within five years, encouragement of organic farming, and closer scrutiny of other development activities.
3. The report was withheld for months: The panel submitted its final report on 31 August 2011. The Ministry resisted disclosure through repeated applications under the Right to Information Act, 2005 and an order of the Central Information Commission, and approached the Delhi High Court seeking a stay, before uploading the report on its website on 23 May 2012.
4. Every State government objected: All the States concerned, including Karnataka and Kerala, opposed the recommendations, and elected representatives particularly in Kerala argued they would severely disrupt local livelihoods.

What did the Kasturirangan High-Level Working Group change?

1. Why it was constituted: Taking the criticism of the WGEEP report into account, the Union Ministry set up a High-Level Working Group (HLWG) under K. Kasturirangan to prepare a “workable and implementable” report on conserving the Western Ghats.
2. What it recommended: The panel visited several places, including Sakleshpur in Hassan district, and submitted its report on 15 April 2013. It recommended that about 37 per cent of the Western Ghats, 59,940 sq km forming a continuous band of natural vegetation stretching roughly 1,500 km across six States, be declared an ESA. Karnataka accounted for the largest share, around 20,668 sq km.
3. The objection from the earlier panel: Gadgil objected strongly in an open letter, stating that the WGEEP had proposed a graded, participatory approach with a major role for grassroots input.
4. What the letter said the HLWG did instead: It had effectively partitioned the landscape, with roughly a third to be protected by “funds and guards” as natural landscape and the remaining two-thirds labelled cultural landscape and left open to development.

What does the seventh draft propose for Karnataka?

1. Seven drafts, none finalised: The Ministry has issued seven draft notifications since 2014. All six earlier drafts were opposed by the States concerned, and residents of the affected regions filed numerous objections against them.
2. The Karnataka share: The 29,668 sq km proposed in the State is spread across 1,449 villages in Belagavi, Chamarajanagar, Chikkamagaluru, Dakshina Kannada, Hassan, Kodagu, Mysuru, Shivamogga, Udupi and Uttara Kannada districts.
3. The instrument has not changed: The draft still rests on the boundary the HLWG proposed, which is why the objection filed against it is the same objection filed against the six drafts before it.

What are the Malnad protests demanding?

1. The march: On 29 August hundreds of farmers from Hosanagara taluk in Shivamogga district marched about nine kilometres from the Ganesha temple in Karanagiri to Hosanagara town, and farmers across Shivamogga and neighbouring Malnad districts are planning similar protests.
2. The demand has narrowed: The central demand is a physical survey of the land by the State government and the exclusion of human settlements and cultivated areas from the proposed boundary.
3. The Kerala model they cite: Kerala reduced its proposed ESA area from 13,108 sq km to 9,937 sq km, comprising 9,107 sq km of forest and 886.7 sq km of non-forest land, after conducting a physical survey. That reduction of more than 3,000 sq km has since been incorporated into the revised notification.
4. The organising vehicle: A large section of farmers has been brought together under the banner of the Western Ghats Raitha Sahakari Vedike, which has launched a website with a tool to help the public file objections online.
5. The shift in position: The organisation is not opposing the notification outright this time, and is instead demanding that the State government follow the Kerala model to minimise the impact.

How has the Karnataka political establishment responded?

1. The stated concerns: The Member of Parliament from Shivamogga, who joined the protest marches, said restrictions on township projects and the push for organic farming were the primary concerns in the Malnad region.
2. The plantation economy’s objection: Many farmers in Shivamogga, Uttara Kannada, Chikkamagaluru and Kodagu who grow plantation crops such as coffee and areca use chemical fertilizers to protect their crops from disease, and ask how plantations are to be protected if such inputs are restricted. Restrictions on house construction are the second stated objection.
3. A legislative airing: The Karnataka Cabinet announced on 3 September 2026 a three-day special session of the legislature from 21 September to discuss drought, which will also take up a detailed discussion on the Kasturirangan report. The Chief Minister agreed to convene it after leaders across parties urged a physical survey, and the decision was welcomed across party lines.
4. The State’s declared position: The Minister for School Education, who is also in charge of Shivamogga district, has said the State government will oppose the draft notification. A former Minister and Congress leader burnt a copy of the Kasturirangan report at a press conference in Tirthahalli.

Why is the fear about existing forest rules rather than the ESA?

1. A displaced village still without power: Uralagallu in Sagar taluk of Shivamogga district houses families displaced by the Linganamakki dam across the Sharavathi river in the 1960s. The village has roughly 50 to 56 families and a population of 150 to 200, with no proper road, school or primary health centre, its nearest bus stop about 10 km away, and no ambulance visit in recent years. It still has no electricity, because the Forest Department has repeatedly denied clearance for road and power-supply works.
2. Children leave the village to study: A majority of parents there send their children to hostels or to relatives’ homes early. One resident’s two children stay about 50 km away at Mavinagundi, and villagers walk 10 km to Kanuru to catch a bus.
3. Roads are blocked in conflict-prone stretches: At Byrapura in N.R. Pura taluk of Chikkamagaluru district, schoolchildren recently encountered a leopard on their way home, and stayed away from school for several days. Parents say a proper road would allow safer transport, and forest regulations continue to block it.
4. Even the local government has no title: In Karimane village of Hosanagara taluk, large parts of the settlement including the gram panchayat building stand on forest land, leaving the panchayat office without an official khata, or title, and the community in administrative limbo.
5. Unsettled claims are the real anxiety: Bagair hukum, or unauthorised, cultivators and people displaced by dam projects are yet to receive the compensatory land promised to them under existing rules, and they fear that an ESA in force would leave those claims unresolved indefinitely.

What is the case for the notification?

1. The rejected report is held to be the better one: Several environmentalists argue that the Kasturirangan report was a “diluted version” of the WGEEP report, which they consider better suited to conserving the Ghats with active local participation.
2. The argument surfaces only after a disaster: Whenever landslips or flash floods strike Kerala or Kodagu, environmentalists blame policymakers for ignoring the WGEEP recommendations. The debate typically subsides within days, as routine concerns over access, amenities, roads and electricity take over.
3. Much of the proposed area is already forest: An environmentalist based in Sagar taluk states that a major portion of the area proposed for the ESA in Karnataka is already notified forest, that the remainder is small, and that there should be no opposition to including it.
4. The restrictions are said to be misread: The same view holds that people with vested interests are misleading the public with false information about the restrictions, that ordinary people have no reason to fear a ban on mining or on red-category industries, and that the push for organic farming benefits everyone.

Challenges to the Western Ghats ESA notification

1. A draft that never becomes a notification produces neither protection nor certainty: Each draft lapses and is reissued, so landowners cannot plan and the ecologically sensitive designation has no legal force in the interim. Eg. The proposal has now run through more than a decade of successive drafts without a single final notification issuing.
   The Fix: Fix a statutory outer limit within which a draft issued under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 must be finalised or formally withdrawn.
2. ESA status does not stop the land use changes that do the most damage: Large hydel, transmission and road projects are cleared through separate forest and wildlife clearance processes that an ESA notification does not displace. Eg. The Athirappilly hydel project in Kerala’s Chalakudy basin has been proposed and revived repeatedly in a stretch the ecology panel placed in its highest sensitivity zone.
   The Fix: Write the prohibition on new hydel and mining leases into the notification itself, rather than leaving each project to a case-by-case clearance.
3. Forest rights claims in the same landscape are unsettled: Restricting land use before individual and community claims are decided converts a pending claim into a permanent denial. Eg. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 requires gram sabha verification of every claim, and recognition remains incomplete across the Western Ghats States.
   The Fix: Settle pending claims before the final notification takes effect, and attach the gram sabha resolution to the boundary record for each village.
4. Tighter protection without habitat management raises human-wildlife conflict: Restricting access and infrastructure inside a landscape does nothing about crop raiding and encounters on the forest edge, which is what residents experience daily. Eg. Kodagu and Hassan districts record repeated elephant crop damage and human casualties, and conflict compensation in Karnataka runs among the highest in the country.
   The Fix: Fund a dedicated conflict mitigation line inside the ESA framework, covering barriers, rapid response teams and time-bound ex gratia payment.

Conclusion

The dispute is no longer about whether the Western Ghats need protection. It is about who verifies the boundary, and on what evidence. A line drawn from remote sensing and contested for over a decade has delivered neither conservation on the ground nor certainty for the people living inside it, and each reissued draft resets the argument to where it began. The question that decides the outcome is whether Karnataka answers this draft with a completed ground survey or with another objection.

Back2Basics: Western Ghats

1. What it is: The Western Ghats is a chain of hills running parallel to India’s western coast, older than the Himalaya, and it intercepts the south-west monsoon to produce the heavy orographic rainfall of the west coast.
2. Global recognition: It is one of the world’s recognised biodiversity hotspots, a designation given to regions with exceptional endemism and severe habitat loss.
3. World Heritage status: UNESCO inscribed a serial property of 39 sites across the Western Ghats on the World Heritage List in 2012.
4. Why endemism matters here: A large share of its amphibians, fish and flowering plants are found nowhere else, and species such as the lion-tailed macaque and the Nilgiri tahr are restricted to this range.

Matching Previous Year Question

“Gadgil Committee Report’ and ‘Kasturirangan Committee Report’, sometimes seen in the news, are related to (a) constitutional reforms (b) Ganga Action Plan (c) linking of rivers (d) protection of Western Ghats”