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Renowned environmental scientist and ecologist Madhav Gadgil passed away on January 7 at Pune, Maharashtra, after a brief illness. He was 82 years old. His cremation took place at 4 pm on Thursday (January 8) at Pune’s Vaikuntha crematorium.
Gadgil, who founded the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Sciences, Bengaluru, had been studying India’s ecology and environment for more than half a century. Gadgil pioneered research on the ecological significance of the Western Ghats. It was for this work that in 2024, the United Nations Environment Programme awarded him their Champions of the Earth award for the year under the ‘Lifetime Achievement’ category. Decades before this, in 1981 he was awarded the Padma Shri in 1981 and Padma Bhushan in 2006.
Fifteen years ago. Madhav Gadgil published one his widely-recognised works was his report submitted to the government as head of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) in 2011. The panel submitted its report after a lot of field visits, interactions with local communities and more. The report categorised the Western Ghats across six states into Eco Sensitive Zones of different gradations: 1 (areas of highest sensitivity), 2 (areas of high sensitivity) and 3 (areas of medium sensitivity). The report also made a lot of recommendations, including no mining or quarrying in areas listed under ESZ1.
Ironically, all states rejected the report; many called it “impractical.” And 14 years later, it has not been implemented in any form yet, across any of the six states home to the Western Ghats in India – even after another panel headed by Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan submitted another, more diluted report that also decreased the area across the Ghats that is to be eco-sensitive.
In his interview with The Hindu last year, he had expressed concerns about the disasters in the Western Ghats, adding that all the recommendations in the report were much needed to avert disasters. “What we witnessed was a model of development being imposed on people: mining operations and polluting industries were forced upon communities without their consent. At the same time, even conservation efforts were imposed in a top-down, authoritarian manner by a forest department that often acted in a tyrannical and anti-people way,” he said.
Apart from this report on the Western Ghats, his areas of work included the sacred groves of the Western Ghats to traditional ecological knowledge and peoples’ participation, India’s ecological issues and conflicts to environmental movements, and more.
Madhav Gadgil had also authored and co-authored numerous books, from This Fissured Land in 1992, to A Walk Up The Hill – Living with People and Nature, in 2023. Gadgil had also expressed strong views on the detrimental development projects coming up in the Great Nicobar Island, in tune with the warnings of scientists, conservationists, activists and several other sections of society. “If India has to act as a law-abiding country, then the Forest Rights Act would very much apply to the Shompens and the Nicobarese. Those areas should remain inviolate. They should be community forest resources of particularly vulnerable tribal groups and they should not be touched. So we are violating these laws all the time,” he had said.
A man of courage and conviction, he always opined that scientists, like all academics from various dispensations should speak truth to power.
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