Fear revisits residents of Western Ghats

On August 29, hundreds of farmers from Hosanagara taluk in Shivamogga district marched about nine kilometres from the Ganesha temple at Karanagiri to Hosanagara town, protesting against the latest draft notification proposing to declare large parts of the Western Ghats an Ecologically Sensitive Area (ESA). Farmers across Shivamogga and neighbouring districts in the Malnad region are planning similar protests in the coming days. Their central demand is that the Karnataka government conduct a physical survey of the land and exclude human settlements and cultivated areas from the proposed ESA boundaries.

The chain of events that led to this notification began with another march nearly four decades ago — one that set out to save the Western Ghats.

On November 1, 1987, two groups of scientists, ecologists, environmentalists, and activists began walking simultaneously from the northern and southern extremities of the Western Ghats — Navapur in Dhule district, Maharashtra, and Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu — towards a common meeting point in Goa. Among the organisers and participants were anthropologist Kailash Malhotra, S.R. Hiremath, Pandurang Hegde, and several others from Karnataka. Along the route, participants held public meetings and documented the ecological condition of the landscape. The effort culminated in a conference in Goa in February 1988, where ecologist Madhav Gadgil of the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, chaired the technical session on the region’s ecological status and the measures needed to conserve it.

The group remained active in the years that followed: a yatra marked the march’s 10th anniversary in 1998, and further meetings were held in 2009 and, more significantly, on February 18, 2010, at the Keystone Foundation in Kotagiri, Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu. The organisers invited the then Union Minister for Environment and Forests, Jairam Ramesh, to inaugurate the meeting and appealed to him to constitute an expert panel to examine the status of the Western Ghats and recommend conservation and governance mechanisms.

Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel

Less than a month later, on March 4, 2010, the Ministry of Environment and Forests set up the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) under Prof. Gadgil’s chairmanship, comprising nine non-government and five official members. Its mandate was to assess the ecological status of the Western Ghats, demarcate areas to be notified as ecologically sensitive zones under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, and recommend measures for conservation and rejuvenation through wide consultation.

The panel submitted its final report to the Ministry on August 31, 2011 — by which time Mr. Ramesh had been replaced as Minister by Jayanthi Natarajan. The release was delayed. Despite repeated RTI applications and an order from the Central Information Commission, the Ministry resisted disclosure and even approached the Delhi High Court seeking a stay. The report was finally uploaded on the Ministry’s website on May 23, 2012. Prof. Gadgil has since narrated the events surrounding the report in his autobiography, A Walk up the Hill.

The WGEEP report advocated a people-oriented model of development, going beyond regulation to propose science-based initiatives such as 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, as one such model.

Kasturirangan High-Level Working Group

The WGEEP report drew strong opposition, including from the State governments concerned. Taking the criticism into account, the Union Ministry constituted a High-Level Working Group (HLWG) under K. Kasturirangan to prepare a “workable and implementable” report on conserving the Western Ghats.

The panel visited several places, including Sakleshpur in Hassan district, and submitted its report on April 15, 2013. It recommended that about 37% of the Western Ghats – 59,940 sq km, 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.

Among the panel’s proposed restrictions within the ESA were a complete ban on mining and sand extraction, with existing operations to be phased out within five years or on expiry of their 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 and encouragement of organic farming and closer scrutiny of other development activities.

All the State governments concerned, including Karnataka and Kerala, opposed the recommendations, and elected representatives — particularly in Kerala — argued they would severely disrupt local livelihoods.

Prof. Gadgil, too, objected strongly to the Kasturirangan report, calling it flawed on several counts. In an open letter to Mr. Kasturirangan published in The Hindu, he noted that while the WGEEP had proposed a graded, participatory approach with a major role for grassroots input, the HLWG had effectively partitioned the landscape — roughly a third to be protected by “funds and guards” as natural landscape, with the remaining two-thirds, labelled cultural landscape, open to development.

The Ministry has issued seven draft notifications since 2014. All earlier six were opposed by the States concerned and residents of the affected regions have also filed numerous objections. The seventh draft, issued on July 27, 2026, allows 60 days to file objections. It proposes a total ESA area of 56,825.7 sq km, of which 29,668 sq km — spread across 1,449 villages in Belagavi, Chamarajanagar, Chikkamagaluru, Dakshina Kannada, Hassan, Kodagu, Mysuru, Shivamogga, Udupi, and Uttara Kannada districts — falls in Karnataka.

On September 3, 2026, the Karnataka Cabinet announced a three-day special session of the legislature from September 21 to discuss drought. The session will also see a detailed discussion on the Kasturirangan report.

Life under existing forest rules

The deeper fear among residents of the Western Ghats foothills stems from hardships they already face under existing forest regulations — hundreds of villages lack basic amenities even without the ESA in force.

Take Uralagallu in Sagar taluk of Shivamogga district, where families displaced by the Linganamakki dam across the Sharavathi river in the 1960s reside. The village today has roughly 50 to 56 families and a population of 150 to 200, with no proper road, school, or primary health centre, and its nearest bus stop being about 10 km away.

Residents say an ambulance has not visited the settlement in recent years. Ironically, the people who surrendered their land for a hydel power project still lack electricity decades later, because the Forest Department has repeatedly denied clearance for road and power-supply works.

Nagaraj Salkod, a resident of Uralagallu, said a majority of the parents in the village send their children to either hostels or relatives’ places early on. “My two children stay at a relative’s place at Mavinagundi, about 50 km from my place, as we don’t have a school in the village,” he said. They walk 10 km to Kanuru to catch a bus.

Similar struggles persist in remote villages across Chikkamagaluru, Hassan, and Shivamogga districts, where residents battle forest restrictions to secure electricity, road access, or emergency healthcare.

At Byrapura in N.R. Pura taluk of Chikkamagaluru district, schoolchildren recently encountered a leopard while returning home, and the fear kept them away from school for several days; parents say a proper road would enable safer transport and reduce such encounters, but forest regulations continue to block it. In Karimane village of Hosanagara taluk, large parts of the settlement — including the gram panchayat building itself — stand on forest land, leaving the panchayat office without an official khata (title) and the community in administrative limbo.

These cases illustrate the daily plight of people living under current forest rules, raising the question of what their situation will become under the far stricter regime the Kasturirangan panel has recommended. Separately, bagair hukum (unauthorised) cultivators and those displaced by dam projects are yet to receive the compensatory land promised to them under existing rules. The people fear that if the ESA comes into effect, these claims could remain unresolved indefinitely.

The Kerala model

Many in the Malnad region are pressing the State government to replicate Kerala’s approach. 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 — a reduction of more than 3,000 sq km that has since been incorporated into the revised notification. The people of the Malnad region want the Karnataka government to undertake a similar exercise to pare down the area proposed for the State.

B.Y. Raghavendra, Shivamogga MP, who was among the political leaders who joined the protest marches, said restrictions on township projects and the push for organic farming were the primary concerns in the Malnad region. 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. “If there are restrictions on the use of such inputs, how will farmers protect their plantations? Similarly, restrictions on house construction are unacceptable,” he said.

R.M. Manjunath Gowda, president of the Shivamogga Central Cooperative Bank, has brought together a large section of farmers under the banner of the Western Ghats Raitha Sahakari Vedike to organise protests against the notification. The vedike has also launched a website with a tool to help the public file objections online. Notably, the organisation is not opposing the notification outright this time — it is instead demanding that the State government follow the Kerala model to minimise the impact.

Leaders across parties have urged the State government to conduct a physical survey and propose the ESA area accordingly, excluding human habitations and cultivated land. Understanding the scale of public concern, Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar has agreed to convene a special session of the Karnataka legislature on the issue, a decision welcomed across party lines. Minister for School Education Madhu Bangarappa, who is also in charge of Shivamogga district, has said the State government will oppose the draft notification. Former Minister and Congress leader Kimmane Ratnakar recently burnt a copy of the Kasturirangan report at a press conference in Tirthahalli.

The other side

Amid the many voices opposing the draft notification, there is also support for stricter conservation measures. Several environmentalists argue that the Kasturirangan report was a “diluted version” of Prof. Gadgil’s, which they consider better suited to conserving the Western Ghats with active local participation.

Whenever landslips or flash floods strike Kerala or Kodagu, this argument resurfaces — environmentalists blaming policymakers for ignoring Prof. Gadgil’s recommendations. But the debate typically subsides within days, as routine concerns over access, amenities, roads, and electricity take over.

Akhilesh Chipli, environmentalist based in Sagara taluk, said he has advocated strict forest protection measures along the lines of Prof. Gadgil’s recommendations since 2016. “A major portion of the 20,668 sq km proposed for the ESA is already notified forest area; the remainder is a small quantity, and there should be no opposition to including it in the proposed ESA. People with vested interests are misleading the public with false information about the restrictions. For instance, why should ordinary people worry about a ban on mining or red-category industries? Even the push for organic farming is good for everyone,” he said.