Madhav Gadgil: When a scientist asked the mountains to speak

By the winter of 2009, Jairam Ramesh, then Union minister for environment and forests, had begun to feel that something elemental had fractured in India’s relationship with its mountains. The files on his desk were thick with approvals, environmental clearances granted with carefully worded conditions, routinely forgotten.

On paper, the regulation appeared intact. On ground, the Western Ghats, the ancient mountain system that regulates the climate, rivers, and biodiversity of peninsular India, were being dismantled piece by piece.

Across Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Goa, and Maharashtra, forests were fragmented, hill slopes were carved open, quarries were driven deeper into fragile rock, and rivers were regulated to exhaustion. Each project appeared manageable in isolation. Taken together, they amounted to a slow, administrative unravelling of a living mountain system.

Experts confirmed Ramesh’s unease. The Western Ghats were not collapsing in a single spectacular catastrophe. They were being hollowed out quietly, invisibly, clearance by clearance.

It was for this reason that Ramesh deliberately chose Ooty, in the Nilgiris, for a meeting that would soon alter the grammar of Indian environmental politics. Set inside the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, Ooty did not allow ecological decline to be hidden behind files or PowerPoint slides.

Outside the conference hall lay tea plantations where forests once stood, drying springs, stressed wildlife corridors, scarred slopes, and a hill economy stretched to its limits. The crisis was not theoretical there. It could be seen, touched, even smelled.

As officials, scientists, and conservation thinkers debated, one question refused to leave the room: could India continue to govern the Western Ghats through piecemeal regulation, or did the mountains demand to be understood as a single, interlinked ecological system? Then came the more uncomfortable question. Who could be trusted to say this without trimming truth to suit political convenience?

The name that surfaced carried both respect and unease. Madhav Gadgil.

Ramesh would later say he did not want a safe committee or a report designed to offend no one. He wanted rigour, independence, and moral clarity, someone who would not translate ecological truth into bureaucratic comfort. Gadgil, with his lifelong insistence that science must speak plainly to power, was the obvious choice.

In March 2010, the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) was formally notified, with Gadgil as its chair. What followed would become one of the most dramatic, divisive, and misunderstood episodes in independent India’s environmental history.

Limits, not bans

The Gadgil Committee did not call for romantic conservation or blanket prohibitions. It did not freeze agriculture or propose eviction. Instead, it introduced an idea that unsettled the system far more deeply: limits.

The report proposed graded ecological sensitivity across the Western Ghats, recognising that all landscapes are not equal. It argued that the most fragile zones must be protected from mining, quarrying, polluting industries, and destructive construction. It insisted that gram sabhas, local bodies, and biodiversity management committees should have real authority over land-use decisions. Existing agriculture and livelihoods were explicitly protected. Displacement was rejected.

For the first time, development was asked to justify itself before ecology, and power was asked to justify itself before people. This was precisely what made the report intolerable to entrenched interests.

The backlash: Fear as politics

The resistance was immediate and ferocious, but it did not look the same everywhere.

In Kerala, the backlash acquired a moral and emotional intensity unmatched elsewhere. Sections of the Catholic Church, particularly in highland dioceses where settler agriculture and quarrying intersected, framed the report as an existential threat to farmers. Parish networks became channels of fear: that houses could not be repaired, wells could not be dug, and land could not be sold. The Left parties, caught between their traditional ecological rhetoric and a powerful settler base, amplified these anxieties instead of correcting them. What was presented was not the report, but a spectre.

In Karnataka, resistance came sharply from the mining and quarrying lobby, still smarting from earlier regulatory interventions. In Goa, it was the iron ore economy and real estate interests. In Maharashtra, sugar barons, dam lobbies, and hill-town developers joined hands. In Tamil Nadu, bureaucratic resistance was quieter but no less firm, wary of losing discretionary control.

Across states, political parties that otherwise agreed on nothing found consensus in opposition. The report was denounced as anti-development, anti-farmer, even anti-people — often by those who had not read it.

What angered vested interests was not what the report banned, but what it questioned: the unchecked right to extract, build, and decide without local consent.

What they chose to ignore was what the report actually said — that agriculture would continue, that no one would be evicted, that ecological collapse would hurt farmers first, that landslides, floods, and water stress were predictable outcomes of unregulated hill cutting.

The report was buried under the claim that there was no consensus. A diluted alternative replaced it, and Gadgil became one of the most polarising figures in the Western Ghats.

And yet, something else happened. Every time a landslide buried homes in Idukki or Wayanad, his name returned. Every flood that tore through Kerala, Karnataka, and Maharashtra revived his warnings. Every drying spring in Kodagu and the Nilgiris brought back the same quiet question, asked without ideology or theatre:

What did Gadgil say?

A scientist who refused distance

No other Indian scientist before him occupied this uneasy space in public life — hated and revered in equal measure. Dismissed as anti-development by politicians. Remembered as prophetic by people standing amid debris. Mocked in television studios. Sought out in moments of disaster. That authority did not originate with the Western Ghats report. It had been built patiently over the course of decades.

Madhav Dhananjaya Gadgil was born on 24 May 1942 into a family where public responsibility and intellectual seriousness were part of everyday life. His father Dhananjay Gadgil was among India’s most respected economists, a scholar who insisted that development be examined not as a slogan, but as a historical process shaped by power and inequality.

That inheritance mattered. Madhav Gadgil’s ecology would later echo the same insistence: development choices must always answer the question of who benefits and who pays.

Educated in India and later at Harvard University, where he studied biology under Edward O. Wilson, Gadgil absorbed the finest traditions of evolutionary theory and population biology. Unlike many contemporaries, he returned to India in 1971, convinced that this was where the science had to be built.

After a brief stint at Pune's Agharkar Research Institute, he joined the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru in 1973. Over three decades, he helped shape Indian ecology as a rigorous, interdisciplinary and socially grounded science. He founded the Centre for Ecological Sciences and the Centre for Theoretical Studies, mentored generations of researchers, and published over 250 scientific papers spanning population biology, conservation biology, human ecology and ecological history.

Silent Valley and the birth of public ecology

On 2 October 1979, Gadgil met M.K. Prasad of the Kerala Sasthra Sahitya Parishad. They walked through Silent Valley together, slowly and attentively, for an entire day. Gadgil would later say this walk marked his true entry into India’s environmental movement.

The proposed hydroelectric project on the Kunthipuzha river promised 120 megawatts of power. Engineers spoke in megawatts. Gadgil spoke of time. He saw at once that Silent Valley was not degraded land awaiting improvement, but an ancient tropical evergreen forest regulating water flows, stabilising soil, maintaining microclimates and harbouring evolutionary histories science had barely begun to understand. To submerge it was to erase ecological memory.

When the project was finally abandoned and Silent Valley declared a National Park, it marked one of the rare moments in independent India when ecological reasoning decisively reshaped policy.

Beyond the Ghats: A pattern of dissent

Silent Valley was not an exception. It was a template. In Karnataka in 1976, Gadgil’s study on bamboo resources questioned subsidies that encouraged over-extraction by forest-based industries, influencing policy change.

In Bastar in the mid-1980s, he challenged extractive forestry models that treated both forests and Adivasi communities as expendable, exposing how state-controlled forestry disrupted sustainable indigenous systems while delivering little benefit to local people.

As a member of the scientific advisory council to the prime minister (1986–90), he pushed for ecosystem-based planning. He assisted in establishing India’s first biosphere reserve in the Nilgiris. Internationally, he chaired the science and technology advisory panel of the Global Environment Facility, a United Nations programme.

Across wildlife conservation, environmental education, coastal regulation, and biodiversity governance, his interventions followed a single logic: ecology was not an afterthought, but the foundation of any durable development.

The quiet end

In July 2025, his wife Sulochana Gadgil — a pioneering climate scientist and one of India’s foremost authorities on the monsoon — passed away. Her death left a deep silence in his life. Six months later, on 7 January, Gadgil died at a hospital in Pune, aged 83. He is survived by his son and daughter.

What remains

Reflecting on his passing, Ramesh said nation builders come in many forms, and Gadgil was unmistakably one of them — gentle, unassuming, with a vast ocean of knowledge beneath his humility. Historian Ramachandra Guha wrote simply that he was devastated, having lost not only an exemplary scientist and citizen, but a friend and mentor of four decades.

In the Western Ghats, grief took quieter forms. Lamps were lit. Names were spoken softly. And when the monsoon returned with its familiar violence, people remembered the man who had warned them to listen.

Madhav Gadgil did not offer comfort. He offered truth. He believed ecology was not an obstacle to development, but its moral boundary. That democracy without ecological limits would eventually collapse under its own weight. That science, if it wished to matter, must stand with people and against convenience.

He asked India to listen to its mountains. The tragedy is not that he was opposed. The tragedy is that he was right.