Gadgil: conservationist who saw humans as constituents of the ecosystem

Madhav Gadgil, the pioneering scholar and iconic people’s conservationist, passed away on Wednesday in Pune after a brief illness. He was 83.

As someone who started off with the upper-class “urban conservationist approach to nature conservation”, Mr. Gadgil metamorphosed into an ecologist who advocated the rights of the marginalised communities for whom the forest was the home. He called them the “common people of India” and saw them as “constituents of the ecosystem”.

Nothing sums this up better than his own admission in his autobiography A Walk Up the Hill: Living with People and Nature published in 2023. Writing about his early days as a young conservationist, Mr. Gadgil confessed: “I subscribed to the urban conservationist approach to nature conservation, namely, protection through the devices of wildlife sanctuaries and national parks… I also subscribed to the view that it was necessary to remove habitations from within such habitats to safeguard them.”

All that changed in the 1980s, when Mr. Gadgil “started thinking about alternative ways of following my passion to conserve nature, working with rather than against the common people of India.”

Writing in the foreword of the book, M.S. Swaminathan said of Mr. Gadgil, “Madhav has had an illustrious career as one of India’s leading researchers in the fields of ecology and environment, but more importantly, his thinking has been combined with action on environmental and ecological security in the service of humanity.”

Mr. Gadgil would go on to shift the paradigm in the global conservation discourse, giving primacy to human rights over exclusive wildlife protection. He was distraught by the obsession of governments with commercial interests and their disregard for the rights of farmers and indigenous people. In fact, he began to view the Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972 as weapon at the hands of the forest departments “to subjugate the common people of India”, especially by criminalising hunting-gathering communities and farmers.

The Western Ghats, where he was born in 1942, received his particular attention. This interest acquired the sharpest clarity in his iconic 2011 report as chairman of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel. The Manmohan Singh government, having responded to an alarm sounded by experts and local populations on the destruction of the fragile ecosystem and people of the Western Ghats by industrialisation, climate change and commercial greed, had tasked Mr. Gadgil to render advice on how to save the ghats from an ecological disaster.

Being a grassroots man, Mr. Gadgil scoured the region he knew so intimately, interacted with communities, both forest- and village-based, panchayats and forest officials, and recommended strict but people-driven protection for the ghats. Advocating the setting up of a Western Ghats Ecology Authority, he asked for the major part of it to be declared environmentally sensitive. No new polluting industries were to be set up in the zones earmarked as particularly endangered and existing industries were to be phased out.

Vested interest groups promptly resisted the ideas, leading, typically and predictably, to the setting up of another panel. Headed by the eminent space scientist, K. Kasturirangan, it recommended in 2013 that a reduced area (37% of the ghats) be protected. But even that was not accepted.

Till today, the Western Ghats remains a zone of contestation between the dogma of development and the calls for conservation. This binary is now being recognised the world over.

Mr. Gadgil also championed the ‘Save the Silent Valley’ movement in Kerala in the 1970s and early 1980s to protect rainforests, as he campaigned for the forests of Bastar. A ‘product’ of Harvard and a citizen of the world, he focused, with the precision of an aquiline eye, on the fragilities of India’s ecosystems and the human inhabitants.

Paying a rich tribute on X, former Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said Mr. Gadgil “was a top-notch academic scientist, a tireless field researcher, a pioneering institution-builder, a great communicator, a firm believer in people’s networks and movements, and friend, philosopher, guide, and mentor to many for over five decades.”

Mr. Ramesh recalled how in the 26 months that he was Environment Minister, he “turned to him every other day for guidance and advice.”

Historian Ramachandra Guha, who co-authored two path-breaking books with Mr. Gadgil in the 1990s (still in print), described him as “an exemplary scientist and citizen, and, to me, a friend and mentor for forty years and more.”

Mr. Gadgil leaves behind a rich legacy for the future generations. He had hoped that this “will be the third generation of people born in free, democratic India whose Constitution professes values of social justice, equity, equality, non-racism and non-sexism, human dignity, an open society, accountability and the rule of law.”

To achieve that, the ecologist must, as he said, “talk of many things, not just air and water and the bird that sings, but of men and money and economic reforms...”