Tidying up Gadgil’s ambitious
makeover plan, Kasturirangan leaves too many windows open
Along with the Eastern Himalayas, the Western Ghats host India’s richest wilderness in 13 national parks and several sanctuaries. Recognised by UNESCO as one of the world’s eight most important biodiversity hotspots, these forested hills are also source to numerous rivers, including Godavari, Krishna and Cauvery.
Spread across six states all along the western coast, this pristine landscape has been subject to thoughtless development — mining, hydel projects, plantations and tourism. So environmentalists cheered when the Ministry of Environment and Forests set up in March 2010 an expert panel under ecologist Madhav Gadgil to find a strategy for conserving these Ghats. But hope gave way to scepticism soon after Gadgil placed his report in August 2011. Caught between the exacting recommendations of its own panel and stubborn resistance from the industry and the states, the ministry continued to dither for nearly a year.
Then, in August last year, the ministry constituted yet another panel under Planning Commission member and astrophysicist Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan to examine the Gadgil report, consult the stakeholders and suggest how to implement it in “the most effective and holistic manner”.
Many read the move as an attempt to device a compromise formula. Their fears came true when Kasturirangan submitted his report on 17 April, identifying roughly 37 percent of the Western Ghats as an Ecologically Sensitive Area (ESA). Since then, the Kasturirangan panel and the ministry have been accused of undermining the Gadgil report, which marked out 60 percent of the Western Ghats as the highest-priority Ecologically Sensitive Zone (ESZ).
While Kasturirangan’s High-Level Working Group (HLWG) has indeed moved away from Gadgil’s Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) — with the caveat that “environmentally sound development cannot preclude livelihood and economic options for this region… the answer will not lie in removing these economic options, but in providing better incentives to move them towards greener and more sustainable practices” — the gap between their recommendations may not be as wide as it seems.
To begin with, Gadgil’s Western Ghats is smaller than that of Kasturirangan’s. While this forested hill range runs parallel to the Arabian Sea for nearly 1,500 km from Gujarat’s Tapi river in the north to just short of Kanyakumari in the south, there has been no standard definition of its east-west width, which varies from 10 to 210 km. In the absence of a consensus on the precise boundaries, the Gadgil panel went by forest types above a certain altitude to define the Western Ghats landscape across 1,29,037 sq km.
Gadgil’s report proposed to declare this entire landscape as ESA, creating three ESZs within it. He prescribed that the existing sanctuaries and ESZ-1 would together cover 60 percent of this landscape. The 25 percent lowest priority areas would be marked as ESZ-3 to allow all developmental activities with precautions. The remaining 15 percent area would become ESZ-2. For example, while no mining would be allowed within ESZ- 1, existing mines could continue in ESZ-2 with a moratorium on new licences. In ESZ-3, new mines could come up.
The Kasturirangan panel, on the other hand, adopted the criteria followed by the Western Ghats Development Programme of the Planning Commission and identified 188 talukas as its Western Ghats landscape, which worked out to 1,64,280 sq km. He marked 37 percent of this stretch as ESA where hazardous industries, thermal plants or mines would not be allowed. In effect, the restriction level of Kasturirangan’s ESA corresponds to that of Gadgil’s ESZ-1.
Now, according to the Gadgil report, the ESZ-1 areas add up to approximately 77,000 sq km (60 percent of 1,29,037 sq km). Kasturirangan’s ESA, on the other hand, accounts for around 60,000 sq km (37 percent of 1,64,280 sq km). That is a reduction of 17,000 sq km in the top priority segment.
Kasturirangan is also blamed for overlooking nearly 20,000 sq km (15 percent of 1,29,037 sq km) of ESZ-2 areas proposed in the Gadgil report. His report, however, says that all development projects located within 10 km of the ESA will be regulated by the Environmental Impact Assessment Notification, 2006. Since the width of the ESA itself will not extend over 10 km along a number of stretches, this may not be practical.
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| Pic: Arati Rao |
Yet, if we factor in even 5-km-wide buffers on both sides of the ESA along its roughly 1,500-km length, around 15,000 sq km will enjoy similar protection as prescribed under ESZ-2 in the Gadgil report. So, in sum, around 22,000 sq km out of 97,000 sq km prescribed under ESZ-1 and ESZ-2 by Gadgil’s WGEEP has been left out by Kasturirangan’s HLWG.
Comparable data is not available yet for Tamil Nadu and Goa. But in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala, 17 of Gadgil’s 70 ESZ-1 talukas have been entirely left out by Kasturirangan. For the rest of the talukas, what explains the gap is the difference in the approaches of the two panels.
While Gadgil marked the ESZs at the taluka level, Kasturirangan identified ESAs on a much finer grid at the village level. Gadgil’s report marked entire talukas as ESZ-1 even if only parts of those belonged to the highest ecologically sensitive category. But demarcation at the village level by Kasturirangan allowed exclusion of dense human habitations — population density above 100 per sq km — from the ESA.
The flipside of the Kasturirangan panel’s approach, however, is that such exclusions will fragment the ESA. While the natural north-south continuity of dense forests will largely be maintained, covering prime tiger and elephant corridors of the Ghats, small patches of ESAs identified in the wings of this unbroken axis may be of little ecological benefit.
In fact, given the experience in such cases, these tiny islands of ESAs are unlikely to survive encroachment and other human misuse for too long. At the same time, it will take thorough ground surveys to determine if existing encroachments and expired land leases have been taken into account while excluding high human use areas from the ESA.
However, both panels stressed the importance of protecting local livelihood interests, which is essential to build a pro-conservation constituency among the communities. While Gadgil’s three-tier ESZ model favoured the concept of “develop sustainably – conserve thoughtfully” over a strict “go/no-go” regime, Kasturirangan stressed on adequate financial arrangements to incentivise “green growth” in the region.
Therefore, if site-specific concerns are addressed and the ESA is made as contiguous as feasible, a reasonable downsizing of the area originally proposed by Gadgil may still not be that ominous for the ghats’ future. Given the brazenly combative opposition to any length of ESA, marking 60,000-75,000 sq km of India’s best wilderness as out of bounds for development is probably as good as it will ever get.
However, the big catch lies in the Kasturirangan panel’s refusal to impose a categorical ban on hydel projects even within the truncated ESA it proposed. For new projects, he has merely proposed a set of conditions such as maintaining baseline river flow, cumulative impact study and minimum distance between projects. His panel has also refused to reiterate Gadgil’s candid stand against Athirappally and Gundia hydel plants and called for yet another round of revaluation.
But for these open windows, who knows the greens might well be reasonable enough to settle for a few lakh hectares less.
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