Madhav Gadgil: Green warrior, and a lasting conservation legacy

Gadgil also held a keen interest in linguistic and cultural diversity and was awarded the Padma Shri in 1981 and the Padma Bhushan in 2006

Pioneering ecologist Madhav Dhananjaya Gadgil, whose seminal report on the protection of the Western Ghats in 2011 warned against the pillaging of the environment and whose bottom-up approach to conservation prioritised marginalised communities in the battle against the climate crisis, died after a brief illness in Pune on Wednesday night. He was 83.

Madhav Gadgil (HT PHOTO)

Arguably one of the biggest names in conservation and a columnist for this newspaper, Gadgil also held a keen interest in linguistic and cultural diversity and was awarded the Padma Shri in 1981 and the Padma Bhushan in 2006. He is survived by a son and a daughter.

“I am very sorry to share the sad news that my father, Madhav Gadgil, passed away late last night in Pune after a brief illness,” said his son Siddhartha Gadgil. Gadgil’s wife and noted climate scientist Sulochana Gadgil passed away last year.

Born in Pune in 1942 to Pramila and Dhananjaya Gadgil, the founder of the Gokhale Institute of Economics in Pune, Gadgil was influenced by his birdwatcher father and learnt to recognise birds from their pictures even before he could read. He grew up in the lush hills of the Western Ghats and, fascinated by its rich natural and cultural heritage, decided to become a field ecologist and anthropologist while still in Pune. He was educated at Fergusson College in Pune, the University of Mumbai, and Harvard University, where he did a doctoral thesis in mathematical ecology and won the IBM Computer Center Fellowship.

Trained in evolutionary biology, Gadgil was among the earliest Indian scientists to use mathematical models to explain processes such as natural selection, population dynamics, resource allocation and ecological sustainability.

He returned to India in 1971 and initially worked at the Agharkar Research Institute in Pune before joining the Indian Institute of Science in 1973. One of his first projects there was an estimation of the elephant populations in Bandipur and Nagarhole in Karnataka, Mudumalai in Tamilnadu and Wayanad in Kerala.

“The three elephants that carried the tourists around Bandipur would be left free for grazing with chains and bells in the forest for the night. Their mahuts would go get them back in the morning and I often accompanied them. I would ride on their bare necks sitting behind one of the mahuts, and listen to them chatting with each other,” he wrote in a 2020 article. After this, he was engaged between 1976 and 1980 on a bamboo resource study in Karnataka.

For 31 years, he taught at IISc, where he established the Centre for Ecological Sciences and engaged in basic as well as applied research in collaboration with tribals, farmers, herders and fisherfolk. He was involved in drafting India’s Biological Diversity Act and chaired the Science and Technology Advisory Panel of Global Environment Facility and the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel.

In 2011, Gadgil chaired the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel that recommended that 75% of the 129,037 sq km area of the Western Ghats be declared environmentally sensitive because of its dense forests and the presence of a large number of endemic species. The report, whose recommendations are yet to be implemented, was prescient about the fallout of the ravaging of the mountain range but many states at the time deemed it controversial because of development concerns.

A second commission recommended it be reduced to 50% and subsequent panels sought to further shrink it to 37% amid growing concerns that mindless development and haphazard construction was ravaging the sensitive Ghats. Four draft notifications have since been issued but eco-sensitive areas along the Western Ghats are yet to be notified by the Centre, 15 years since the first such demarcation was recommended. Among the areas recommended for such demarcation by the panel was that in Kerala’s Wayanad where over 250 people were killed in landslides in 2024.

Over the last decade, Gadgil repeatedly spoke out against unregulated mining and construction on steep slopes and advised that disasters such as the 2018 Kerala Floods would only be exacerbated by such activity.

“Had our recommendations been accepted, there is no doubt that the landslides would either have been averted totally or their extent and intensity would have been much lower. Unfortunately, not only have our recommendations to bring such disturbing activities to a halt been ignored, the pace at which these disturbances are taking place has increased over the last decade,” he wrote in this newspaper in 2021.

He was an unusual combination of a person fascinated by the diversity of the natural world, of the landscapes and the life they support, as well as the diversity of cultures and lifestyles of the people firmly rooted to India’s soil. He dedicated himself to intellectual pursuits ranging over mathematics, natural and social sciences, history and public policy.

“In the Western Ghats, disasters have been happening frequently in the past few years. In the Himalayas, we have seen instances of such flooding over the past 50 years. The Chipko agitation in Uttarakhand in 1972 was partly triggered by flooding in the Alaknanda because of cutting of trees and hill slopes. These activities have only increased over the years,” he told this newspaper in an interview in 2021.

Gadgil was named one of the six ‘Champions of the Earth’ for 2024 by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). “In a scientific career that has spanned six decades – taking him from the halls of Harvard University to the upper echelons of India’s government – Gadgil has always considered himself a “people’s scientist,” the UNEP statement had said.

His research – spanning across seven books and 225 scientific papers – helped promote the community-driven conservation of ecosystems, from forests to wetlands, and influence policymaking at the highest level. “I hope that people will get organised, they will build pressure, our recommendations are in the interest of the larger mass of people in the country. This is more and more possible in the era of communication,” he told HT in 2024.

Gadgil wrote several books in his long career, including a landmark history of ecology in India – This Fissured Land – in 1992 with historian Ramchandra Guha. He also wrote Ecology and Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India, also with Guha, which analysed ecological degradation with social conflicts, resource competition, and economic interests. His other works looked at sacred groves, biodiversity and communities. He published his memoirs in A Walk Up The Hill in 2023.

In many ways, his work and legacy shaped grassroots environmentalism in India that placed marginalised communities at the heart of conservation and called for greater ecological protection of India’s fragile mountain ranges in the face of growing threats from the industry and the climate crisis.

“Throughout the world, it is people who have ensured that the rulers pay due attention to environmental concerns; that this is beginning to happen in our democracy through the efforts of simple people, working at the grassroots and taking advantage of the modern knowledge age, is a most welcome development,” he wrote in this newspaper in 2022.