What the Western Ghats map leaves out
More than a decade after the first draft notification, the Centre is moving to notify the Western Ghats as an ecologically sensitive area (ESA), State by State, starting with Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Goa. The sixth draft, issued on July 31, 2024, covers about 56,825 sq km across six States and lapses in late July 2026. It arrives in the middle of another monsoon and another set of landslides: a fresh slide on an under-construction tunnel road in Wayanad this July, two years after the Mundakkai and Chooralmala disaster that killed several hundred people. The public debate remains the same: conservation versus development, and the Centre versus resistant States. Beneath that debate lies a policy choice that shapes far more than the headlines suggest. That choice is the line the Kasturirangan Committee drew in 2013 between “natural” and “cultural” landscapes. Using satellite imagery, it classified about 60 per cent of the Western Ghats’ roughly 1,64,280 sq km area as cultural landscape, including settlements, farms, and plantations. The remaining 40 per cent, consisting largely of relatively unfragmented forests, was classified as natural landscape, from which the ESA was carved out. The restrictions that give the notification its force, including bans on new mining and quarrying, red-category industries, thermal power projects, and large construction, apply only within this natural landscape. The cultural landscape is excluded. This is presented as a technical boundary. It is not. It reflects a policy decision about which landscapes are considered worth protecting. The line closely follows the most populated, most contested, and most plantation-dominated parts of the Western Ghats. Those are the areas that now fall outside the regulatory framework. State governments recognised the implications immediately, which is why many of their objections amount to demands for a larger carve-out. Kerala wants the Cardamom Hills and parts of Idukki excluded. Karnataka, which has the largest proposed ESA, rejects the framework altogether. Maharashtra has sought the exclusion of 378 villages, while Goa has asked for 21. The distinction between natural and cultural landscapes has become the mechanism through which inhabited and commercially active slopes are left out of the map. The problem is that these are also the slopes where the risk is greatest. The deadliest recent landslides in the Western Ghats have occurred not in remote forests but in settled plantation areas. Wayanad’s Meppadi region, identified as ecologically sensitive by the Gadgil Committee in 2011, lies within the kind of terrain that the later framework places outside protection. No single landslide can be directly attributed to this policy choice. Slope failures have multiple causes, with extreme rainfall playing the largest role. Even so, the pattern is difficult to ignore. Quarrying, slope-cutting, and unregulated construction continue in the cultural landscape under lighter scrutiny, while the people living below these activities bear the consequences. Sunita Narain, who served on the Kasturirangan Committee, has written that the panel chose to protect what remained of the natural landscape, treating the altered areas as difficult to restore. Kerala later pushed the boundary further. In 2018, the Centre removed another 3,115 sq km from the protected regime at the State’s request. The second exclusion is less visible but may prove more significant over time. By defining the cultural landscape as a zone of economic activity that should remain outside regulation, the framework treats the people who live there as those to be exempted from restrictions, rather than as participants in conservation. This marks a departure from an alternative approach that already exists in Indian law. The Forest Rights Act, 2006, and the Community Forest Resource (CFR) rights it recognises, give gram sabhas the legal authority to protect, manage, and govern their forests and commons. Gadgil’s original report, despite its controversial reputation, moved in this direction. As Narain has noted, it argued for community rights and for local people as partners in conservation. The Kasturirangan framework took a different path by concentrating decision-making within the environmental bureaucracy. Across much of the cultural landscape, Community Forest Resource rights remain absent. Residents receive neither the protection that stronger regulation of quarrying and construction could provide nor the legal authority to manage the forests and slopes on which they depend. They are excluded from both. Is the carve-out pro-farmer? The carve-out is often defended as being pro-farmer, protecting smallholders from distant regulation. Some of that concern is genuine. Yet the biggest beneficiaries of the exemption are commercial quarrying, large plantations, and construction, rather than marginal cultivators. The people the exemption is meant to protect are often the same people exposed when a hillside above a plantation collapses. This is not an argument for reviving the broad interpretation of the Gadgil Committee’s recommendations and extending blanket restrictions across inhabited areas. That approach, whether or not it accurately reflected Gadgil’s intent, contributed to the rejection of the original report and deepened public distrust. As Sunita Narain has noted, poorly designed restrictions in other eco-sensitive areas have alienated poor communities and weakened support for conservation. The point is simpler. A rights-based alternative already exists, and the current framework does not make use of it. A more defensible approach would begin by recognising the cultural landscape for what it is. Agroforestry, home gardens, paddy fields, sacred groves, and even shaded plantations help regulate water, stabilise slopes, and store carbon. Treating these landscapes as “not nature” excludes those ecological functions from the calculations that determine protection. A broader approach to valuation, one that considers ecological and cultural value alongside economic value, would recognise their contribution. Regulation of genuinely destructive activities such as quarrying, slope-cutting, and large construction could then be linked to community governance under Community Forest Resource rights, rather than relying solely on the forest department. The Centre is already considering financial incentives for States to support conservation. Part of that support could be directed to the gram sabhas and local communities that maintain these ecological services, rather than flowing only to State governments. None of this is straightforward. Implementation of the Forest Rights Act across the Western Ghats remains uneven. Community Forest Resource rights are limited in the plantation-dominated districts of Kerala and Karnataka. Payment schemes also carry the risk of being captured by powerful interests. These are challenges that call for careful design, not reasons to leave the people of the cultural landscape outside the framework. As the notifications are issued State by State, attention will focus on the number of square kilometres brought under protection. The more important questions are which landscapes the State considers worth protecting and who is given the authority to protect them. The distinction between natural and cultural landscapes answers both by excluding the same people twice: first from the map of protected nature, and then from the institutions responsible for protecting it. A framework that treats the cultural landscape as a source of ecological value and community rights, rather than simply as an exemption, would lead to a different outcome. The monsoon will continue to check that choice every year. Deepanjana Saha is a doctoral scholar and SAGE Fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bengaluru.