Madhav Gadgil: Ecologist who warned India but was rarely heard

Madhav Dhananjaya Gadgil, the scientist behind the landmark Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel report and one of India’s most influential public intellectuals, passed away on January 8, 2026, in Pune. He was 83. With his death, India loses not just an ecologist of global standing, but a rare voice who insisted that environmental protection, democracy and social justice were inseparable.

For over five decades, Gadgil shaped how India understood its forests, biodiversity and ecological limits. Admired by students and environmentalists, challenged by governments, and often sidelined by political and commercial interests, he remained steadfast in warning that ecological collapse was the inevitable cost of unchecked growth.

In the preface to the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel report, Gadgil summed up this concern in stark terms:

“The Western Ghats has been torn asunder by the greed of the elite and gnawed at by the poor, striving to eke out a subsistence. This is a great tragedy, for this hill range is the backbone of the ecology and economy of south India.”

Scholar, institution builder, public intellectual
Born in Pune in 1942 to Pramila Gadgil and Dr Dhananjay Ramchandra Gadgil, Madhav Gadgil grew up in an intellectually rich environment. His father, a distinguished economist, was vice-chairman of the Planning Commission of India, founder-director of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, and the co-architect of the widely used Gadgil-Mukherjee formula for central assistance to states.

Madhav Gadgil studied biology and ecology in India before earning his doctorate from Harvard University. He later joined the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, where he founded the Centre for Ecological Sciences, helping build one of the country’s most respected institutions for ecological research. His research spanned population biology, conservation theory and the history of human interaction with nature. 

A prolific writer, he authored seven books and more than 250 scientific papers. In 2023, he published his autobiography, A Walk Up the Hill, tracing his intellectual journey through India’s changing landscapes. His other major works include This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (with Ramachandra Guha), Ecology and Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India, and Ecological Journeys: The Science and Politics of Conservation in India.

In This Fissured Land, Gadgil wrote that ecological conflicts in India reflected "deep divisions in access to nature’s resources" an insight that remained central to his public interventions. The book traced how forests, rivers and biodiversity were shaped by centuries of social hierarchies, colonial extraction and post-Independence development choices. He consistently argued that ecological knowledge must shape public policy, and that communities living closest to nature must have a decisive role in its management.

Writing in Malayala Manorama after the Pettimudi landslide in 2020, Gadgil argued that the way forward lay in genuine democratic decentralisation, along the Swiss model, and the empowerment of local communities. “This is what Mahatma Gandhi envisioned when he spoke of a republic of self-reliant villages,” he wrote.

Policy architect and conservation pioneer
Gadgil was a key architect of India’s Biological Diversity Act, 2002, introducing the concept of People’s Biodiversity Registers to empower local self-governing bodies to document and protect biological resources and traditional knowledge. His early scientific work on sacred groves highlighted their ecological value long before community conservation gained mainstream recognition.

He served on numerous national and international bodies, including the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, the National Advisory Council, and the National Tiger Conservation Authority.

He received several honours, including the Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan. In 2024, the United Nations Environment Programme named him a Champion of the Earth, describing him as a “people’s scientist” whose career spanned six decades.

The Western Ghats report and a defining battle
Gadgil’s most consequential public role came in 2010, when he was appointed chairperson of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) by the Union environment ministry.

The panel’s 2011 report was uncompromising in its science. It recommended that nearly two-thirds of the Western Ghats be designated Ecologically Sensitive Areas, with strict curbs on mining, quarrying, large dams and unregulated construction. Crucially, it proposed decentralised decision-making, empowering gram sabhas and local bodies to govern fragile ecosystems.

The report triggered fierce resistance, particularly in Kerala, Karnataka and Maharashtra, where political parties and industry groups branded it anti-development. Gadgil rejected this argument, repeatedly stating that the report opposed not development, but ecologically blind growth.

Under pressure, the government constituted a second committee led by K Kasturirangan, whose recommendations substantially diluted the original proposals and reduced community participation. Gadgil was openly critical of the Kasturirangan report, calling it technocratic and inadequate to address the scale of ecological degradation in the Western Ghats.

Kerala floods and landslides
In the years that followed, Gadgil repeatedly returned to the Western Ghats debate as extreme weather events battered Kerala. After devastating landslides in Wayanad, he warned that such disasters were not isolated natural phenomena but the predictable outcome of deforestation, hill cutting, quarrying and unregulated construction in fragile landscapes.

He pointed out that recurring floods and landslides in Wayanad, Idukki and Kozhikode mirrored the risks identified by the WGEEP more than a decade earlier. Climate change, he said, had intensified rainfall, but the scale of destruction was magnified by human interference with slopes, forests and drainage systems.

“These are not acts of nature alone,” Gadgil warned, stressing that ignoring ecological limits had turned heavy rain into catastrophe. Each disaster, he argued, represented a failure of governance, not a lack of scientific knowledge.

“Our recommendations in WGEEP would have been accepted by any society that believes in good governance. Resistance is from the political machinery, which is firmly in the grip of money power. In Kerala, at least 90 per cent of stone quarries are illegal. But the government is legalising them,” he said in a 2018 interview with The Week, following the floods.

After the Wayanad landslides, he cautioned that highly sensitive areas such as Meppadi were being burdened by tea estates converted into resorts, artificial lakes and other interventions that weakened geological stability.

Madhav Gadgil leaves behind a body of work that continues to challenge India’s development choices. His life was defined by a simple but demanding belief: that prosperity built on ecological ruin is neither sustainable nor just.