New Delhi: Former ISRO chief K. Kasturirangan wants the Centre to incorporate the best features of a 2013 report on the Western Ghats in its upcoming notification on the ecologically sensitive areas in the hilly belt.
The issue of notifying ecologically sensitive areas in the Western Ghats belt is back in the discussion after the Wayanad landslides claimed roughly 350 lives in Kerala.
In 2013, a 10-member panel led by Kasturirangan recommended the notification of 37 percent of the 1.29 lakh square kilometres of Western Ghats as ecologically sensitive. The report has been gathering dust for over a decade now.
Speaking to ThePrint, Kasturirangan said the panel had prepared “a balanced report” to ensure the protection and conservation of the Western Ghats while considering the plight of the residents in the area.
“What we tried to do through our report was to find a good meeting point between environmental conservation and human settlement,” Kasturirangan said.
A Centre-constituted five-member expert panel is now preparing a report, reportedly to redefine the ESAs across six states in the Western Ghats belt. Its draft notification included 13 villages from the landslide-hit Wayanad district within the ESAs.
The Centre will likely release the final notification on ecologically sensitive areas in the hilly belt at the end of September. Incorporating the 2013 recommendations will provide “long-term stability for the ecosystem in the region”, Kasturirangan told ThePrint.
The 2013 report came after ecologist Madhav Gadgil’s report, which suggested declaring 75 percent of the Western Ghats as ecologically sensitive areas.
“Close to 60% of the Western Ghats region is under cultural landscape — human-dominated land use of settlements, agriculture and plantation (other than forest plantations) — and only about 40% of the area can be classified as natural landscape,” the 2013 report read.
“Of the natural landscape, the biologically rich area with some measure of continuity is roughly 37% of the Western Ghats — which is about 60,000 km square. We have identified this 37% of the natural landscape as an ecologically sensitive area (ESA),” it added.
The 2013 report highlighted widespread mining activities and the expansion of human settlements as posing a significant risk to the already sensitive ecology in the area.
Initially, the report received flak for diluting the Gadgil report, which recommended a much larger area as ESA. However, the Kasturirangan panel said they had a dual aim — to protect the ecology and not ignore the existing human settlements in these areas.
While neither the Gadgil nor Kasturirangan panel report was implemented, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change issued the sixth draft notification for declaring 56,800 square kilometres of Western Ghats as ESA a day after the landslides in Wayanad.
Kasturirangan told ThePrint that while the 2013 report has been on the back burner so far, it should now be incorporated.
“We had some of the best minds in the field that worked together to bring a holistic view of the Western Ghats and its ecology. These recommendations have the best interests of the environment and its residents in mind,” he said.
Along with Kasturirangan, the panel included members such as renowned ecologist and Delhi University professor C.R. Babu, Delhi School of Economics professor Kanchan Chopra, professor and expert on the Western Ghats and its environmental systems Darshan Shankar, professor P.S. Roy from ISRO, and the Centre for Science and Environment’s Sunita Narain, among others.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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