India’s hard-won Western Ghats notification, and a model of Man and Nature the world must learn
By Binod Anand — Secretary General, Confederation of NGOs of Rural India (CNRI)
Voice of Rural India
Ask a farmer in the Sahyadris what the mountain means to him, and he will not reach for a word like “ecosystem.” He will point to the spring that has never run dry in his grandfather’s memory. He will show you the grove behind the temple that no axe has ever touched, because some things are simply not touched. He will tell you that when the first monsoon cloud breaks against these green walls, his whole village breathes again.
That farmer does not know the phrase Ecologically Sensitive Area. And yet, on 27 July 2026, in a dry line of the Gazette of India, the Government of India spoke about his hill, his spring, his grove — and about him. Notification S.O. 4106(E) of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change moved to protect one of the oldest mountain systems on Earth, the Western Ghats. But it did something rarer still. It refused to protect the mountain by throwing its people off it.
Read that again, because the world has spent a hundred years doing the opposite.
A gift older than the Himalaya
What are we even trying to save here? Let us not be shy about the answer.
The Western Ghats — our Sahyadris — run like a green spine for nearly 1,500 kilometres down the western edge of the peninsula, from the Tapi in the north down to Kanyakumari at the very toe of the country, standing on average more than 600 metres above the plains. They are older than the Himalaya. They catch the monsoon before it reaches the rest of us and hand it back as rivers. The Godavari, the Krishna, the Cauvery — and hundreds of streams whose names only their own villages remember — are all born in these hills. Break this wall of green, and half a peninsula goes thirsty.
And what lives here? One of the eight richest biodiversity hotspots on the entire planet. The Nilgiri tahr on the high crags, the shy lion-tailed macaque in the canopy, the drowned and dreamlike Myristica swamp forests, the shola grasslands of the ridge-tops — and endemic frogs, fish, birds and flowers found nowhere else on God’s earth. UNESCO has written several of these stretches into its World Heritage List. And from this same soil come cardamom, pepper, cinnamon, mango and jackfruit — the spices that once brought the ships of the world to our coast, and still feed millions of small growers today.
But here is the part the world keeps forgetting: these hills are not empty. Nearly five crore human beings live in and around them — farmers, plantation workers, forest-dwellers, fishers. And they are the authors of one of the oldest conservation traditions anywhere on earth: the sacred groves, the kavu of Kerala and the devrai of Maharashtra, patches of ancient forest that simple village faith has guarded since long before any government had a department for it. For these people, protecting nature was never a policy to be notified. It was a way of being alive.
How much is now under the shield
So how much of this treasure does the notification place under protection? The draft notifies an Ecologically Sensitive Area of roughly 56,825.7 square kilometres — an unbroken ribbon of natural landscape stretched across six states. Here is the ground, state by state:
| State | Ecologically Sensitive Area (sq km) |
|---|---|
| Gujarat | 449 |
| Maharashtra | 17,340 |
| Goa | 1,461 |
| Karnataka | 20,668 |
| Tamil Nadu | 6,914 |
| Kerala | 9,993.7 |
| Total | 56,825.7 |
This grows out of the recommendation of the High Level Working Group (the Kasturirangan Committee), which back in April 2013 flagged about 37 per cent of the Western Ghats — some 59,940 square kilometres — as ecologically sensitive, and asked that the most ruinous activities there be banned or tightly leashed.
Now, let us be honest about how hard this was
Do not, for one moment, imagine that this notification floated gently down from a ministry’s desk. It was dragged into daylight after more than a decade of resistance — and anyone who tells you otherwise has not been watching.
Look at the paper trail in the Gazette itself. A draft in March 2014. Another in September 2015. Another in February 2017. Again in 2018. Again in 2022 — twice. And now, in 2026, this one. Six drafts. Six. Meeting after meeting after meeting with the six state governments, with Members of Parliament, with stakeholders, stretching from 2013 all the way to 2024. Why does it take thirteen years and half a dozen drafts to protect a mountain that everyone agrees is priceless?
Because the mountain is priceless — and so, to some, is what can be dug out of it, quarried from it, and built upon it.
Every honest reader of this story knows the pressures that stalled it: the mining and quarrying interests that see rock where the rest of us see a watershed; the real-estate and construction lobbies eyeing the cool green slopes; the short-term political calculation in state after state that found it easier to delay than to decide. Each new draft was chipped at, watered down, sent back, argued over. That the Union Government has held the line and pushed the notification forward at all — with its bans intact — is not a small thing. It is an act of will against a strong current, and it deserves to be said plainly and gratefully.
And make no mistake, the bans have teeth. Mining, quarrying and sand-mining are barred outright, existing mines to be shut within five years or on lease-expiry, whichever comes first. No new thermal power plant, and no expansion of old ones. The most polluting “Red” category industries — shut out. Large townships and building complexes — stopped. Hydropower and cleaner industry — allowed only under strict ecological conditions, including a guaranteed minimum flow left in the rivers. This is protection, not decoration.
The lesson the world must learn
And yet — here is the wonder of it — the very same order that chains the excavator opens its arms to the farmer.
It says, in plain words: there will be no displacement of the people living inside the zone. Farming and plantation work go on, untouched. A family may repair, rebuild and extend its own home. Existing clinics stay; new primary health centres may come up. A man may buy and sell his own land without a new leash. And before any project may proceed, the notification demands the informed consent of the Gram Sabha under the Forest Rights Act — and asks the states to monitor the zone with the local community, not over its head.
Put those clauses together and a philosophy shines through. The five crore people of the Ghats are not treated as a stain to be scrubbed off the map so nature can be “saved” from them. They are recognised for what they have always been — the custodians of the mountain, whose farms and groves and daily care are part of its health, not a wound in it.
This is exactly where the world must sit up and learn from India. For a century the fashionable global model was fortress conservation: draw a line, evict the humans, call the emptiness “pristine.” It failed the forests and it broke the people. India’s Western Ghats notification answers with something better — an ecological democracy, where the hill and those who live upon it are protected together. It is, in the truest sense, an old Indian idea wearing new legal clothes: that prakriti is not a resource to be conquered, but a mother to be lived with, in dharma.
But a law nobody has heard of protects no one
Now to the unfinished duty — and it is urgent.
A notification is only as strong as the awareness of the people it names. Somewhere tonight there is a village on that list of 56,825 square kilometres whose residents have no idea their home now sits inside an Ecologically Sensitive Area. And that is dangerous — because the notification gives them rights: the right to be consulted, the right of Gram Sabha consent, the right to object within the sixty days the government has opened for public objections. A right you do not know you have is a right you cannot use.
So this is a direct appeal to the officials who carry this order on the ground — the District Collectors, the State ESA cells, the Forest and Revenue Departments, and the Panchayati Raj institutions of every affected district across Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
Advertise this. Loudly. Everywhere. Publish the village-wise list in the local language, not just in the Gazette’s officialese. Read it out in the Gram Sabha. Paste it on the panchayat notice board, the ration shop, the bus stop, the temple wall. Announce it on community radio and on WhatsApp. Send the patwari and the forest guard door to door if that is what it takes. Do not let a single farmer learn, three years too late, that his village was listed and his sixty days to speak had quietly run out. Awareness is not a courtesy here. It is the very thing that turns this notification from a map into a partnership.
The mountain has kept faith with us for millions of years — sending down the rain, filling the rivers, holding the soil, feeding the pot. This notification is India’s chance to keep faith with the mountain, and with the people who have always lived in its shade. The bans are the easy part. The real test is whether the last villager on that list ever gets to know that the Republic has, at long last, stood up for his hill and for him.
Let us make sure he knows.
The author is Secretary General of the Confederation of NGOs of Rural India (CNRI) and Founder of the World Cooperative Economic Forum (WCOOPEF). Views are personal.
