India’s Western Ghats: Fragile, and wounded

A decade ago, we warned of the perils of ill-advised human interventions. Our warnings were ignored; such activities intensified; and citizens are paying the price

While in jail in 1942, the Gandhian economist JC Kumarappa wrote a book titled Economy of Permanence that articulates what has come to be called “sustainable development”, following the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Environment in Stockholm. If one were to use Kumarappa’s words, the wounds being inflicted on the Western Ghats today are a display of an economy of violence engaged in resource exhaustion while promoting social disharmony.

Both the Western Ghats and the west coast are home to highly literate and aware citizens, who have pioneered progressive initiatives. The spirit of such movements should now be restored to ensure that the economy of violence engaged in resource exhaustion is effectively countered, and the ongoing series of disasters gradually brought under control (REUTERS)

The Western Ghats have been suffering for a long time now, but it is only since 2018 that nature’s wrath has made it a centre of people’s attention. This is because the victims of rampant destruction are no longer just the weak and the poor but members of the better-off urban middle classes as well.

The Kerala government brushed aside the 2018 floods as a once-in-a-century event. But the whole country experienced very heavy rains in 2019, with serious flooding in Kerala, Goa and Maharashtra. In 2020, once again, floods affected Kerala and Goa and, this year, Goa, Maharashtra and Kerala have all witnessed extensive flood-related damage accompanied by landslides, small and big.

The frequency of landslides of all sizes has increased a hundred-fold from 2010 to 2020 over Maharashtra’s Western Ghats. This increase is only partially explained by spells of intense rainfall. It is primarily a result of the growing pace of ill-advised human interventions. The Enercon windmill project abutting Maharashtra’s Bhimashankar sanctuary is a case in point.

In 2011, the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP), which I chaired, reported that careless construction of roads for installing windmill machinery at the project had triggered off a series of landslides that covered the fields of farmers at the base of the hills with rubble, choked their streams, and silted up the Bhima river and Bhama and Andhra reservoirs.

Three years later, a landslide occurred at the nearby village of Malin on July 30, 2014, destroying the village and killing 151 people. While the government promptly attributed it to a burst of heavy rainfall, locals allege that funds from a government scheme to create additional paddy terraces by employing people (under the employment guarantee scheme) were siphoned off to pay influential politicians to carry out the work using earth-moving equipment. This disturbed the land extensively and triggered the landslide.

Kerala witnessed a series of major landslides leading to large-scale deaths in Wayanad, Kozhikode and Malappuram districts in August 2019, followed by the Pettimudi landslide near Munnar on August 7, 2020. Again, the government attributed this to heavy rains, brushing aside the fact that there had been extensive construction of roads and of high-rise buildings on steep slopes in close vicinity of the landslide site against WGEEP’s recommendations.

This year, the intense spell of rains from June 19 to June 22 in Konkan triggered several major landslides. The worst was at Taliye in Raigad district, killing 124 people; a second landslide at Birmani in Khed taluka killed two people; and a third landslide at Pedhe, Kumbharwadi, destroyed six houses and killed three people. All these landslides are a result of careless construction of roads and unregulated rock quarries engaged in extensive blasting, accompanied by deforestation. This has been followed by landslides in Kottayam and Idukki districts of Kerala around mid-October, resulting in the death of at least 21 people.

Regretfully, all these were disasters waiting to happen. As early as 2011, WGEEP designated each one of these as localities falling in regions of highest ecological sensitivity, Ecologically Sensitive Zone 1 (ESZ1). ESZ1 included areas with steep slopes and high rainfall. Both these increase the susceptibility to landslides. The extent of intact natural vegetation is the third component for assignment as ESZ1. Landslides are under check in areas with intact natural vegetation because of the binding of the soil by roots. However, any disturbance to natural vegetation in a locality with high rainfall and with steep slopes makes it prone to landslides.

Such disturbances may include construction of buildings and roads, quarrying or mining, replacement of natural vegetation by plantations, or levelling of the land using heavy machinery.

We strongly recommended avoiding these kinds of deleterious activities, and, 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.

WGEEP emphasised that it is people at the grassroots, with their health and well-being closely tied to the health of their environment, who have the traditions, knowledge, and motivation to safeguard it. India is a democracy where the Constitution declares that people are the sovereign rulers of the country. We have in our books many pro-people Acts, such as the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution, biological diversity act and forest rights act.

Hence, the way forward lies in the pursuit of genuine democratic decentralisation and empowering local communities, whether they be in villages or in cities. Both the Western Ghats and the west coast are home to highly literate and aware citizens, who have pioneered progressive initiatives such as the people’s planning campaign in Kerala. The spirit of such movements should now be restored to ensure that the economy of violence engaged in resource exhaustion is effectively countered, and the ongoing series of disasters gradually brought under control.

Madhav Gadgil is one of India’s most widely-regarded ecologists. He is a former professor of the Indian Institute of Science, where he founded the Centre for Ecological Sciences. He headed the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, which has also come to be known as the Gadgil Commission.

The views expressed are personal