Senior environmentalist Madhav GadgilLast week, the recipient of the UN’s highest environmental honor for 2024 – the ‘Champions of the Earth’ award – emphasized the role of local communities in protecting the environment while talking to The Indian Express.
He said the Gram Sabha and locals should be part of the decision-making process regarding carrying out activities like rock quarrying in ecologically sensitive areas in the Western Ghats.
Gadgil was the chairman of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP), which submitted a report in 2011 – later known as the Gadgil Report – and recommended demarcating the Western Ghats into ecologically sensitive zones at different levels.
“The decision-making approach should be bottom-up, not the other way around,” he said. “In less sensitive areas, rock quarrying can be allowed with suggestions from well-organized community groups like Kudumbashree (a community network aimed at empowering women and a poverty alleviation program) in Kerala. These groups are awarded quarrying contracts. should be given and asked to manage.”
According to Gadgil, such measures to limit activities in the high and medium ecologically sensitive areas of the Western Ghats will help avoid disasters like the Wayanad landslide in July this year. The disaster killed more than 250 people. However, environmentalists say these actions will not be easy to implement as the rich and powerful continue to profit from rock mining, which leaves ecologically sensitive areas vulnerable to landslides.
“Most of these quarries are illegal and do not have adequate permission from the local district collector. My friends in Kerala have told me that a large number of mines are owned by members of political parties including the BJP, CPI(M), and Congress, who make a lot of money,” he said.
Gadgil also accused “tea plantation owners and their cronies” of building resorts and ponds in the area, adding pressure on the land and making it prone to landslides.
He highlighted the fact that poor and marginalized communities suffer when disasters like the Wayanad landslide occur.
The ecologist also points out that India needs to revise its approach to economic growth. He said that the country should pay attention to the development of four elements namely natural capital, human capital, social capital and man-made capital.
“We cannot focus only on man-made capital, which includes mining and polluting industries for economic growth. Because man-made capital adversely affects natural capital and human capital in the long run. It harms the environment and creates unemployment by destroying agriculture and so on. … I am sure that if we move forward in this way, we will be able to take the path leading to overall development,’ he said.
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