Western Ghats Eco-Sensitive Area: Karnataka Rejects the Seventh Draft Notification

1. Western Ghats Eco-Sensitive Area: Karnataka Rejects the Seventh Draft Notification

Basic Concept

The Western Ghats, a nearly continuous mountain chain running about 1,490 km along India's western coast through Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, is recognised as one of the world's eight "hottest hotspots" of biodiversity and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site (a serial site of 39 components) in 2012. It regulates the southwest monsoon, sustains dozens of west-flowing rivers, and shelters thousands of endemic plant and animal species, making its protection a recurring GS1 (physical geography) and GS3 (environment and biodiversity conservation) theme. Concern over unchecked mining, quarrying and construction along the Ghats led the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change to set up the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel under Madhav Gadgil in 2010. Its 2011 report recommended treating almost the entire Western Ghats, about 1,64,280 sq km, as an Ecologically Sensitive Area (ESA), sub-divided into Ecologically Sensitive Zones I, II and III with graded restrictions, a recommendation the concerned states found too restrictive of mining, industry and infrastructure. The Centre then constituted a High-Level Working Group under K. Kasturirangan (2012-13), which used satellite-based land-use mapping to distinguish "natural landscape" from "cultural landscape" (human-modified area) within the Ghats, and recommended notifying only the natural landscape, roughly 37% of the total area or about 60,000 sq km, as ESA, exempting the rest for regulated development. Since 2014-15, the Environment Ministry has repeatedly tried, and failed, to issue a final ESA notification based broadly on the Kasturirangan formula, with every draft lapsing after state governments raised objections about loss of livelihoods and developmental rights for lakhs of residents living within the proposed boundaries.

Core Context

On 22 September 2026, the Karnataka Legislative Assembly unanimously passed a resolution, moved by Forest Minister Ramalinga Reddy, rejecting "in its present form" the Union Environment Ministry's seventh draft ESA notification for the Western Ghats, reissued on 27 July 2026. The draft proposes declaring 56,825.7 sq km as ESA across six states: Karnataka (20,668 sq km, spanning 1,449 villages in 10 districts), Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Goa and Gujarat (449 sq km). Karnataka's principal objection is technical and administrative rather than ideological: it argues that the boundaries were drawn using satellite-based remote-sensing data that cannot reliably separate genuine forest cover from agricultural land, plantations, human settlements and public infrastructure, so that an entire village risks being classified as ESA if even one-fifth of its area shows up as "forest" on the satellite map. The Assembly's resolution asks the Centre for a one-year window to carry out a plot-level, survey-number-wise physical ground survey through a proposed high-level committee, to be headed by a retired judge and to include revenue and forest officials along with farmers' representatives, before any boundary is finalised, and it demands that agricultural land, horticultural areas, settlements and public-utility zones be excluded from the ESA footprint.

Latest Developments

• This is the seventh time since 2014-15 that the Environment Ministry has issued a draft ESA notification for the Western Ghats based substantially on the Kasturirangan report; each of the previous six drafts lapsed without being finalised because the statutory public-objection window (currently 60 days) closed without the government notifying a final version, forcing a fresh draft to be issued.

• The Centre has extended the tenure of the expert committee examining state objections and village-wise demarcation up to July 2027, signalling that finalisation is unlikely before then.

• The draft's proposed regulatory regime bans commercial mining, stone and sand quarrying, new thermal power plants, "red category" highly polluting industries, and large townships with built-up area beyond roughly 20,000 sq metres inside the ESA, and tightly regulates new hydroelectric projects; it explicitly exempts ongoing agriculture, plantation activity and existing local livelihoods from these restrictions.

• Concern over repeated delay is sharpened by disaster memory: the 2024 Wayanad landslides in Kerala, which killed over 200 people, were widely linked by scientific assessments to unregulated quarrying and land-use change in ecologically fragile Western Ghats terrain, and had renewed pressure on the Centre to finalise the notification rather than let it lapse again.

• Karnataka's rejection is not new in spirit, since Kerala, Maharashtra and Goa have all objected to different drafts on different grounds over the past decade, but it is the first time in this round that a full state legislature has passed a formal resolution demanding a fresh, year-long ground-truthing exercise rather than incremental boundary tweaks.

• A recurring structural criticism, reiterated in this round, is the absence of any dedicated financial compensation or "ecological fiscal transfer" mechanism to compensate states and local communities for the development and revenue foregone once land is placed under ESA restrictions.

UPSC Prelims Pointers

• Western Ghats: a UNESCO World Heritage Site (inscribed 2012), spans about 1,490 km across Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and is one of the world's eight biodiversity "hottest hotspots."

• Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (2010-11), chaired by Madhav Gadgil, recommended near-total ESA coverage of about 1,64,280 sq km, divided into Ecologically Sensitive Zones I, II and III.

• High-Level Working Group (2012-13), chaired by K. Kasturirangan, recommended ESA status for only the "natural landscape," about 37% or 60,000 sq km, of the Western Ghats.

• The current, seventh, draft ESA notification, reissued 27 July 2026, proposes 56,825.7 sq km as ESA across six states.

• ESA notifications for such areas are issued by the Union Government under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986.

• Karnataka's contested area under the current draft covers 20,668 sq km across 1,449 villages in 10 districts.

• The 2024 Wayanad landslides in Kerala are frequently cited as an example of the ecological cost of delayed Western Ghats regulation.