Madhav Gadgil, advocate of democratic conservation, has died at 83

Madhav Gadgil argued that conservation was not a technical problem but a political one, centered on who decides how land and resources are used, and on what evidence.
Trained as a scientist but shaped by fieldwork, he rejected elite, top-down conservation models in favor of approaches that treated local communities as part of ecosystems rather than obstacles to be managed.
He became nationally prominent after chairing the 2011 Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, which proposed strict safeguards and a democratic, bottom-up decision-making process that governments largely resisted.
Until the end of his life, he remained a sharp critic of development that ignored law, ecology, and consent, insisting that democracy, not convenience, should guide environmental decisions.

In India, arguments about nature are often treated as friction in the path of progress. Madhav Gadgil insisted they were arguments about power: who gets to decide what happens to a forest, a river, a hillside, and on what evidence. He made that case as a scientist, and then made it again as a citizen who did not care much whether officials found it convenient.

Gadgil, an ecologist associated most closely with the Western Ghats and with a democratic approach to conservation, died on January 7, 2025. He was 83.

He was born in Pune and grew up with two unusual advantages: access to books and access to the living world. His father, Dhananjaya Ramchandra Gadgil, bought him binoculars and helped him learn birds “in the pre-pesticide days.” A neighbor, the anthropologist Irawati Karve, shaped his outlook in a different way, encouraging him to grow up without religious, caste, or class prejudices. When Gadgil was nine, he accompanied Karve on fieldwork to Kodagu, where he saw wild elephants and a sacred grove at Talakaveri, near the origin of the Kaveri River. It was an early lesson in how landscapes hold meaning beyond their market price.

As a young man he was physically tough and competitive—running, swimming, and playing racket sports—traits that suited a field naturalist who preferred to learn by looking closely. Another early lesson arrived through development. In Jawaharlal Nehru’s India, dams were “temples of modern India.” Gadgil learned at 14 about forest destruction and displacement linked to the Koyna dam. He learned to treat those trade-offs as real, and to treat official stories about them with skepticism. The pattern stayed with him: the country’s ambitions were real, so were the costs, and the people who bore them were often those least consulted.

At the Institute of Science in Mumbai he met Sulochana, a classmate who became his partner in life and intellect. Both went to Harvard for doctoral work, he in biology, she in mathematics. Harvard also gave him a credo he repeated later: “take nothing on authority, subject all assertions to scrutiny and maintain what is right without worrying about the reactions of the powers that be.” It fit his temperament. He was willing to argue, and he did not wait to be invited.

After completing his PhD in mathematical biology, he returned to India with a sense that science should not be sealed off from the country it purported to serve. He worked for decades at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, helping establish what became the Centre for Ecological Sciences and training students who later led programs of their own. He also developed a second career as a public writer, publishing popular articles in English and Marathi alongside academic work.

Much of his research started with attention to small things that turned out to be large. In studying sacred groves, he argued they were functional reserves: protecting water sources, sheltering medicinal plants, and providing habitat in cleared landscapes. In Bandipur Tiger Reserve, where he spent years observing elephants, he learned to see ecological infrastructure in ordinary forms. He noticed, for instance, the ficus tree, spared even in clear-felling because it fruits when others do not and feeds insects, birds, bats, monkeys, and more. He watched how mahouts understood that value in practice.

From such observations, he built a broad critique, shaped by what he later called a “people’s scientist’s” attention to life on the ground. He distrusted a style of conservation he saw as elite, centralized, and contemptuous of rural knowledge. He wanted a model that treated people as part of ecosystems, not as a problem to be removed. Programs that promised a synthesis but delivered exclusion disappointed him; the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve, constituted in 1986, struck him as a patchwork of protected areas that kept people and science at arm’s length.

The fight that made him a household name came later. In 2011 he chaired the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, which proposed strict safeguards for the mountain chain and a process meant to begin at the gram sabha, the village-level governing assembly. The report’s guidelines were blunt: limit mining and quarrying, rethink new highways and rail lines in the most sensitive zones, curb destructive practices, and shift decisions downward. Governments were not eager. Another committee was formed. The report became a shorthand for constraint, and his name became, in some quarters, an irritant.

He had little interest in being soothing. When his proposals were dismissed as impractical, he answered with a question that doubled as a charge: “What is practical, flouting our laws and sabotaging democracy?” For him, the scandal was not disagreement. It was the ease with which rules could be bent for “development,” and the expectation that villagers should accept the consequences in silence.

Gadgil’s last public years did not soften him. He continued to argue that information was becoming cheaper, and that communities could now collect their own data and challenge official fictions. Political will, he said, responded to money; it could also respond to organized people. He spent his life trying to make that second force harder to ignore.

Header image: Madhav Gadgil in 2016. Photo by Syed Shiyaz Mirza