Madhav Dhananjaya Gadgil passed away on January 7,2026 in Pune at the age of 83. With his death, India has lost one of its most important voices for ecology—at a time when mountain ranges like the Aravallis are being dismantled, the Andaman Islands face severe deforestation, forests are opened up for mining and monocrop plantations, and environmental protection laws are steadily weakened through amendments and notifications.
Kerala, however, has lost something more troubling: a voice it argued with, dismissed, and remembers only when disasters strike, almost every monsoon. Since the big floods of 2018, monsoons in Kerala bring rain, floods, landslides and Gadgil!
Gadgil was a scientist who believed that knowledge carries responsibility. Born in Pune in 1942, he studied biology in India and completed his doctorate in ecology at Harvard. At a time when many chose to stay abroad, he returned home and committed himself to building ecological science in India - steadily, sensitively, institutionally, and yet, close to the ground.
At the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, he played a key role in building the Centre for Ecological Sciences and shaping generations of ecologists trained in long-term field observation rather than quick conclusions. His work ranged across biodiversity, conservation, population ecology, and natural resource use, but one idea ran through all of it: nature cannot be protected by ignoring people.
That idea shaped his public life, and nowhere more sharply than in Kerala.
Gadgil will be remembered here mainly for chairing the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP), an initiative by the then Minister for Environment and Forests, Jairam Ramesh. The panel submitted its report in 2011. The report was scientifically rigorous and measured in its recommendations. It did not call for enclosing the Western Ghats or taking away livelihoods. It identified ecologically sensitive zones, warned about cumulative damage, and proposed graded regulation. Crucially, it placed responsibility with local self-governments and gram sabhas, rather than distant centralised authorities.
The report asked Kerala to slow down, to think, and to plan with care.
But Kerala responded with contempt and rage, leaving no room for engagement.
Political parties across the spectrum rejected the report. Sections of the Church opposed it publicly. Quarrying and plantation interests mobilised fear, circulating baseless claims and distorted interpretations of the report. Madhav Gadgil and the committee members were personally vilified and attacked. The report was branded anti-development and anti-people, and very few made any serious effort to engage with its findings. Despite decades of work in the region, Gadgil himself was dismissed along with the report.
As the report got pushed aside, in its place came a diluted alternative - the Kasturirangan committee’s report - which cut down Gadgil’s landscape-wide, graded framework into a smaller notified one, stripping away its democratic core. Even this weakened framework never settled into firm protection and lingered as draft notifications and partial measures. What remains today bears little resemblance to the democratic and precautionary approach the Gadgil Report had laid out.
What followed was predictable. It is now part of the state’s lived experience.
The floods of 2018 were a turning point. Rivers overflowed, hills collapsed, and nearly half the State went under water. More than 450 people lost their lives, close to three lakh houses were damaged or destroyed, and livelihoods were devastated. The UN-led Post-Disaster Needs Assessment estimated recovery needs at over ₹31,000 crore - a figure that captured only part of the damage to lives and livelihoods.
In the years that followed, landslides at Kavalappara, Puthumala, Pettimudi and, more recently, the worst of them, Mundakkai-Chooralmala deepened the sense of loss. Each disaster brought more deaths, displacement, and recovery costs running into thousands of crores. Each was followed by inquiries and assessments, and each time the same causes returned: quarrying, deforestation, altered hydrological systems, unstable slopes, and construction that ignored terrain and water.
Again and again, these reports repeated the logic - and often the warnings - of the Gadgil Report.
Veteran ecologist Dr VS Vijayan, a member of the WGEEP, later pointed out that many of the areas hit by landslides and flash floods had already been identified in the report as highly vulnerable. It was a factual observation, not a political one. And yet, the State’s decision to ignore these warnings was political and myopic, with painful consequences and heavy costs to lives, property, and ecosystems.
With every disaster, Gadgil’s name returned to public discussion. Not because there was a sudden agreement with him, but because disasters forced recognition. The report that was once dismissed kept resurfacing as a reference point, even when it was not openly acknowledged.
While public opinion and political decisions trashed this lifeline report, a few political leaders chose not to join the attack. The late PT Thomas is remembered most clearly for his intervention in the Kerala Assembly, where he defended the report and staged a walkout against its rejection. Others too, at different moments, resisted its dismissal - V S Achuthanandan, Mullakkara Ratnakaran, Binoy Viswam, VD Satheesan, VM Sudheeran, and Kummanam Rajasekharan - to name the most prominent among them. Not all agreed fully with the report, but they recognised it as a lifeline that deserved engagement, not vilification.
Gadgil was not an easy environmentalist. He challenged romantic ideas of conservation as much as he opposed reckless development. He criticised aspects of the Wildlife Protection Act when he felt it ignored constitutional principles and people’s realities. He spoke openly about human-wildlife conflict and the limits of rigid positions. He believed that hard truths must be spoken and spoken early, without fear of consequences.
Those who worked closely with him recall his simplicity and clarity. Dr TV Sajeev of the Kerala Forest Research Institute has spoken of Gadgil’s deep respect for community knowledge and his refusal to see people living close to forests as obstacles. He believed they should be leading conservation efforts. Sajeev also noted that Gadgil was among the first in India to clearly connect science with governance, and that the WGEEP was perhaps the first such report when knowledge creation was directly tied to how decisions were meant to be made - and by whom.
Environmental lawyer Harish Vasudevan points out that the Gadgil Report was as much about constitutional values - decentralisation, consent, accountability - as it was about ecology. Drawing from his conversations with Gadgil, Vasudevan notes that both the Union government and States were uncomfortable with the report because it challenged their hold over environmental clearances and argued instead for people-centric, science-based regional authorities.
Beyond Kerala, Gadgil’s contributions were wide-ranging. He helped establish India’s first biosphere reserve in the Nilgiris. He played a key role in shaping the Biological Diversity Act and the system of People’s Biodiversity Registers. He served on the Prime Minister’s Scientific Advisory Council and contributed to environmental thinking nationally and internationally. He received the Padma Shri, the Padma Bhushan, and later the UN’s Champions of the Earth lifetime award.
But in Kerala, his legacy is not about achievements, nor was it about science and his deep commitment to democracy and grassroots decision making. It was about how he challenged the powers of exploitation and wilful destruction of resources and ecosystems that sustain this landscape.
Today, it is clear: it was a warning given early and understood late - if at all.
As tributes flow in now, there is a risk of comfort. Gadgil himself would not have wanted that. He did not argue for posthumous agreement. He argued for timely action.
For me, the best way to remember Madhav Gadgil is not through polite praise, but by continuing to speak and write honestly about what Kerala has done to its mountains, forests, rivers, and people - and about what it still refuses to face.
Madhav Gadgil is no more. But Kerala is still, painfully, in conversation with him.
Sridhar Radhakrishnan is an environmental and social justice activist. He writes about democracy, ecology, agriculture, and climate concerns.