Karnataka Opens Special Session, Plans All-Party Delegation to PM Against Western Ghats ESA Draft

The news

BENGALURU. The Karnataka government plans to take an all-party delegation of MPs and MLAs to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi to convey the State's strong reservations against declaring parts of the Western Ghats as an eco-sensitive area, or ESA, The Economic Times reported. An ESA is a tract notified by the Union government under environmental law in which specified activities are banned or regulated so that a fragile landscape is not degraded; it is not the same as a national park, because people continue to live and farm inside it. The move comes ahead of a three-day special session of the Karnataka legislature beginning Monday, 21 September, in which the State will formulate its response to the Centre's latest draft notification on the Kasturirangan report and also review the drought situation, The Indian Express noted in its daily listing. The Centre has sought States' feedback by 27 September. Under the latest draft, the Union government has proposed declaring 20,668 sq km across 10 districts of Karnataka as ecologically sensitive; the notification earlier said the move would affect 1,449 villages across 39 taluks. Karnataka has consistently opposed the proposed ESA tag, warning that it would adversely impact livelihoods, plantations, farming communities and infrastructure development across the region. Ahead of the session, Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar toured key Western Ghats districts, including the coffee-growing region of Sakleshpur in Hassan, to interact with local residents, farmers and legislators. “We will first understand the sentiments of the people and farmers, as well as the situation of those living near forest areas before discussing the matter in the House,” the Chief Minister said. The paper recalled that the Kasturirangan panel had recommended designating ecologically fragile pockets of the Western Ghats as ESA to strike a balance between conservation and development; while the draft framework exempts agriculture and plantation activities, it seeks to ban or restrict mining, quarrying and large construction or industrial projects. The drought half of the session's agenda is also large: The Hindu reported that more than 200 taluks across Karnataka are likely to be included in the drought-affected list as the government assesses them in phases based on prescribed criteria and ground-truthing, according to Deputy Chief Minister G. Parameshwara. Syllabus link: conservation, environmental impact assessment and Centre-State relations in GS3 and GS2.

Static syllabus linkage

1. The ESA is a creature of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986. The Union government notifies an ecologically sensitive area using its power under Section 3 of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, read with Rule 5 of the Environment (Protection) Rules, 1986, which allows it to prohibit or restrict industries and processes in a specified area. The notification is first issued in draft, objections are invited, and only then is a final notification issued. Because the power is the Centre's, a State's opposition is legally a representation, not a veto, which is why Karnataka's response takes the form of a delegation rather than a statute.
2. Gadgil and Kasturirangan disagreed on scale, not on the need to protect. The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel chaired by Madhav Gadgil reported in 2011 and proposed treating the entire range as ecologically sensitive, graded into three zones of decreasing restriction, with a strong role for gram sabhas. States objected, and the High-Level Working Group chaired by K. Kasturirangan reported in 2013, distinguishing a cultural landscape of settlements and plantations from a natural landscape, and recommending that roughly 37% of the Ghats, about 60,000 sq km, be notified as ESA. Mining, quarrying, sand mining, thermal power plants, red-category industries and large townships were to be barred inside that area.
3. The Western Ghats is both a heritage site and a hotspot. The range runs parallel to the western coast through six States — Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2012 as a serial site, and together with Sri Lanka it forms one of the world's biodiversity hotspots. It is the source of peninsular rivers including the Godavari, Krishna and Kaveri, which is why its forest cover matters to farmers far to the east who will never see it.
4. Drought declaration is a State decision under a central manual. A State declares drought following the Manual for Drought Management issued by the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare in 2016 and revised later. The manual uses rainfall deficit and dry spells as mandatory triggers, and then impact indicators such as vegetation indices, crop sowing, soil moisture and water availability, after which field ground-truthing of crop loss is required. A declaration unlocks relief from the State Disaster Response Fund and, for severe drought, a request for assistance from the National Disaster Response Fund under the Disaster Management Act, 2005.

Why UPSC loves this

1. Gadgil versus Kasturirangan is a perennial Mains frame. The GS3 syllabus lists conservation, environmental pollution and degradation, and environmental impact assessment. The Western Ghats dispute has been the classic Indian case of conservation versus livelihood for over a decade, and the 2018 and 2024 Kerala floods and landslides revived it each time. Candidates who can state what each panel actually recommended score over those who treat the two names as slogans.
2. Prelims asks for geography and legal source. Questions on which States the Western Ghats pass through, which Act empowers ESA notification, and the difference between ESA and eco-sensitive zones around protected areas are standard. The 10 km default buffer around protected areas under the 2011 guidelines is distinct from the Western Ghats ESA, and the examiner deliberately conflates the two.
3. Federalism is the new axis. An all-party delegation of a State against a central environmental notification converts an ecological question into a Centre-State one. GS2 questions on cooperative federalism increasingly draw on environmental examples such as river water, forest clearance and coastal zoning.

Analysis

1. The Centre has the power but not the consent, and that is why the notification never becomes final. Legally the Union government could finalise the ESA tomorrow; the Environment (Protection) Act does not require State concurrence. In practice every draft since the Kasturirangan report has been allowed to lapse and reissued, because enforcement of an ESA depends on State revenue officials, State pollution control boards and State police. A notification the State will not implement is paper. Karnataka's all-party delegation is therefore not a protest against a law but a demonstration that the enforcing government is not on board, which is a far more effective message.
2. The exemption for agriculture and plantations weakens the State's strongest argument. Karnataka's stated fear is for livelihoods, plantations and farming. Yet the draft, as The Economic Times describes it, exempts agriculture and plantation activities and targets mining, quarrying and large construction or industrial projects. If the exemption is real, the livelihood affected is less the farmer's than the quarry owner's and the builder's. The counter-view is that villagers fear what a restrictive regime does to roads, housing and small enterprise over time, and that mistrust of forest bureaucracies is earned. Both can be true, but the answer should separate the two interests rather than merge them.
3. Scale is the contested variable, and 1,449 villages is a political number. 20,668 sq km across 10 districts is a large share of the State's forested west. When a notification touches 1,449 villages across 39 taluks, every MLA from the region has constituents inside it, which explains why the response is all-party rather than partisan. The honest policy question is not whether to protect the Ghats but whether the boundaries were drawn with village-level verification. Where they were drawn from satellite imagery alone, the State has a legitimate grievance and a demand for ground verification is reasonable.
4. Pairing the ESA with drought in one session is telling. The same session will review a drought likely to cover more than 200 taluks. Drought in a State whose rivers rise in the Ghats is an argument for the ESA rather than against it, because forest cover in the catchment governs the dry-season flow that farmers downstream depend on. That the two items are on the same agenda but framed in opposite directions is the clearest illustration of how environmental and agricultural policy are made in separate compartments.
5. The Gadgil route of local consent remains the road not taken. Gadgil proposed that gram sabhas have a decisive voice in zoning. That was rejected as impractical, and the result is a decade of top-down drafts that have neither protected the range nor settled the dispute. The counter-argument is that gram sabhas can also be captured by quarry and real-estate interests. A middle path would let gram sabhas propose boundary corrections within a fixed ecological floor that is not negotiable.

Administrator's brainstorm