Keralam Asks the Centre to Shrink Its Western Ghats Eco-Sensitive Area to 8,590.69 sq km of Forest Only

The news

Thiruvananthapuram. After Karnataka’s special Assembly session against the Western Ghats Ecologically Sensitive Area (ESA) draft, carded here on September 21, the Keralam government has made its own formal move: it has urged the Centre to limit the ESA in its part of the Ghats to forest areas covering 8,590.69 sq km, The Hindu reports. An ESA is a tract notified by the Centre under environmental law in which activities such as mining, quarrying and large construction are banned or regulated because the ecosystem is fragile. M.G. Rajamanickam, Special Secretary, Environment and Climate Change, formally placed the State’s recommendations and suggestions before the Centre on Thursday, Minister for Electricity and Environment Sunny Joseph said in Thiruvananthapuram on Friday. “Our stand is that populated areas, farmlands and plantations should be excluded and the ESA limited to forest regions,” Mr. Joseph said. The history he recounted: in 2013 the K. Kasturirangan Committee proposed an ESA of 13,108 sq km covering 123 villages in the State, which sparked widespread protests; after a study, the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests issued a draft notification that reduced the area to 9,993.7 sq km. Keralam now wants it brought down to 8,590.69 sq km and the number of villages to 98. It is also seeking a final notification, because every notification issued from 2014 to July 2026 has been a draft. The Minister called Keralam’s case “unique” given its small size, dense population and large forest cover (29.15% of total area), and said that adding another law to the existing stringent laws protecting forests, the environment, paddy fields and wetlands could hurt development, agriculture and everyday life. If needed, Chief Minister V.D. Satheesan will lead a delegation to New Delhi. The Hindu’s editorial the same day (“Narrowed posture”) supplies the wider map: as of mid-2026 Gujarat was reportedly close to agreement with the Centre, Tamil Nadu had no substantive disagreement, Kerala wanted its ground-truthed 9,993 sq km cut to 8,805 sq km — a smaller cut than today’s 8,590.69 sq km ask — and Maharashtra and Goa wanted 378 and 21 villages omitted. Citing the Centre’s 2024 decision to notify ESAs State by State, it argues that Karnataka, which holds the largest share of the proposed ESAs by area, cannot keep rejecting the framework without an equally considered alternative map. The syllabus link is GS3 on conservation and environmental impact assessment, and GS2 on Centre–State relations.

Static syllabus linkage

1. The legal basis for an ESA is Section 3 of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, not a separate forest law. Section 3 of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 empowers the Central Government to take all measures it considers necessary to protect and improve the environment, and Section 3(2)(v) specifically covers restricting the areas in which industries, operations or processes shall not be carried out or shall be carried out subject to safeguards. Rule 5 of the Environment (Protection) Rules, 1986 lists the factors the Centre must consider in imposing such restrictions, including the biological diversity of the area and its proximity to protected areas. The same Rule requires the Centre to publish its intention as a draft and invite objections before a final notification, which is why the Western Ghats process has produced a series of drafts. Because the Act is a Central law, the final notification is the Centre’s decision, though in practice it has sought State agreement.
2. Gadgil and Kasturirangan disagreed on how much of the Ghats needs protection and how to decide it. The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, chaired by ecologist Madhav Gadgil, reported in 2011 and treated the entire Western Ghats as ecologically sensitive, grading it into three zones with graded restrictions and recommending a strong role for gram sabhas and a statutory Western Ghats Ecology Authority. The High-Level Working Group chaired by K. Kasturirangan, set up after States objected, reported in 2013. It divided the Ghats into a ‘cultural landscape’ of settlements, farms and plantations and a ‘natural landscape’, and proposed that about 37% of the Ghats, roughly 59,940 sq km, be notified as ESA. Within the ESA it recommended a ban on mining, quarrying, sand mining, red-category industries and large townships; its use of remote-sensing data and a rule including a whole village if 20% of its area was sensitive are what Karnataka now disputes.
3. The Western Ghats are a global biodiversity hotspot and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Western Ghats run for about 1,600 km parallel to the west coast through six States: Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Together with Sri Lanka they form one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, with very high endemism among amphibians, reptiles, fish and flowering plants. UNESCO inscribed the Western Ghats as a serial natural World Heritage Site in 2012, made up of component sites in Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra. The range is also the water tower of peninsular India: the Godavari, Krishna and Kaveri rise on its slopes.
4. An ESA is not the same as an eco-sensitive zone around a sanctuary. Eco-sensitive zones are buffer areas notified, also under the Environment (Protection) Act, around national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, following the National Wildlife Action Plan and Ministry guidelines of 2011; they act as shock absorbers around a protected area. The Western Ghats ESA is a landscape-scale notification covering villages whether or not they adjoin a protected area. Keralam already has overlapping protections, including the Kerala Conservation of Paddy Land and Wetland Act, 2008 and the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980, which is the basis of the Minister’s ‘another law’ argument. The Wayanad landslides of July 2024, which killed more than 200 people in Mundakkai and Chooralmala, sharpened the debate on building and quarrying on steep, rain-soaked slopes.

Why UPSC loves this

1. GS3 conservation questions keep returning to the Western Ghats. The syllabus names conservation, environmental pollution and degradation, and environmental impact assessment. Mains has asked candidates to compare the Gadgil and Kasturirangan approaches and to assess why landslides and floods in the Ghats have intensified. Keralam’s submission gives a live example of how the final map is actually negotiated.
2. Prelims tests the legal source and the geography. UPSC has asked which States the Western Ghats pass through, which rivers rise there, and under which Act eco-sensitive zones are notified. The distinction between an ESA, an eco-sensitive zone and a protected area under the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972 is exactly the sort of statement-based trap the paper sets.
3. Environmental federalism is a GS2 theme hiding inside a GS3 topic. The Hindu’s editorial frames the ESA as a collective-action problem: States bear the local cost, the nation captures the benefit. That argument fits GS2 questions on cooperative federalism and the Centre’s power to legislate on subjects in the Concurrent List, where ‘forests’ and ‘protection of wild animals and birds’ were moved by the 42nd Amendment.

Analysis

1. Keralam is asking for the ESA to cover land that is already protected, which would make the notification largely redundant. Limiting the ESA to forest areas sounds moderate, but forests are already governed by the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980, wildlife laws and State forest rules. The purpose of a landscape-scale ESA is to regulate what happens at the edges — quarries on slopes above villages, resorts on stream banks, roads cut into unstable hillsides — which is where Wayanad-type disasters begin. Excluding plantations and settlements removes exactly those edges. The counter-view is serious: in a State where farms and forests interlock, blanket restrictions on houses and farm roads hurt poor settlers far more than they hurt quarry owners, and a notification the State will not enforce protects nothing.
2. The editorial’s strongest point is that the ESA is a textbook public good, so States will always bargain it down. A State that gives up mining royalties and construction activity bears the cost alone, while the benefits — rainfall regulation, river flows to other States, biodiversity — are shared by the whole peninsula. Each State therefore has an incentive to shrink its share, and Keralam’s number has in fact moved from 13,108 to 9,993.7 to 8,805 and now 8,590.69 sq km. The Centre’s 2024 decision to notify State by State speeds agreement but removes the logic of a continuous range, since a corridor broken in one State loses value in the next. A fair solution would compensate conserving States, for instance through forest-cover weight in Finance Commission transfers, rather than rely on persuasion.
3. Twelve years of drafts is itself a policy outcome, and it has favoured the extractive lobby. Keralam’s complaint that every notification from 2014 to July 2026 has been a draft cuts both ways. Uncertainty discourages legitimate farm and housing investment, as the editorial says, but it also means no final, enforceable ban on mining in the most sensitive villages has ever come into force. Interim directions of 2013 preserve some protection, yet a regime of repeated drafts invites litigation and lobbying at every round. A final notification, even a smaller one, would be better than an indefinite draft that is ignored on the ground.
4. The ‘20% rule’ dispute shows that the unit of mapping, not the principle, is the real quarrel. Kasturirangan used the revenue village as the unit and included the whole village if a fifth of its area was ecologically sensitive. That was an administrative convenience, because land records and permissions are issued village-wise, but it inevitably swept farmland into the ESA. Ground-truthing at plot or survey-number level would resolve many complaints, and Keralam’s reduction from 123 to 98 villages suggests such mapping is possible. The lesson for policy is that a scientifically sound boundary drawn crudely produces political resistance that ends up weakening the science.
5. Keralam’s ‘unique’ plea is partly true and partly a template other States will copy. Keralam is small, densely populated and heavily dependent on plantations along the Ghats, so a given ESA area touches more households there than in Gujarat or Tamil Nadu. But Karnataka, Maharashtra and Goa have made similar pleas in different words, and if each State’s uniqueness is accepted, the continuous range becomes a patchwork. A better test than uniqueness is risk: slope, rainfall and past landslide history should decide where restrictions bite hardest, whatever the State boundary.

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