Every weather-related disaster brings in its wake the demand for a drastic environmental response. When landslides in the hills of Western Ghats in Kerala’s Wayanad killed more than 200 people early this month, a similar clamour rose to impose the recommendations in the two Western Ghats ecology reports that had recommended stringent restrictions on developments in the fragile region.

The votaries of the reports argued that if the recommendations had been implemented the tragedy could have been prevented.

They said the same when the devastating floods of 2018 killed over 400 people in Kerala, one of the worst weather-related disasters to hit the state.

And on social media, the simple story of good environmentalists versus evil development is a sell-out. The basic storyline across such posts goes like this: In 2011 and 2013, two expert reports recommended that thousands of square kilometres of fragile Western Ghats across six states, including Kerala, be declared as ecologically sensitive areas. If we had heeded the ecologists, bad development wouldn’t have taken place and we could have safeguarded the areas from man-made disasters triggered by heavy rain. Many lives would have been saved. The nexus of corrupt politicians, vested interests, and polluters is to blame. No one listened to the honest advice of ecologists and environmentalists, leaving citizens to suffer.

Then, there is another version, in which everybody wears shades of grey, including the ecologists. This isn’t the simplistic binary that’s the staple of social media. Here it is:

In 2011, a Union government-appointed committee of ecologists headed by Madhav Gadgil studied the fragile ecology of Western Ghats. Their conclusion: The ghats were looking at an ecological disaster. Their solution: Declare 75% of the Western Ghats area as an ecologically sensitive area. That’s more than 1 lakh square kilometres spread across six states.

It recommended banning mining, polluting industries, major road constructions, power plants, plantations, and curbing high-density tourism and imposing many other restrictions on development in areas mapped out as ecologically sensitive. 

Besides its call to zone off 75% of Western Ghats land as ecologically fragile, the panel made one more recommendation that would have created a new lord of the ghats: a central Western Ghats Authority that should oversee economic development in this vast area spread across states.

The Gadgil report said the authority should be headed by an eminent ecologist or a retired Supreme Court judge. Below it, there would be a state-level ecology authority and a district-level one. It was intended as an ecology-focused bureaucracy staffed with environmentally sensitive people that would override the corrupt political-economy of the six states.

An impatient good-hearted ecologist’s solution to an environmental emergency was to override Indian democracy run by those ‘tainted’ elected representatives, and impose a top-down puritanical governance by honest ecologists. The report imagined a new kind of environmental governance, licensing and clearance regime.

Then, there was the matter of detailing the boundaries of this ecologically sensitive area, village by village, forest patch by forest patch. The committee had used ecological parameters (such as diversity of species in an area) and broad revenue district boundaries to recommend that over 10,00,000 square kilometres should be out of bounds for industries, polluting activities and development. They didn’t precisely map out every village, town or forested hill that had to be put under development freeze. They said such detailed and accurate boundaries of the restrictive zones could be worked out later once the Western Ghats Authority had been set up. But, they recommended that economic restrictions be notified immediately on this massive swath of the Western Ghats range.

Again, the ecologists had shown impatience. The identification of the boundaries on the ground could potentially take long if done meticulously. The ecologists did not want to wait. While claiming to put people at the heart of their ecologically safe world, they were ready to build their imagined world first and later figure how people could fit in it.

Guess what happened?

The fear of loss of livelihood and closure of businesses spread like wildfire. Ordinary villagers, plantation owners and workers, mine owners, contractors, business people and political parties were pitted against the do-good ecologist.

If I were a miner, I stood to lose. If I were a labourer in tea estates or cardamom fields, fear lurked that it would be shut down for ecological reasons. Resorts feared shutdown. Homestays feared loss of revenue from curbs on tourism. Plantations and resorts are the biggest employers in the ghats. 

Some feared that even building a hospital or a road to a village would become harder with new licences needed from new authorities.There was a legitimate fear, then there were rumour mongering campaigns by vested interests.

People who lived off forests feared another national-level licensing regime. All centralised forest-protection regimes since the colonial era have boiled down to heavy exploitation, petty corruption, and large-scale denial of rights to the poor in combination with corruption-stoked exemptions for the rich and powerful.

People feared the angel they didn’t know but were comfortable with the devil they knew: the existing political-bureaucratic machines.

Buoyed by support from several segments of society, the states rejected the Gadgil report. A new committee headed by K Kasturirangan, a scientist, was set up. In 2013, it submitted its report, which reduced the protected area in the mountain range to 37% (about 60,000 square kilometres). It was almost half of what the Gadgil report proposed, and did away with the need for a new central authority. The report was a considerable climb down from the first one but it too faced objections from the states. 

In essence, neither the Union government nor the states want to really implement the reports because they know voters demand economic prosperity. But governments also know it is bad to be not seen championing an idea intended to protect ‘mother nature’. So, they stage a theatrical performance, playing ping-pong with the reports to avoid taking real action.

So, each time a tragedy strikes, ecologists could blame the corrupt world for failing them and their reports, reaffirming their moral superiority. The Union government could blame the states for not listening, and the states could in turn say the Union government is not budging. 

For more than a decade, as governments of different hues played the game again and again, life stuttered from one disaster to another. This has been repeated with the landslides this year in Kerala.

Is there a way to avoid such a stalemate?

The ecologists, with their intrinsic view that all politics and business are plain dirty for the environment, produced an extreme policy prescription that it ended up uniting all the most powerful vested interests alongside many concerned citizens. But, how did the ecologist imagine that these powerful forces and all elected representatives across six states would cede decision-making power to a committee of ‘good’ environmentalists?

The ecologist’s dream of a harmonious world coming together to save the environment is utopia. The real world is a noisy marketplace of different interests and stakes that must be navigated to govern and move society towards a better equilibrium between development and ecological security; between instant economic betterment and long-term sustainability. 

Progressive (I would even call them radical) pieces of legislation and policies have almost always emerged in democracies by involving the stakeholders, not just token representation on the table. Such radical policies require policymakers to first assess the distribution of power, resources and opportunities in the existing political economy. Then, to use an ethical framework to redistribute the cards for betterment. This is the difference between radical change and extremist ideas.

The Forest Rights Act, 2005 is proof of that. It’s not a perfect law. It came through after immense opposition from the forest bureaucracy and powerful segments of conservationists. No one is entirely happy with it but it has moved the needle radically in the right direction.

Take another example, The National Food Security Act, also known as the right to food law, has a similar history of intense negotiations between stakeholders and various interest groups alongside some very astute political manoeuvres.

In a democracy, the solution lies in crafting policies through negotiation and listening rather than going for extreme policies that emerge from impatience with democracy.

In Western Ghats reports, the ecologists hoped to short-circuit flawed democratic processes and move six states from an extreme lopsided economic growth model to extreme ecology-at-all-costs model overnight. Those in power knew better, but they too, used the weakness in the first prescription to let the patient die instead of looking for a suitable remedy.

Now, 13 years later, a third committee of experts is still reviewing the recommendations of the first two. As climate change leads to more frequent and more intense extreme weather events, our governance failures will continue to show up as disasters more often.

There is a larger lesson from the Western Ghats reports’ failure: The climate emergency cannot be tackled with extreme policies, which turn into a double whammy for the poor. First, climate change impacts the poor disproportionately, then our ‘emergency’ solutions to climate change deprive the poor a second time over. The ‘radical’ policies are actually regressive if they come at the cost of the poor in the short run.