Mapping of two Western Ghats districts shows much of proposed ESA overlaps with Notified Forests, Protected Areas, or existing ESZs

Amid cacophony surrounding the Western Ghats and the measures that have been proposed to conserve it, Paani Earth Foundation, a citizen-led initiative, has broken down the Centre’s draft notification on the proposed Ecologically Sensitive Area (ESA) in the Western Ghats.

The foundation zoomed into two districts, Kodagu and Udupi, and mapped the proposed ESA villages using the spatial layers for administrative boundaries from Karnataka Geographical Information System (KGIS) to understand them in the context of the landscape and existing legal protection layers.

This comes even as the Karnataka legislature, on September 22, unanimously passed a resolution rejecting the K. Kasturirangan Committee report on the Western Ghats in its current form in response to the draft published on July 27.

The foundation’s report begins by clarifying that the ESA notification is not the same as the Kasturirangan Report. “The Kasturirangan High Level Working Group (HLWG) submitted its report in 2013. It identified and delineated the villages proposed as ESA. The ESA notification includes some of the restrictions recommended by the HLWG.... The ESA village boundaries come from the Kasturirangan report,” it says. But many of its other recommendations were not included.

These include incentives for growers to move towards organic cultivation, financial benefits for ESA villages, local community ownership and benefits in tourism related activities, a stronger role for Gram Sabhas and communities, and greater environmental scrutiny of development projects.