A Walk up the Hill: Living with People & Nature
Madhav Gadgil
Penguin Random House
Rs.582
Pages 424

This autobiography is not restricted to environment degradation. It also addresses equitable resources distribution & sustainable livelihoods

One of India’s pioneer ecologists, author, academic and founder of the Centre for Ecological Sciences, a research forum of the top-ranked (NIRF 2024) Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Madhav Gadgil is invested with a rare combination of a field researcher’s curiosity mixed with intuition and a deep philosophical insight into environmental issues.

In this compelling autobiography, Gadgil shares vivid memories as a young boy exploring the slopes of the Vetal Hills of Pune with his father, learning to identify birds and becoming “passionately interested in the diversity of the natural world, of the landscapes and the life they supported”.

The importance of non-institutionalised learning through close interaction with scholars and researchers such as ornithologist Salim Ali and social anthropologist Irawati Karve, is highlighted in this engaging memoir. His father, Dhananjaya Ramchandra Gadgil’s guidance and his compassionate, non-traditional mother who overruled religion, ritual and caste demarcations, remained a lifelong inspiration.

Gadgil’s formal education at Fergusson College, Pune and the Institute of Science in Mumbai may have facilitated his entry as a biology student at the blue-chip Harvard U, but he was critical of the rigidness of the university syllabus and the imitative mould of research dissertations in India. He pursued excellence and wanted to genuinely understand how centres of first-rate research in North America and Europe applied advanced technologies to scientific exploration. His eagerness to acquire these skills and lessons and to implement them in newly independent India were foremost in his mind when he and his wife decided to return to India after being awarded their research degrees.

Post-independent India was confronted with a development dilemma and Gadgil soon became aware of the environment and development conundrum. As a student in Harvard, he was intrigued that ecology courses were focused on living organisms and their natural environment, while neglecting the role and interference of human beings in ecosystems.

The complexities of homo sapiens as a significant constituent of ecosystems convinced him that experimental research needed to be expanded beyond conventional molecular biology. As a first, he incorporated mathematical modelling in ecology, experimented with ideas of genetic variability, developed the concepts of ecological niche and prudence.

In particular, the heterogeneous environment of the hills of the Western Ghats in India interested Gadgil who believed that indigenous tribal people and their traditional knowledge systems were primary preservers of ecological balance. He became critical of white Europeans and North Americans who “discovered the charms of the wilderness… after destroying it” and the World Wildlife Fund (now Worldwide Fund for Nature) “for preaching Nature conservation to Asians and Africans”.

Yet this scholar-seer’s concern about environment degradation is not restricted to forest conservation and depleting biodiversity, it is also about the human concern of equitable distribution of resources and sustainable livelihoods. It has made him sceptical of bureaucracy and reckless government policies imposed on people without consultation. Gadgil is critical of the “urban upper-class culture of conservationists” that is utterly ignorant of ground realities, short-sighted and geared towards commercialisation in tandem with the powers that be. On the other hand, he mingles with tribals and fisherfolk, farmers and herders, and communities dependent upon a particular resource in their region. They have a larger stake in long-term conservation and their voices need to be heard and their knowledge of local ecology and conservation should be utilised, writes Gadgil.

More than half-a-century ago, the Minamata disaster in Japan, the Bhopal gas leak nearer home and Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring made the world aware of the threat posed to biodiversity by soil degradation and water pollution. The author provides a trove of statistics to show how depleted bird populations and menacing monkey-infested areas are all connected to man-made ecological imbalance. The outcome of ecology damage is reckless ‘development’ for the peasantry. “Political decision-makers and the bureaucracy come from the same social strata as those who benefit from their policies,” observes Gadgil. The displaced and disempowered suffer destroyed habitats without rehabilitation or compensation while alternatives of sustainable livelihoods are denied to them.
This book adequately delineates Gadgil’s life-long passion for promoting conservation, preservation of habitats, and sustainable biodiversity. The British historian E.P. Thompson had commented how his earlier book This Fissured Land (1992) written with historian Ramachandra Guha “stuck to the pessimistic tone of most environmental texts”. However in Ecology and Equity (1995), he highlights the role of the Third World countries’ contribution in managing the crisis in India and proposing guidelines for ecological reform.

In this memoir, Gadgil expresses hope that our own ‘welcome generation’ i.e, third generation citizens born in free, democratic India, will honour the Constitution by rejecting the prevalent discourse of caste, creed, race, language and religion which creates a divisive society. He fervently believes that “India will see a turnaround only when there is equitable sharing of the humongous costs of environmental degradation”. For him, the primary divide is between the urban-rich population constituting “biosphere people” and the economically weaker rural citizens and forest-dwellers, “ecosystem people”, many of whom have become “ecological refugees”.

The recent catastrophic Wayanad landslide is a repetition of the devastating flood that hit Kerala in 2018. It underlines the reality that the voices of disadvantaged ecosystem people need to be heard. The value of this memoir is that it covers the entire gamut of environmental problems confronting the country and offers practical solutions towards a sustainable future.

Jayati Gupta