Madhav Gadgil, the pioneering scholar and iconic people’s conservationist, passed away on Wednesday in Pune after a brief illness. He was 83.
As someone who started off with the upper-class “urban conservationist approach to nature conservation”, Mr. Gadgil metamorphosed into an ecologist who advocated the rights of the marginalised communities for whom the forest was the home. He called them the “common people of India” and saw them as “constituents of the ecosystem”.
Nothing sums this up better than his own admission in his autobiography A Walk Up the Hill: Living with People and Nature published in 2023. Writing about his early days as a young conservationist, Mr. Gadgil confessed: “I subscribed to the urban conservationist approach to nature conservation, namely, protection through the devices of wildlife sanctuaries and national parks… I also subscribed to the view that it was necessary to remove habitations from within such habitats to safeguard them.”
All that changed in the 1980s, when Mr. Gadgil “started thinking about alternative ways of following my passion to conserve nature, working with rather than against the common people of India.”
Writing in the foreword of the book, M.S. Swaminathan said of Mr. Gadgil, “Madhav has had an illustrious career as one of India’s leading researchers in the fields of ecology and environment, but more importantly, his thinking has been combined with action on environmental and ecological security in the service of humanity.”
