Karnataka’s state legislature has unanimously rejected the Union government’s latest draft notification designating Ecologically Sensitive Areas in the Western Ghats, the seventh time the state has pushed back against the long-running Kasturirangan Committee recommendations. The draft, issued on July 27, had proposed bringing roughly 20,668 square kilometres across 1,449 villages in ten Karnataka districts under ESA protection. Legislators objected primarily to the methodology behind the boundaries, arguing they were drawn largely from satellite imagery rather than joint physical, plot-level surveys on the ground. They said this risked classifying entire villages as ecologically sensitive merely because a fraction of their area carried a forest tag, even when much of the land was under agriculture, plantations, or settlement.
Lawmakers called the approach “scientifically inappropriate” and warned it could unfairly restrict development and livelihoods for residents not living on genuinely fragile forest land. The resolution also flagged unresolved legal and administrative issues, including pending forest rights claims, land-grant disputes, bagar-hukum regularisation applications, and litigation over deemed forests, all of which the state wants settled before any ESA line is finalised. In place of the current draft, Karnataka has asked the Centre for a full year to carry out a survey-number-wise physical verification of land use across the proposed area. It also wants a high-level committee, headed by a retired judge and including revenue officers, forest officials, farmer representatives, industry members, and environmental experts, to oversee the exercise.
Other demands include village-level committees with elected representatives, explicit exclusion of farmland, horticultural plots, plantations, and public infrastructure from the final boundary, and a support package offering alternative livelihoods and financial assistance to affected communities. The dispute reflects a broader tension across the six Western Ghats states over reconciling ecological protection of one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots with the economic and political costs borne by hill communities. With this the seventh iteration of the draft to run into state-level resistance, the Centre must now decide whether to accommodate Karnataka’s survey demand or push ahead with the notification despite the legislature’s objections.