Let us start with a very ordinary bureaucratic sentence and see what is hiding inside it — "the Union Environment Ministry has reissued, for the seventh time in over a decade, its draft notification."
Seven drafts. Twelve years of drafting, running back to a process that began fifteen years ago with Gadgil. Zero final notifications. This is not a routine step in the policy process. This is the policy process breaking down in slow motion, in public view, over a landscape that most of us are told is one of the most important on the planet.
Why does the landscape matter? The Western Ghats are 1,600 km of mountain running from Gujarat to Tamil Nadu, broken only by the 30 km Palghat Gap — older than the Himalayas, and part of one of the world's eight "hottest hotspots" of biodiversity (the hotspot unit is properly the Western Ghats and Sri Lanka). They are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. They receive the monsoon before the rest of peninsular India does. They give birth to the Godavari, the Krishna, the Cauvery and the Periyar — the rivers that let south India live. They shelter the Nilgiri tahr, the lion-tailed macaque, and hundreds of species that exist nowhere else on Earth.
Exam trap: Do not add the Tapi to that list. The Tapi rises at Multai in Betul district, Madhya Pradesh — in the Satpura range, not the Ghats. It is one of only two major west-flowing peninsular rivers rising outside the Western Ghats; the Narmada is the other. This is a standard GS-1 slip and an examiner will catch it.
A note on the area figure. You will see several totals quoted for the Western Ghats, and they are not interchangeable. 1,29,037 sq. km is the boundary the Gadgil panel itself drew. The Kasturirangan group worked with a larger delineation of 1,64,280 sq. km. International conservation material often cites figures higher still. Always attribute the number to whoever drew it — mixing one body's total with another body's percentage is how an answer ends up contradicting itself.
Now here is where it gets important — this landscape is under pressure that is not distant or theoretical. Mining, quarrying, hydel dams, plantation expansion, tourism infrastructure, sand extraction and urban growth are eating into the Ghats every day. On 30 July 2024 the hillsides above Mundakkai and Chooralmala, in the Meppadi panchayat of Wayanad district, came down in the night. Around 420 people were killed and more than a hundred were never found — India's deadliest landslide on record. That was not a freak accident. That was the balance sheet of decisions delayed.
So what is an Ecologically Sensitive Area, and why is one needed? The power sits in the statute, not merely in the rules made under it. Section 3(1) and Section 3(2)(v) of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 empower the Central Government to restrict or prohibit the areas in which industries, operations and processes may be carried out. Rule 5(1) of the Environment (Protection) Rules, 1986 then lists the ten factors it may weigh in doing so — among them the biological diversity of the area, the pollution load, and its ecological importance. An ESA notification is the legal instrument that results. Once notified, it prohibits new mining, quarrying, sand mining, thermal power plants, certain polluting industries and large construction inside the boundary. It regulates activities like hydel power.
And now the provision that actually explains this whole story. The procedure lives in Rule 5(3). The Centre must first publish a draft notification of its intention, giving the public 60 days to file objections — and it must then consider those objections and act within the period the rule allows. Miss that window and the draft simply dies. That is not a footnote. That is the mechanism by which six drafts have lapsed in twelve years. The Ghats are not unprotected because the law is silent. They are unprotected because a procedural clock keeps running out.
How to use this: Do not confuse ESA (Ecologically Sensitive Area — a large landscape-level designation) with ESZ (Eco-Sensitive Zone — a buffer around a specific national park or wildlife sanctuary). ESZ extent is site-specific, fixed case by case under the 2011 guidelines; the "10 km" figure you will see quoted is a reference ceiling from the Wildlife Conservation Strategy, 2002, not a standard width, and a corridor can require more. On the Supreme Court: its order of 3 June 2022 mandated a minimum 1 km ESZ around every national park and sanctuary — but that order was substantially modified on 26 April 2023, when the Court held a uniform 1 km minimum impossible to implement and exempted areas where ESZ notifications or proposals already existed. Cite the 2022 order without the 2023 modification and you have written an out-of-date answer.
So the tool exists. The Ghats are under threat. The scientific case is settled. And yet — seven drafts, zero notifications.
Deployment: "India does not lack the legal instrument to protect the Western Ghats — Section 3(2)(v) of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 has been available since the year the Bhopal disaster was still fresh, and Rule 5(3) supplies the procedure. What India lacks is the institutional capacity to carry that procedure to a conclusion before its own clock expires."