-Business Standard These disasters were caused due to higher economic activities like rock quarrying, construction of new buildings and roads and destruction of natural forest, says Madhav Gadgil At least 20 people have lost their lives and several others are missing as heavy rains led to flash floods and landslides in several parts of Kerala. The situation, which may turn out to be a repeat of the 2018 floods if rain continues, has...

-Hindustan Times The nature-development equilibrium is broken, leading to climate disasters. At least 100 people have died in floods in three states in peninsular India — Kerala, Karnataka, and Maharashtra — in August due to monsoon floods. There are several reasons, as reported in a series of articles in Hindustan Times, for the havoc and deaths, such as changes in land-use patterns, excessive quarrying and unscientific plantations (Kerala), poor management of dams...

-The Hindu The Western Ghats panel’s suggestions stressed the need to strengthen grass-roots governance In 2018, many people thought that the floods and landslides in Kerala that caused huge financial losses and manifold human tragedies marked a once-in-a-century calamity, and that normalcy will return soon and we can merrily return to business as usual. Further, the probability of two such back-to-back events was only 1 in 10,000. Hence, in 2019, a repeat...

-TheWeek.in Noted ecologist Madhav Gadgil blames the “law-flouting” state government for the devastation in Kerala. The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP), headed by Gadgil in 2011, had suggested measures to preserve the ecologically frail Ghats. But, the Kerala government, like the other five states, chose to reject the report. Having suffered such devastation, Gadgil feels that the state should survey the “ecologically sensitive zones” that have been compromised due to...

-The Hindu Business Line The rejection of the the Gadgil panel report, by all the six States along the Western Ghats, has proved to be a costly error The floods of catastrophic dimensions that ravaged Kerala recently have brought into sharp focus the all-round ecological destruction caused by human interference in the State’s hilly terrains. The fact that there were 12 major landslides and hundreds of minor ones within a fortnight in the...