Who Was Madhav Gadgil? Veteran Ecologist and Pioneer of India’s Green Movement Passes Away at 82

Senior environmental scientist Madhav Gadgil passed away at the age of 82 after a brief illness at his home in Pune, marking the end of a distinguished life that deeply influenced India’s environmental thought, policy landscape and conservation values over more than five decades.

Madhav Dhananjaya Gadgil was widely seen as a key architect of modern environmentalism in India. An ecologist, academic, writer and public intellectual, who played a pivotal role in shaping grassroots environmentalism in India and was also known for his prescient warnings that unchecked infrastructure development and large-scale projects in the Western Ghats could result in severe and far-reaching consequences.

Pioneer of India’s Green Movement  

Gadgil previously served on the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister and chaired the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) in 2010, which later came to be widely known as the Gadgil Commission. 

A recipient of the prestigious Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan, Dr Gadgil was among the key figures behind the Biological Diversity Act and also contributed to the implementation of the Forest Rights Act. He conducted extensive research spanning population biology, conservation biology, human ecology and ecological history.

Who Was Madhav Gadgil?

Born on May 24, 1942, in Pune, Madhav Gadgil was the son of Pramila Gadgil and Dhananjay Gadgil, a Cambridge-educated economist, former Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, former director of the Gokhale Institute, and the author of the Gadgil Formula.

In 1963, Dr Gadgil earned his BSc in Zoology from Fergusson College under Poona University, now Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU). He went on to complete his MSc in Zoology from Harvard University in 1965, followed by a PhD in Biology from Harvard in 1969.

He returned to India in 1971 and joined the Agharkar Research Institute (ARI) in Pune, where he worked for a few years. In 1973, he moved to the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, serving the institution for nearly three decades before retiring as its Chairman in 2004.

Over the years, Dr Gadgil held several key positions, including serving as a member of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), and the National Advisory Council (NAC).