Kerala has asked the Union environment ministry to exclude more than 30 populated and agricultural villages from a draft eco-sensitive-area notification covering the state’s Western Ghats. The deadline for the state’s formal submission falls on 24 September. Agriculture minister T Siddique confirmed the state’s position this week, as officials finalised the proposal ahead of the cut-off.
The draft notification, issued by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, would designate 9,993.7 square kilometres of Kerala’s Western Ghats territory as ecologically sensitive. It spans 131 villages across the state’s hill districts. Restrictions inside an eco-sensitive area typically limit construction, mining and certain farming activity, a prospect that has alarmed communities living inside the proposed boundary.
The state’s counter-proposal
“Kerala has 9,993.7 sq km included in the draft notification. We are trying to get around 1,500 sq km excluded,” Siddique said, describing the scale of the state’s counter-proposal. Officials want the roughly 1,500 square kilometres removed to cover populated settlements and land under active cultivation. They argue that treating farmed and inhabited land the same as untouched forest misjudges the actual ecological risk.
A central assessment team visited Kerala ahead of the deadline to evaluate the ecological concerns behind the original notification, giving state officials a chance to make their case for exclusions directly. The final decision on how much territory is removed rests with the Union government. Kerala’s request represents an opening position rather than a guaranteed outcome.
The Western Ghats eco-sensitive-area process has run for well over a decade, moving through several draft notifications since an earlier expert panel first recommended strict protection across large parts of the mountain range. Kerala has raised similar objections at earlier stages of that process. State officials argue consistently that blanket restrictions covering entire administrative boundaries fail to distinguish between dense forest and land that has been under continuous cultivation for generations.
Compensation and climate-resilient crops
Alongside the exclusion request, Kerala has committed to doubling compensation paid to farmers affected by wildlife attacks, a chronic source of tension in villages bordering forest land. Human-wildlife conflict has grown as forest boundaries and farmland increasingly overlap. Compensation levels have long been a point of complaint among hill-district farmers, who say existing payouts fall well short of actual crop and livestock losses.
The state is also working with universities to develop climate-resilient crop varieties and farming methods suited to the Western Ghats’ shifting rainfall patterns. Officials position the initiative as a parallel track to the boundary dispute rather than a replacement for it. They frame the combination of compensation increases and crop research as evidence that conservation and farm livelihoods can be managed together, an argument aimed as much at the Union government reviewing the exclusion request as at farmers directly affected by it.
The Western Ghats hill tracts are also Kerala’s principal pepper-growing region, and the crop is currently trading at its highest price in more than a decade after years of disease and rainfall losses cut domestic output. Farmers in the affected villages are watching both processes at once. One is a market recovering after a prolonged slump. The other is a regulatory boundary that could constrain how they farm going forward. How the two intersect will depend heavily on where the Union government ultimately draws the eco-sensitive-area line.
Kerala is not alone in pushing back against Western Ghats conservation boundaries. Neighbouring states have raised similar objections to earlier drafts of the same notification over the past decade. What distinguishes this round is the scale of the compensation and crop-resilience commitments the state has offered alongside its exclusion request, an attempt to show the Union government that conservation and farm livelihoods need not be traded off against each other.
