Sixty Years On, Dam-Displaced Uralagallu Still Has No Power - And Fears the Next Green Line

The ESA Debate Karnataka's Farmers Are Fighting With a Village That Has No Electricity

The stated commitment here is straightforward: notify Ecologically Sensitive Areas in the Western Ghats to prevent mining, red-category industry and unchecked construction from degrading a global biodiversity hotspot. The Kasturirangan panel scoped this to 37% of the Ghats - about 59,940 sq km - as a workable compromise after the more expansive Gadgil report drew opposition from every concerned state government.

That is the target. The data on the ground tells a different story about what "workable" has actually meant for the people living inside these boundaries.

Where the Commitment Breaks Down Take Uralagallu in Shivamogga's

Sagar taluk. Roughly 50 to 56 families here were displaced in the 1960s to build the Linganamakki dam - infrastructure that generates hydel power for others. Sixty years on, the village itself has no electricity, no school, no primary health centre and no proper road, because the Forest Department has repeatedly denied clearance for exactly this kind of work.

This is not a hypothetical fear about a future ESA regime - it is what "restricted forest land" already means for people living under the current rules, before any new notification takes effect. The bottleneck isn't ambition or even the Kasturirangan boundaries themselves; it is that clearance and compensation processes inside forest land are administratively frozen and nothing in seven successive draft notifications since 2014 has addressed that specific failure.

Why Farmers Are Asking for Kerala's Method, Not a Different Outcome This is the

detail that separates this story from a generic "development versus conservation" framing: protest organisers like the Western Ghats Raitha Sahakari Vedike are not opposing the ESA notification outright. They are demanding Karnataka replicate what Kerala already did - a physical ground survey that cut Kerala's proposed ESA from 13,108 sq km to 9,937 sq km by identifying and excluding actual human settlements and cultivated land, rather than relying on satellite-drawn lines that don't distinguish a coffee plantation from unbroken forest.

Karnataka's current 29,668 sq km figure has not gone through that ground-truthing exercise. The demand, in other words, is procedural - get the boundary right using the method that already worked next door - not a demand to abandon conservation.

What This Means for the Exam

The exam-relevant insight isn't "conservation and livelihoods conflict"

• that's the headline-level read. It's that Uralagallu shows what an ESA regime looks like in practice once implemented without a functioning clearance and compensation mechanism, which is precisely why the physical-survey demand carries more weight than a blanket rejection: it targets the actual failure point - mapping and ground-level administration - rather than the conservation objective itself.