MADHAV GADGIL'S LIFE IN ECOLOGY, COMMUNITY AND DISSENT

In 1986 Gadgil played a pivotal role in establishing the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, India’s first UNESCO-recognised biosphere reserve.

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Gadgil founded the Centre for Ecological Sciences at IISc, Bengaluru.

Madhav Dhananjaya Gadgil was born in Pune on 24 May 1942. His father Dhananjay Ramchandra Gadgil was a pioneering economist and cooperative movement leader who founded India’s first cooperative sugar mill; he also loved bird-watching and introduced his son to the wildlife of the Western Ghats.

Growing up on the city’s outskirts, young Madhav wandered among Vetal Hill and the ranges of the Western Ghats. These childhood excursions instilled an early fascination with birds and butterflies and a respect for the “ecosystem people” - buffalo-herding Gavlis and other pastoralists - whom he met on those treks. A formative incident occurred when the 12-year-old accompanied his father to a dinner at the Koyna hydropower project; the elder Gadgil lamented the destruction of forests and livelihoods for industrial progress. The experience alerted Madhav to the environmental cost of development and the inequities of Indian society.

After school in Pune, Gadgil studied biology at Fergusson College and then earned a Master's degree in zoology from the University of Mumbai in 1965. He went to Harvard University to study mathematical ecology and animal behaviour; his doctoral thesis (1969) became a citation classic. Harvard broadened his understanding of ecology and taught him, in his words, that science is “a systematic enterprise of scepticism”. Following two years as a lecturer at Harvard, he returned to India in 1971.