Madhav Gadgil Biography 
Madhav Gadgil is a prominent ecologist and writer from Pune, known for his outstanding contributions towards the field. A very influential figure of present times, he is a recipient of Padma Shri in 1981 and Padma Bhushan in 2006. Volvo Environment Prize and the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement are other major honours received by him for his overall contributions to the field of environment protection. One of the major contributions of Gadgil is his effort towards the preservation of ecology of India. In 2018 following Kerala floods, he came to limelight once again, as State government has ignored his report in 2011, which pointed towards the massive destruction of Western Ghats. At that time he urged many Indian states to protect Western Ghats to avoid natural calamities.
He was born on May 24, 1942 in Pune, Maharashtra. His father Dhananjay Ramchandra Gadgil was a Cambridge scholar and the author of the Gadgil formula. Madhav completed his graduation in biology from Pune in the year 1963 and also took his Master’s degree. He then joined Harvard University for his research works, and earned PhD in 1969. He worked as a research fellow in IBM with a scholarship, and also worked as a lecturer. He returned to India in 1971, and worked as a scientific officer at Agharkar Research Institute, Pune for 2 years.
In 1973, he joined the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and was associated with the institute for three decades. He retired as chairman from the institute in 2004. As an ecologist he played a magnificent role for the preservation of ecology of India. In 1980s he identified Nilgiris as the first biosphere reserve in India. He stood as the chairman of Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel which later came to be known as the Gadgil Commission. As per the report submitted in 2011, he marked around 64 percent of the Western Ghats region as Ecologically Sensitive Area, and earned recognition for his efforts.
Though the state governments of Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Madhya Pradesh ignored his suggestion to protect the ecology and environment, natural calamities in the recent times proved his research works to be true. With the most recent Kerala floods in 2018, he blamed it as a human-made disaster, and his response garnered nationwide attention.
Published: August 30, 2018
Updated: August 30, 2018
