The canopy closes overhead as the monsoon sky lowers, and the Katlekan dark forest of North Kanara slips into an almost absolute blackness. It is the middle of the day. A few hundred yards in, the light dies so completely that you reach for a torch just to discern the brook gurgling a few yards away. Hornbills call through the dripping understory, mountain imperial pigeons murmur in the vaulted gloom, and eagle owls send their low hoots echoing between ancient trunks. Here, in this living darkness, the dry, fragmented woodlots that pass for forests in “the New India” reveal themselves as paltry shadows of the aranya that inspired poets like Rabindranath Tagore — a primordial realm that still breathes and governs itself, reminding the visitor that true wilderness does not merely survive in India; it thrives in the damp air and the dark. If we let it.
Having done my doctoral dissertation on forest management and seen jungles across four continents, I thought I knew what a forest was. I was wrong.
The Katlekan darkness is merely the most intimate face of a mountain chain whose influence extends far beyond its forested slopes. The Western Ghats, running 1,600 kilometres along the edge of the peninsula, are nothing less than the living ecological spine of India. Recognised as one of the world’s eight hottest biodiversity hotspots, these mountains harbour extraordinary life — nearly half of India’s flowering plant species, a third of its vertebrate fauna, and over 300 globally threatened species find refuge here. Several species, like the Katlekan Marsh Nut and the Gund Day Gecko, are exclusive to the very forests I visited.
Yet the significance of the Ghats runs deeper than species counts. They gather the first impact of the southwest monsoon and release it as the lifeblood of the Deccan: The Godavari, Krishna, Kaveri, and Tungabhadra rivers originate here, sustaining hundreds of millions across six states. Their dense forests temper regional climate, draw down carbon, hold the soil in place, and soften the runoff and flooding that would otherwise devastate downstream plains.
It is no exaggeration, then, to call these rainforests “India’s Amazon”. Like their South American counterpart, they behave as a vast living organism — breathing in carbon dioxide, exhaling oxygen, and cycling moisture back into the atmosphere to sustain the monsoon itself. Their layered canopies, dripping with epiphytes and echoed by the calls of hornbills and lion-tailed macaques, weave a self-renewing tapestry of life that sustains the climate and waters of the entire peninsula. Just as the Amazon Basin constitutes the lungs of South America, the Western Ghats are the lungs and wellspring of India. As ecologists like Madhav Gadgil have long noted, their continued integrity is not merely a conservation priority; it is a matter of civilisational ecological survival.
In pursuit of ‘development’
Meanwhile, something else is planned in the neighbourhood of Katlekan. The proposed Rs 10,000-crore, 2,000 MW Sharavathi Pumped Storage Project in Karnataka’s Shimoga and Uttara Kannada district remains under an interim stay by the Karnataka High Court, with work frozen until further orders. It aims to link the Talakalale and Gerusoppa reservoirs on the heavily hydropower-dammed Sharavathi river, through massive underground tunnels and powerhouses, pumping water uphill during off-peak hours and releasing it to generate power during peak demand.
The project sits entirely within the Sharavathi Valley Lion-Tailed Macaque Wildlife Sanctuary — an area which enjoys one of highest levels of protection under the Wildlife Act, where such infrastructure is strictly prohibited. An expert committee constituted by a Standing Committee of National Board of Wildlife recommended against approval, citing irreversible ecological harm and questioning its technical justification. The panel found it would yield no new net energy to the grid, instead producing a net loss of approximately 500 MW due to pumping requirements.
The stakes are enormous. The project requires clearing over 50 hectares of dense primary evergreen forest, fragmenting crucial wildlife corridors between the Anshi-Dandeli and Bhadra-Kudremukh landscapes. Experts warn of extreme landslide risks in this geologically fragile zone, where blasting for underground structures like tunnels and powerhouses with heavy industrial explosives threatens catastrophe. With an installed renewable energy capacity of 20.23 GW, Karnataka needs diversified solutions such as Battery Energy Storage Systems, pumped storage, compressed air energy storage and gravity energy storage to manage the intermittency of renewable energy.
Critics acknowledge this need. However, meeting this need by destroying forever, a carbon-storing ecological backbone such as the Sharavathi Lion-Tailed Macaque Wildlife Sanctuary in the Western Ghats, which justly enjoys the highest levels of legal protection is indefensible.
Towards cultural and ecological renewal
To defend the ecology of the irreplaceable Western Ghats entails renewing our ties to the natural world. No trite nostrum along the lines of “sustainable development” will suffice. Sustainability is about what we can go on taking from nature without finding the courage to face our organised, well-disguised greed. Ecological renewal and reciprocity imply that we honour what our ancestors have bequeathed to us — a stable, healthy ecology. It means we creatively renew a culture long integrated with nature, until the winds of accelerating industrial modernity begin to sunder them. We pass on what was passed down to us. We act for future generations the way our ancestors acted towards us. We act towards trees and animals, mountains and forests, rivers and coastlines with the reverence the cosmos deserves. This means putting an end to the plunder that corporate-consumer civilisation is routinely engaged in through mining and infrastructure, roads and expressways, dams, airports, and power plants. Not allowing aranya to be sacrificed to ecologically subsidised cities.
Defending India’s Amazon means protecting it from Amazon’s India — from the tentacles of the global market that tighten their grip on metropolitan humanity, driving us to suicidally ransack the natural world.
Shrivastava is a writer, teacher, and ecological thinker. He is the author of The Grammar of Greed: Reflections on a Fatal Ecology
To defend the ecology of the irreplaceable Western Ghats entails renewing our ties to the natural world (file photo). 
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