Madhav Gadgil

Madhav Dhananjaya Gadgil (born 24 May 1942) is an Indian ecologist, academic, writer, columnist and the founder of the Centre for Ecological Sciences, a research forum under the aegis of the Indian Institute of Science.

Gadgil was born on 24 May 1942 in Pune, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.

His parents were Pramila and Dhananjay Ramchandra Gadgil, a Cambridge scholar , economist , former director of the Gokhale Institute and the author of the Gadgil formula.

Gadgil, an active sportsman during his college years, held the Maharashtra State Junior and Pune University high jump records in 1959 and 1961 respectively.

He has also represented Pune University at the All India University Athletic meet.

He is married to Sulochana Gadgil, a noted meteorologist and a Harvard scholar, whom he met during his Fergusson College years.

The couple has a daughter, who is a journalist cum Spanish teacher, and a son, a mathematician.

The family lives in Pune, his home town.

His life story has been recorded in a biographical book, Vidnyanyatri – Dr. Madhav Gadgil, written in Marathi by A. P. Deshpande.

One of the major contributions of Gadgil is his effort towards the preservation of ecology of India.

He graduated in biology from Fergusson College of the University of Pune in 1963, and secured a master's degree in zoology from the Mumbai University in 1965.

Gadgil was encouraged to join Harvard University by Giles Mead, then curator of fishes at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Initially intending to do research under Mead, Gadgil later changed subjects by hearing lectures of E. O. Wilson, "the brightest young star in the ecology-evolution end of biology at Harvard at that time," and subsequently did his doctoral research on mathematical ecology and fish behaviour, under the guidance of William Bossert, one of Wilson's former students.

It earned him a PhD in 1969.

Subsequently, he received a Fellowship from IBM to continue his work as a research fellow at the Harvard Computing Center and simultaneously worked as a lecturer of biology at the university for two years.

He returned to India in 1971 and took up a job as a scientific officer at Agharkar Research Institute of the Maharashtra Association for Cultivation of Science, Pune where he stayed for two years.

In 1973, he joined the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, starting an association that would stretch for over thirty years, superannuating from the institute as its chairman in 2004.

During this period, he established two research centres at IISc, the Centre of Theoretical Studies and the Centre for Ecological Studies.

In 1976, when the Government of Karnataka decided to look into protecting the bamboo resources of the state, Gadgil was asked to conduct a study, which is reported to have influenced the government to curb the subsidies provided to forest based industries.

His early researches in the 1980s have helped in the identification of the Nilgiris as the first biosphere reserve in India.

The Government of India awarded him the fourth highest civilian award of the Padma Shri in 1981 and followed it up with the third highest award of the Padma Bhushan in 2006.

A decade later, in 1986, he was appointed as a member of the Scientific Advisory Council to Prime Minister of India, a post he held till 1990.

During this period, he assisted the efforts to establish the first biosphere reserve in the country at the Nilgiris in 1986.

He also worked as a visiting professor at Stanford University (1991) and the University of California, Berkeley (1995).

In 1998, he was appointed the chairman of the Science and Technology Advisory Panel of Global Environment Facility, an agency under the United Nations.

He held the chair till 2002.

He also served as a member of the environmental education panel of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and as a member of the National Advisory Council.

He is a member of the National Tiger Conservation Authority and is the chairman of the committee proposing Environmental Education Curriculum at School level.

His contributions, as a member of the draft committee, has been reported in the preparation of the Biological Diversity Act 2002 and the manual he prepared for the People's Biodiversity Registers has been accepted by the National Biodiversity Authority.

He is still associated with the Authority in the preparation of a biodiversity inventory at the local bodies' level.

Gadgil is known to have done extensive researches in the areas of population biology, conservation biology, human ecology and ecological history.

After his retirement from IISc, he went back to Pune in 2004 to resume his association with Agharkar Research Institute and holds the Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi chair of the visiting research professor at the University of Goa.

He is a former member of the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India and the Head of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) of 2010, popularly known as the Gadgil Commission.

He is a recipient of the Volvo Environment Prize

and the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement.

In 2010, when the Government of India constituted an expert panel, Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP), to examine the ecological issues related to the Western Ghats, he was selected as the chairman of the panel.

As the chairman of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP), which later came to be known as the Gadgil Commission, he submitted a report in 2011, marking around 64 percent of the Western Ghats region as Ecologically Sensitive Area (ESA).

The report attracted support and dissension, the environmentalists welcoming the recommendations and the state governments of the neighbouring states and the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church of Kerala disapproving it.

This paved way for the subsequent Kasturirangan Commission, which diluted the recommendations to a level more acceptable to the state governments.

He has been credited by many with the introduction of quantitative investigations of ecology and animal behaviour in India and for including humans as a vital part of ecosystems.