When the sky fell over Wayanad’s Western Ghats hills and ensuing landslides washed away more than 200 people living in the foothills, clamour rose to revive and impose the recommendations listed in the two Western Ghats ecology reports.

In 2011, a committee of ecologists headed by Madhav Gadgil concluded that the ghats were looking at an ecological disaster. They recommended stringent measures: Declare 75% of the Western Ghats area as an ecologically sensitive area.

It essentially meant banning mining, polluting industries, major road constructions, power plants, plantations, and curbing high-density tourism and imposing many other restrictions on development in 1 lakh square kilometres spread across six states.

An impatient good-hearted environmentalist’s solution to an environmental emergency was to override Indian democracy run by those ‘tainted’ elected representatives, and impose a top-down puritanical governance by good-hearted honest ecologists. The report imagined a new kind of environmental governance, licensing and clearance regime.

After vociferous protests from the people beset with fear of loss of livelihood and businesses, another committee was set up and it too submitted its report.

But neither the Union government nor the states wanted to really implement the reports because they know voters demand economic prosperity. So, they stage a theatrical performance, playing ping-pong with the reports to avoid taking real action.

So, each time a tragedy strikes, ecologists could blame the corrupt world for failing them and their reports, reaffirming their moral superiority. The Union government could blame the states for not listening, and the states could in turn say the Union government is not budging.

For more than a decade, as governments of different hues played the game again and again, life stuttered from one disaster to another.

But is there a way to avoid such a stalemate?

The Reporters’ Collective founding editor Nitin Sethi in this blog piece identifies the problem, which isn’t the simplistic binary of ‘good environmentalists versus bad development’ peddled in the social media, and puts forward a tried-and-tested solution to break the stalemate. He also draws a larger lesson from the Western Ghats reports failure.

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