“At the ground level people are really interested and they want to get involved and our report if nothing else, seem to have served the purpose of triggering such kind of an interest” said Dr Madhav Gadgil while delivering a lecture on “Democracy and ecology in contemporary India” in Delhi in July 2013. He was referring to the 2010-11 report of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP), which he chaired and which was one of the major contributions of Dr Gadgil to India’s environmental governance.  One of us accompanied him during some of his travels which mainly consisted of back to back and often heated meetings in some of the remotest corners of the Western Ghats. The meetings were not only about plants, trees and rivers, but about what the villagers feel about development and how it should happen. No one had asked such questions before. It was democratisation of Environmental Governance at its messiest and the most beautiful. Something that was rarely attempted before. Or since.