Legally Protected Wildlife Sanctuaries in the Western Ghats Are Under Direct Threat from Pumped Storage Projects. This report examines how the diversion of evergreen forests and critical wildlife habitat violates key environmental laws, highlights governance failures at both state and national levels, and debunks the project’s claim of being green, clean, and renewable.
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Executive Summary
While the Sharavathi Pumped Storage Project (PSP) may support grid stability, its reliance on coal for pumping and the diversion—effectively, the loss—of 279 acres of dense evergreen and semi-evergreen forests within the Sharavathi Lion-Tailed Macaque (LTM) Wildlife Sanctuary demand extraordinary scrutiny.
It’s not just the Sharavathi Pumped Storage Project that seeks to divert land from a legally protected Wildlife Sanctuary. The proposed Varahi PSP requires approximately 612 acres from Someshwara and Mookambika Wildlife Sanctuaries.
The diversion of land within a Wildlife Sanctuary poses a direct threat to critical habitats of numerous endangered species, including the Lion-tailed Macaque. Such diversions violate the core intent of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, which permits approvals only if they are in the interest of wildlife. By approving projects that do not serve the interest of wildlife, Wildlife Boards are acting beyond their legal mandate. Moreover, these approvals are setting a dangerous precedent—making at least eleven more pumped storage projects in other wildlife sanctuaries increasingly feasible.
Procedural lapses and the silent acceptance of inadequate, misleading, and prima facie flawed data weaken regulatory scrutiny and undermine the integrity of the environmental clearance process. Moreover, the current framework enables the Sharavathi project to be fragmented into smaller, seemingly disconnected parts—allowing both developers and regulators to evade scrutiny of its full ecological and economic impact. This piecemeal approach creates a fait accompli—where approval of key components builds pressure to approve the rest, regardless of its legal or ecological consequences. The result is a systemic failure of environmental
governance.
There is an urgent need for landscape-level, evidence-based decision-making for all infrastructure projects in the Western Ghats. As recommended by Dr. Madhav Gadgil, a ‘Western Ghats Ecology Authority’ must be established—but with strong safeguards to ensure it does not become yet another rubber-stamp institution.
The government and industry are framing pumped storage as a clean, green, and renewable energy solution to help meet India’s climate goals. This project is anything but. A system that consumes eight hours of coal-powered energy to generate just six hours of hydropower is fundamentally inefficient, results in a net energy loss, and operates as nothing more than a Coal Energy Storage System. More critically, it opens up dense evergreen forests—vital carbon sinks—and turns them into carbon sources. This is a textbook example of how a climate solution becomes part of the climate problem.
India’s clean energy transition must not become a vehicle for pushing the same old fossil fuel practices—repackaged and greenwashed as renewables. The pursuit of clean energy and climate solutions must move decisively away from fossil fuels and prioritize the conservation of vital carbon sinks like the Western Ghats. Western Ghats is also our water tower. We cannot solve the energy crisis by triggering a water crisis—or a biodiversity collapse.
The blind pursuit of energy targets that destroy ecosystems is not progress—it is borrowing from a future we cannot repay.
