1 CONSERVING INDIA'S BIODIVERSITY: LET PEOPLE SPEAK Madhav Gadgil (in collaboration with Samir Acharya, , Ratin Barman, P.C. Bhattacharjee, Smita Botre, Ashwini Chhatre, Kavita Gandhi, Anirban Ganguli, Utkarsh Ghate, Devashish Kar, Manas Misra, Rekha Panigrahi, P.Pramod, P.R. Seshagiri Rao, D.S. Srivastava Mamata Vardhan and other colleagues from Srishti Jigyasa Pariwar) Centre for Ecological Sciences Indian Institute of Science Bangalore 560 012 India Telephone: (91-80) 3315453, 3340985, 3092507 FAX: 91-80- 3315428, 3341683 E-Mail: madhav@ces.iisc.ernet.in 1. ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT I still vividly recollect a meeting of our garden city’s elite committed to the cause of nature conservation on an evening twenty years ago. We were sitting on a lawn in one of the poshest localities of the city, and had two items on our agenda. One was the plight of elephants which move right up to the outskirts of Bangalore and were being killed by farmers when they raided their ragi fields. Our group was unanimous that there was no way to help some damage to the crops, and that the farmers must be educated to tolerate the losses. The second item on agenda was the menace of urban monkeys, protected by widespread religious feelings, who were causing so much damage to all our gardens. We were also unanimous that the monkeys must be trapped and released somewhere far in the countryside, possibly to inflict some damage on crops of some other farmers, who would no doubt also be educated by nature lovers like us to tolerate the losses in the larger interests of wild life.