India’s new rail expansion project between Karnataka and Goa has opened a dangerous new front in the country’s long war between development and conservation, as reported by Mongabay. The government wants to double an existing 345-kilometre line from Hospet in Karnataka to Vasco da Gama in Goa, creating what officials call a “seamless freight corridor” for coal. What it will actually create is a fracture — a broken ecological artery through the Western Ghats, one of the planet’s eight biodiversity hotspots and home to tigers, elephants, leopards, and hundreds of endemic species that already cling to survival.
The proposed double track will slice directly through two of India’s most important protected areas — the Kali Tiger Reserve in Karnataka and the Bhagwan Mahavir Wildlife Sanctuary–Mollem National Park complex in Goa. Conservationists call it a betrayal dressed as progress. The government calls it connectivity. What both sides agree on is that this 26-kilometre stretch could determine the fate of an entire landscape.
Rail expansion
The single line running from Hospet to Vasco was first laid in 1890, a colonial-era feat of engineering designed to move ore and timber through the forested Ghats. Now the Indian Railways, through its public-sector arm Rail Vikas Nigam Ltd (RVNL), wants to “enhance sectional capacity” by adding a parallel track. Nearly ten hectares of forest in Karnataka’s Dandeli Wildlife Sanctuary and more than 120 hectares in Goa’s Mollem–Bhagwan Mahavir landscape will be cleared.
The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has already given forest clearance. The National Board for Wildlife’s 2019 approval, however, was later struck down by the Supreme Court in 2022 for failing to consider the project’s ecological impact.
The government responded not with reflection but with repetition — commissioning a new study from the Wildlife Institute of India (WII). That study, completed in 2024, confirmed what every ranger and researcher in the Western Ghats already knew: this rail expansion runs through living tiger country.
The evidence they can’t ignore
WII’s field cameras captured adult tigers with cubs in five locations between Tinaighat and Kulem. They also recorded leopards, sloth bears, wild dogs, and herds of gaur, sambhar, and red muntjac. The corridor is more than a route — it is a pulse. Along its length, the study identified 23 species of wild mammals, 135 birds, and an astonishing 61 species of reptiles and amphibians, 80 percent of them endemic to the Western Ghats.
Yet even as the data confirmed the line’s biological sensitivity, the implementing agency downplayed the risk. RVNL’s affidavit to the court claimed “not a single tiger death since 1890,” an argument that collapses under its own absurdity. WII itself documented 341 wildlife deaths between October 2022 and March 2024 — 76 percent amphibians, 16 percent reptiles, and nearly 8 percent mammals — all due to train collisions on the existing line.
The rail expansion plan suggests mitigation, not prevention. WII recommended 323 underpasses, culverts, and overbridges — an engineering gesture that tries to reconcile two irreconcilable worlds. Conservationists argue that you can’t mitigate destruction of a corridor by carving more tunnels into it. In landscapes this dense, the only effective mitigation is avoidance.
A corridor under siege
The Kali–Mollem belt forms a tri-state tiger corridor linking Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Goa — a continuum of forest that the Indian tiger authority (NTCA) has identified as essential for long-term species survival. The 2022 Status of Tigers report notes a worrying decline in tiger numbers along this very belt, even as populations in other regions have stabilised. Habitat fragmentation from highways, mines, and now rail expansion is a key driver of that decline.
Karnataka’s own forest officers raised alarms. Minutes of the State Wildlife Board’s August 2025 meeting show the Deputy Conservator of Forests for the Kali Tiger Reserve refusing to endorse the project, citing slope instability and 5,413 trees marked for felling in a landslide-prone area. The NTCA warned the Supreme Court that doubling the track “would be detrimental.”
The Central Empowered Committee (CEC) also proposed an alternative route through Andhra Pradesh that would avoid protected forests altogether. Still, RVNL insists on pushing forward — backed by a “benefit-to-loss ratio” of 436 to one, a figure that measures coal revenue, not ecological loss.
Development’s dead language
For industry and bureaucracy, “connectivity” has become a moral shield — a word that justifies every assault on the environment. In the Western Ghats, that language hides the real purpose of this rail expansion: coal logistics. Ninety-two percent of the freight on this route is imported coal moving from Goa’s port to Karnataka’s industrial heartland; eighty percent of wagons return empty. Even the Supreme Court’s 2022 judgment noted the absurdity of calling such an inefficient line a public need.
The Amche Mollem campaign in Goa, led by scientists and artists, has repeatedly warned that the double tracking is less about efficiency and more about political economics. As one biologist told Mongabay India, “You can’t call this progress when the only species that benefits is the machine.” The Wildlife Institute’s own data supports the campaign’s position: this section of the Ghats records one of India’s highest rates of biodiversity concentration per square kilometre. Every metre of cleared land erases not just trees but entire food chains.
Coal versus corridor
The Kali river winds through the same landscape that inspired India’s first national parks. Its tributaries feed dense forests and farmlands downstream. Replacing these forests with ballast and rails will increase erosion, magnify floods, and sever wildlife pathways that link twelve tiger reserves across the Ghats. For tigers, isolation means extinction by stealth. They need space, not statistics.
Yet, India’s rail and road policies remain trapped in what the road and train strikes cornerstone calls “death by linear infrastructure” — where every new transport project carves another wound through the country’s protected zones. From Uttarakhand’s Char Dham roads to Madhya Pradesh’s freight corridors, the pattern is the same: the environment becomes the obstacle, and speed becomes virtue.
The NTCA’s 2022 advisory urged all states to treat tiger corridors as non-negotiable. Goa, however, still refuses to notify its portion of this landscape as a tiger reserve, arguing — as its politicians recently told the Supreme Court — that “no tigers are seen.” The WII’s evidence makes that claim indefensible.
The meaning of protection
In reality, rail expansion through the Western Ghats is not an engineering challenge; it’s an ethical one. India’s tiger conservation success depends on maintaining ecological continuity between reserves. Every line of track laid across a corridor erases decades of protection. The Kali–Mollem controversy shows how easily law, science, and politics can collide. The High Court and Supreme Court have both recognised the Ghats’ fragility, yet enforcement still bends to commerce.
As coal trains prepare to roll through forests older than the Constitution, India must ask itself whether progress that destroys its own foundations is progress at all. No economic argument can replace a living corridor once it’s gone. What remains are bridges to nowhere, running through forests that can no longer hear the roar of tigers.
The fight for this rail expansion is not about one line — it’s about whether a nation that once led the world in tiger recovery will now lead it in self-inflicted loss. The Western Ghats doesn’t need another track. It needs a government brave enough to stop one.
Source: Mongabay India
Photo: Mongabay India
