The piece examines the Centre’s State-by-State notification of the Western Ghats ecologically sensitive area (ESA), built on the Kasturirangan Committee’s 2013 split between “natural” and “cultural” landscape. It argues that the boundary excludes the most populated, plantation-dominated, and landslide-prone slopes from protection, and that the same areas also lack Community Forest Resource rights under the Forest Rights Act, leaving residents without either regulatory protection or governance authority. It proposes valuing the cultural landscape’s ecological functions (water regulation, slope stabilisation, carbon storage) and linking quarrying and construction regulation to gram sabha governance, with relevance to our work on ecosystem services valuation and rights-based conservation.