Animal parts smuggler held

Narayan goes without a surname, perhaps to escape easy detection. He is the younger brother of Sansar Chand, widely held by wildlife authorities and experts as India’s biggest animal parts trader. He ran out of luck last week.

Updated on: Aug 11, 2009, 13:38:12 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Narayan goes without a surname, perhaps to escape easy detection. He is the younger brother of Sansar Chand, widely held by wildlife authorities and experts as India’s biggest animal parts trader. He ran out of luck last week.

Rajasthan forest officials arrested him at the Tis Hazari courts on Thursday when he came for a hearing in the trial of his brother. And he is now telling a story, said officials, which could put his elder brother to shame.

“He has confessed to trading in body parts of 14 tigers and 20 leopards in the last 18 months,” said a Rajasthan forest department official, refusing to be identified as he was not authorised to speak to reporters.

“Forest officials from Uttarakhand have interrogated him and are taking necessary action,” said K.K. Garg, field director of Sariska Tiger Reserve, where forest officials are interrogating Narayan.

Narayan took over the family trade — spread across six states from Karnataka to Uttarakhand — after the arrest in 2005 of both his elder brothers, Sansar Chand and Rajkumar.

They don’t kill animals themselves. They simply put out their requirement -- with the price they are willing to pay -- among actual poachers who mostly live around the reserves and sanctuaries.

Wildlife authorities and experts were most worried about Narayan’s alleged confession that he bought body parts of 10 tigers and leopards from Ram Nagar, a locality on the edge of Corbett Reserve in Uttarakhand.

“His reported confession is scary,” said Belinda Wright of Wildlife Protection Society of India. “Corbett is remote, poachers can easily enter and kill tigers and leopards.”

The International Union for Conservation of Nature rated Corbett the best tiger reserve in India based on a 2006 count. With 92 big cats -- one every 5.66 sq km -- it has the highest density of tigers.

It lost four of its tigers in 2009, among the 47 killed all over India.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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