Cheetah beats lions in political upmanship

Gujarat refuses lions for MP to protect imported Namibian cheetahs. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Apr 4, 2012, 23:28:27 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Cheetah has virtually up-smarted lion in the central Indian landscape.

The Gujarat government has refused to relocate lions from Gir National Park in Saurashtra region to Kuno Palpur National Park in Madhya Pradesh on the ground that lions will kill cheetahs.

The environment ministry had recently allowed Madhya Pradesh government to translocate nine cheetahs from Namibia in a phased manner for release in wild in Kuno Palpur. About Rs 50 crore will be spent to implement this project.

The decision came handy for Gujarat government in the Supreme Court which used a ministry’s report that cheetahs will face threat from lions. A technical report of Wildlife Institute of India and Wildlife Trust of India had suggested that lions should be relocated only after cheetahs have established themselves in Kuno.

Similar argument was repeated in the court by Gujarat government counsel, who wanted suspension of any plan to relocate lions to Kuno for safety of cheetahs, who were found in India till 1960s.

Narendra Modi led Gujarat government had been refusing parting with lions for years saying they cannot part with pride of Gujarat. Now, the cheetah project has given them any tool to deny lions to Madhya Pradesh, which had originally developed Kuno for lion relocation.

“Kuno was a designated home for Asiatic lions,” said Fayaz Khudsar, who had filed the petition in the Supreme Court seeking relocation of India’s national animal. “Bringing cheetah to Kuno will be huge setback for lions, a project of great scientific significance”.

The need to relocate lions was felt because of probability of losing country’s only lion population due to inbreeding or any calamity. As on summer of 2010, there were 411 asiatic lions in the 1,412 square kilometres of Gir National Park.

Both the Central and Madhya Pradesh government had backed the project. Despite BJP being in power in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh for around eight years, relocation of lions has not taken place.

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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