Govt rejects proposal to extract sea horses

The committee of National Board for Wildlife has refused to provide endangered sea horses for national project on development of potential drugs from the ocean.

Updated on: May 29, 2010, 22:49:26 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The committee of National Board for Wildlife has refused to provide endangered sea horses for national project on development of potential drugs from the ocean.

The Maharashtra government had sought the environment ministry’s approval to collect 1 kg of imperiled species from Arabian Sea for the research project, which aims at developing medicines from aquatic species in four states.

Sea horses are found along the coast of Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Goa. A proposal submitted by the state government said sea horses played a vital “role in increasing and balancing vital energy flows within the body, as well as a curative role for many ailments...”

At a meeting of the standing committee of National Board for Wildlife chaired by Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, the proposal was rejected after conservationists opposed it saying it will open a Pandora box as organisations will seek mindless extraction of species listed in the Schedule-I of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. Collection of species under the law is prohibited.

“We have nipped the proposal in the bud itself,” said M.K. Ranjit Singh, a team member. “If we give permission for research then we should also be open to the idea that it could be meant for commercial purpose as well.”

Conservationists believe sea horses get easily affected by loss of habitat, pollution or even small changes in their environment, making them the first indicators of the health of the near-shore marine habitat.

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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