India's champions of biodiversity

Glistening in the cloud of ever-increasing incidents of man-animal conflict is a silver lining. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Oct 19, 2012, 01:46:53 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Glistening in the cloud of ever-increasing incidents of man-animal conflict is a silver lining. It comes from several heartwarming stories - that of poachers turning tiger protectors in Kerala, villagers launching a community movement to save olive ridley turtles in Orissa, and villagers in Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra joining hands with the forest department to rejuvenate the green cover.

The authors of eight such episodes were awarded the very first India Biodiversity Awards-2012 at a conference of over 180 countries on Thursday. The awards were given away by environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan and representatives of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The fact that around 40,000 local residents at the Periyar Tiger Reserve in Kerala earn their living from wildlife tourism turned traditional hunters into protectors of the big cats.

"We turned a problem into an opportunity," said Pramod Krishnan, the brainchild behind the project.

Meanwhile, women from Gundlaba village learnt about the importance of biodiversity after a devastating cyclone in 1999.

"It was the mangroves that saved us," said a representative of the Pir Jahania Jungle Surakasha Committee, which was set up after the incident to rejuvenate the foliage and protect the world's biggest nesting site for olive ridley turtles. And now, after 12 years of work, the mangrove cover has risen by 63% and the fish catch per family from one to five kg per day.

In Rajasthan, where forests are hard to find, villagers from Udaipur district felt that the Forest Rights Act- 2006 would lead to encroachment and destruction of wooded areas. Their perception, however, changed when they got rights to collect forest produce in return for ensuring protection of forested areas under the Van Uttan Sansthan scheme.

The Shankarpur village panchayat in Maharashtra, on the other hand, used funds allocated under the Mahatma Gandhi National Guarantee Scheme to rejuvenate depleting forests through check dams.

UNDP officials, however, agreed that the awards failed to take into account incidents where people were affected by actions taken by forest department officials.

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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