New rules to save the tiger, fix responsibility

The Union Cabinet’s decision on Thursday demarcating the duties of the central and state governments and field-level officials for tiger protection could prevent a repeat of Sariska and Panna.

Updated on: Jul 3, 2009, 02:14:03 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Union Cabinet’s decision on Thursday demarcating the duties of the central and state governments and field-level officials for tiger protection could prevent a repeat of Sariska and Panna.

In 2005, tigers vanished from Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan and it was repeated happened in the Panna reserve in Madhya Pradesh in 2009.

“The new agreement will bring accountability,” said Valmik Thapar, a tiger conservationist who was first to raise the issue of mass tiger deaths in Sariska. “The state governments and tiger reserve directors would now be responsible for tiger deaths.”

While over 50 tigers died in Sariska and Panna combined, not a single official was punished. A Special Investigation Team constituted to investigate tiger deaths in Panna in April 2009 failed to fix responsibility as Panna got seven field directors in five years. “We can only say the system failed as not enough time was given to individuals to work in the reserve,” said P K Sen, who headed the probe team.

The tripartite agreement to be signed with 17 states and 37 reserves in the next one month has specific duties for the Centre, state governments and field directors, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said.

The National Tiger Conservation Authority, an Environment Ministry statutory body, will provide over Rs 600 crore to reserves in the next four years and will conduct ecological audit to see if the money has been properly utilized.

The states will have 20 obligations like preparing a tiger conservation plan, posting motivated officers, filling vacancies.

The biggest challenge is for the reserve directors, who have been given 30 responsibilities. They will be answerable for tiger deaths, utilization of funds and will have to coordinate with local panchayat bodies to check man-animal conflict — the cause of 45 tiger deaths this year.

chetan@hindustantimes.com

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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