Panel wants jumbo corridors in its ambit

India's elephant and tiger corridors are under stress as the government is allowing mining activity there forcing the independent members of an environment ministry's wildlife committee asking the government to bring them under their regulation. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: May 27, 2013, 03:01:11 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India's elephant and tiger corridors are under stress as the government is allowing mining activity there forcing the independent members of an environment ministry's wildlife committee asking the government to bring them under their regulation.

The Standing Committee of the National Board of Wildlife is a statutory body headed by environment minister to clear all projects in and around wildlife areas. But, the committee is not able to decide on projects in wildlife corridors as the state governments having liberty to de-notify an elephant area through executive order. This has resulted in mining being allowed in forest areas considered as corridors for the big animals to move from one green zone to another.

The issue was raised at a recent committee meeting by non-official members, who urged environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan to bring all such corridors under its ambit for regulation.

A committee member MD Madhusudan said the elephant reserves are created through an executive order and can be de-notified through another executive order, a major legal hurdle in regulation. The Wildlife Trust of India has identified many elephant corridors but the state governments have failed to notify them fearing it would impose restrictions on developmental work.

"There is a need to give a legal status to these reserves and the regulatory role should be given to the National Board for Wildlife," the minutes of the committee meeting quoted Madhusudan as saying.

Another member Prerna Bindra said that all elephant and tiger corridors should be declared as eco-sensitive zones so that the committee can deliberate on any projects proposed there. She also said that there has been an alarming rate of diversion of key wildlife habitats in recent past for projects.

The ministry's Forest Advisory Committee (FAC), mandated to allow diversion of forests for projects, had cleared mining in both elephant and tiger corridors on the ground that they were not notified as wildlife areas. Some of the projects cleared were in naxal affected areas in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.

"Diversion of forest land in elephant reserves, elephant and tiger corridors that are identified and demarcated by the state government and central government should immediately be brought under the purview of the standing committee," she said.

Kishore Rithe, who represented Satpuda Foundation, said the wildlife corridors are defined under the Wildlife Protection Act and therefore, they should get the status of ecologically sensitive areas automatically.

Other members of the committee expressed their shock at the pace India was losing its wildlife corridors just because they were not notified deliberately by the state governments.

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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