Tiger gets lion's share of wildlife funds in 12th Plan

The tiger has garnered a substantial portion of the wildlife funding pie for the next five years. Chetan Chauhan reports. Tiger territory

Updated on: Oct 14, 2012, 11:29:54 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The tiger has garnered a substantial portion of the wildlife funding pie for the next five years.

The Planning Commission has allocated Rs. 5,889 crore for 1,706 tigers in the 12th Plan (2012-17), compared to Rs. 615 crore in the 11th Plan (2007-12) - a nine-fold increase in allocation. For all the other endangered species - including 26,000 elephants, 300 lions in Gujarat and around 16,000-20,000 leopards - the money allocated is just Rs. 3,600 crore.

In the 11th Plan, the other animals had received Rs. 800 crore - an amount higher than the allocation for tigers.

Justifying the fund allocation, officials said tigers are flagship species and the money spent on their protection would automatically benefit other animals such as deer and rhinos. Most of the money would be spent on relocating around 10,000 families living in 41 tiger habitats of the country, and filling vacancies of security guards in the reserves.

"Several new thrust areas have been identified for implementation. This includes strengthening protection and furthering the co-existence agenda in buffer areas of tiger reserves, besides voluntary relocation along with regulatory monitoring of tiger population and their habitat," the 12th Plan document for wildlife says.

While separate funding for elephants under the 11th Plan has been merged with the existing scheme - Integrated Development of Wildlife Habitats, there is no mention of Asiatic lions, which are only known to inhabit the Gir National Park in Gujarat.

Similar is the story of snow leopards, whose number is now estimated to be less than 1,000 in upper reaches of Himalayas in Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir. Though the poaching figures of leopards have nearly doubled in the last five years, it is also missing from the Plan document. Not a single endangered bird - such as the great Indian bustard and vulture - finds mention in the 1,600-page Plan document.

Wildlife activists say that as a majority of the endangered animals live outside tiger reserves in 600 protected areas, they fall prey to development and other kinds of biotic pressure.

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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