'Tiger Reserve guidelines fail to address tribal issues'

The environment ministry’s new eco-tourism guidelines for tiger reserves has hit another rough patch with 2 members of the committee that framed the guidelines complaining to environment ministry Jayanthi Natarajan that rights of people living in and around the reserves have been over-looked to accommodate the tourism industry.

Updated on: Oct 2, 2012, 22:26:21 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The environment ministry’s new eco-tourism guidelines for tiger reserves has hit another rough patch with two members of the committee that framed the guidelines complaining to environment ministry Jayanthi Natarajan that rights of people living in and around the reserves have been over-looked to accommodate the tourism industry.

Tushar Das and Swati Seshadri representing forest rights groups in the expert panel set up by National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) to review its July guidelines to regulate tourism in 41 tiger reserves in India claim that the authority had failed to respond to their objections.

“We have learnt that the NTCA has neither responded to the objections not has submitted the note of objections in the (Supreme) Court during submission of guidelines, this is despite our explicit request to do so,” they said in a letter to Natarajan on Monday.

The court is expected to hear the case on Wednesday.

Their grouse is that even though they had emailed the objections regarding overlooking the Forest Rights Act in the guidelines on September 22 to NTCA member secretary Rajesh Gopal, there was no mention about it in the guidelines submitted in the court four days later.

“Submission of the NTCA in the court are therefore incomplete and misleading and we object to it,” the letter read.

Their main objection is to the way guidelines propose to identify and notify core and buffer areas, key for enforcing the new eco-tourism guidelines.

They took a strong objection at the guidelines considering the notified core and buffer zones as final without looking into harassment and eviction of of local communities in violation of the Forest Rights Act.

They also said that giving directors of forest reserve unified control for restoration of buffer zones was violation of the Forest Rights Act as well as the Wildlife Protection Act.

“The tourism industry has unjustifiably been given a special role in allocation of funds collected from tourism facilities,” they said in their complaint to Natarajan.

Urging the minister to take corrective action, Dash and Seshadri said the guidelines would impact the rights of scheduled tribes and other forest dwellers.

“We request you to look into the issue and ensure that the law is upheld especially in context of Scheduled Tribe and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act,” they said.

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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