Why government took a stand on tigers, then a U-turn
Issues concerning forest-dwellers, those dependent on tourism, possible electoral fallout resulted in change of heart. Chetan Chauhan reports. Pulling down the curtains on tiger tourism
For almost two years, the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) had been insisting on banning tourism in core tiger areas. However, in the three weeks since the Supreme Court imposed an interim ban on tiger tourism, there has been a sudden change of heart. And not without reason.
Environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan was inundated with letters and phone calls from people and organisations cutting across political and social lines, supported actively by the tourism lobby, asking her to make the NTCA review its guidelines.On Wednesday, the ministry asked the court to review the interim order because it wanted to hold wider consultations on the guidelines submitted to the court.
The NTCA guideline submitted in the court was aimed at enforcing the 2007 amendment in the Wildlife Protection Act, which spoke on creating inviolate core and buffer areas.
Though the guidelines meant well, there were a few ground difficulties. Of the total tiger reserve area of 43,000 sq km, only 9,921 sq km comprises the buffer zone. And only 14 of the 39 tiger reserves have notified buffer zones, primarily because there is not enough vacant green area to make a demarcation. “The so-called buffer zones have farmland and infrastructure, which cannot be acquired in one go,” said Dr Raghu Chandawat, a wildlife biologist. Over 10,000 families residing in the tiger reserves would have to be relocated for creating inviolate core zones.
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In the end, it was a letter sent by Congress general secretary Digvijaya Singh to Natarajan — highlighting the adverse impact of the ban on tourism-dependant people and its possible electoral fall-out — that apparently pushed the ministry to change its stand. And by doing that, it earned the ire of the apex court.
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In the end, it was a letter sent by Congress general secretary Digvijaya Singh to Natarajan — highlighting the adverse impact of the ban on tourism-dependant people and its possible electoral fall-out — that apparently pushed the ministry to change its stand. And by doing that, it earned the ire of the apex court.
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.
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