Double blow for rare bustard

The government has decided to de-notify the Karera Wildlife Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh, the oldest home of the rare Great Indian Bustard, as a wildlife zone.

Updated on: Apr 24, 2010, 23:33:08 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The government has decided to de-notify the Karera Wildlife Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh, the oldest home of the rare Great Indian Bustard, as a wildlife zone.

The move will make Karera the first wildlife sanctuary in India to be de-notified.

The Standing Committee of National Board for Wildlife, headed by Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, took the decision after the state government said that the last bustard spotted in the sanctuary was in 1995.

The area of the Great Indian Bustard Sanctuary in Maharashtra will also be reduced by one-fourth. The committee has decided to reduce the area of India’s only bustard sanctuary near Solapur, 400 km from Mumbai, from 8,500 sqkm to 1,220 sqkm. The number of birds in the sanctuary has dwindled because of alleged killing by locals.

The bustard population in India is less than 1,000 according to an unofficial estimate in 2008. There are no official figures as has been no government survey on bustards.

“De-notification of a wildlife area is rare,” said M.K. Ranjit Singh, head of the Wildlife Trust of India and member of the National Wildlife Board. “Because sanctuaries are considered safe homes for wildlife... Karera was not safe as destruction of habitat resulted in loss of bustards and now migratory birds.”

It was alleged that the decision would benefit the local mining mafia.

The ministry’s decision has, however, come as a boon for Shivpuri residents who have land inside the Karera sanctuary. “Once the denotification of land is done, they would be able to use it freely,” said a state official. But the de-notification will take place only after the state government declares an area equal to Karera elsewhere as protected.

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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