Endangered plants to get protection under wildlife law
Smugglers of endangered plant species may now be dealt with as severely as poachers in a bid to protect the country's rich diversity of flora, although protection will come under wildlife laws and not the Forest Conservation Act.
Smugglers of endangered plant species may now be dealt with as severely as poachers in a bid to protect the country's rich diversity of flora, although protection will come under wildlife laws and not the Forest Conservation Act.
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India is home to about 12% of the world's endangered plant species but laws do not protect plants the same way as animals. The government plans to end this anomaly and provide legal protection to endangered plants and trees by incorporating a new schedule in the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972.
A senior environment ministry official said under existing laws, a person found with endangered plant species can be booked for illegally cutting a tree and sentenced to a maximum jail term of only six months and a fine of Rs 500. Killing an endangered animal, however, can put a person in jail for seven years with a Rs 25,000 minimum fine.
Environment ministry officials made a presentation to a high-level committee reviewing environment and forest laws, seeking the new schedule in the Wildlife Protection Act and want plants to be ranked on extinction probability. This means that the more the chances of a plant becoming extinct, the more the jail term for a person who is caught with it.
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The ministry also plans to put a legal framework in place to deal with inter-state smuggler networks after the Andhra Pradesh government registered about 1,000 cases of illegal felling of endangered Red Sander trees.
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The ministry also plans to put a legal framework in place to deal with inter-state smuggler networks after the Andhra Pradesh government registered about 1,000 cases of illegal felling of endangered Red Sander trees.
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The species, confined to the Eastern Ghats in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, is used in medicines, perfumes, facial creams and to make luxury furniture and has been seized at major international airports like Heathrow, Bangkok and Tokyo. A tonne of the shining wood fetches over Rs 5 lakh in the international market.
Similarly, Agarwood from the northeast and rare herbs and plant species from the Himalayan region are also in demand with smugglers.
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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