Flora, fauna under threat in NE

The biodiversity in the eight northeastern states is under severe stress. For, as much as 75 per cent of the region’s habitat has been threatened. The reasons are unplanned development, illegal felling of trees and poaching of wildlife, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Aug 11, 2009, 01:15:08 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The biodiversity in the eight northeastern states is under severe stress. For, as much as 75 per cent of the region’s habitat has been threatened. The reasons are unplanned development, illegal felling of trees and poaching of wildlife.

A World Wildlife Fund study, Eastern Himalayas, Where the Worlds Collide, released on Monday, said over 10,000 plant species, 300 mammals, 977 birds, 176 reptiles, 105 amphibians and 269 freshwater fish inhabit the eastern Himalayan range.

But in the range, stretching from Arunachal Pradesh to Sikkim and parts of West Bengal in India and touching parts of Myanmar, Nepal and southern Tibet, 163 species were considered threatened. And “90 per cent (of them) are from northeast India”, the study said.

“Destruction of habitat will make many plant species vanish. When there is lesser space for wildlife, weaker animals are thrown out,” said Fayaz Khudsar, 42, an ecology researcher in Delhi University.

He said when animals moved out of their habitat, human-animal conflict, said to be very high in the northeast, would increase further.

The study said as many as 144 new species of wildlife and plants, of which 70 were not available anywhere in the world, were discovered in the northeast over the last decade.

In the eastern Himalayas, which included the northeastern part of India, 353 new species were discovered between 1998 and 2008. The 3,000-km-long Eastern Himalayan ranges are among the biologically most diverse in the world.

“A sensitive assessment of ecology is required before development projects are taken up,” said P.C. Bhattacharjee, zoology professor, Gauhati University. He said, “Habitats are under stress and 3,500 wetlands, which nourish biodiversity, are degrading rapidly.”

Several environmentalists and non-government organisations have been protesting against setting up of hydropower projects, like the one on

the Teesta in Sikkim with a capacity of 10,000 MW, said Himanshu Thakkar of South Asian Network of the Dams Rivers and People, an NGO.

The mega dams in Arunachal Pradesh had submerged several forests, said Bamang Anthony, head of Arunachal Citizens’ Right in Itanagar. He said, “We need to draw a line somewhere.”
(With Rahul Karmakar in Guwahati)

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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