Gir lions now in Modi court

The proposal to shift the lions to Kuno Palpur national park in Madhya Pradesh has been dangling for a decade now.

Published on: Jun 20, 2006, 03:14:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The bitter divide in the wildlife activist fraternity showed up at the second meeting of the National Board for Wildlife on Monday with the Gujarat lobby staunchly opposing any move to shift Gir lions to Madhya Pradesh. At the end of the stormy session, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh set the ball rolling for a compromise, asking environment minister A. Raja to discuss the move with Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi.

The decision was met with protests from a few members.

The proposal to shift the lions to Kuno Palpur national park in Madhya Pradesh has been dangling for a decade now. The ministry of environment and forest has spent crores to develop a habitat for the lions in Kuno. The Gujarat government has opposed the move, arguing that MP was not the right choice.

At Monday’s meeting, former chief wildlife warden of Gujarat GK Patel even claimed that the relocation would be disastrous as tigers would end up killing lions. Wildlife activists like Valmik Thapar countered that lions need to be relocated to preserve them against disease and natural calamity. To this, Patel said the government was already preparing a relocation site in Saurashtra.

Tiger conservation was also a hotly contested issue. The director of Project Tiger, Dr Rajesh Gopal, minced no words in his presentation on the action taken on the recommendations of Tiger Task Force report and status of tiger conservation in the country.

Several members accused the ministry of not doing much to save tigers. “This is the worst crisis in wildlife in the past 30 years. Everything is directionless,” Thapar reportedly told the PM.

A few members objected to the ministry’s proposal to have a statutory body, Tiger Conservation Authority. Instead, S C Sharma, former Additional Director-General Forest sought a Wildlife Conservation Authority for all species. The government, by setting up more bodies, is building empires in the ministry, he said.

Despite the bickering, crucial decisions were taken. The board has decided to give Army officers the powers to check poaching and illegal trade in wildlife. The ministry will also carry out a survey of peacocks in the country and seek a ban on the trade of peacock feathers. The board also decided to take steps for better conservation of red jungle fowl. The PM has asked the ministry to submit a detail plan on bifurcation of the ministry into two departments — wildlife and forest, and environment and pollution.

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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