No tiger skin ritual robes: Tibet

One of the biggest market for tiger and leopard skin ?Tibet ? is fast turning its back on the use of skins robes for traditional ceremonies.

Published on: Feb 14, 2006, 02:09:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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One of the biggest market for tiger and leopard skin —Tibet — is fast turning its back on the use of skins robes for traditional ceremonies.

The upsurge against the skin was seen over the past two months in several regions of Tibet, after Dalai Lama’s condemnation of its usage in a recent Kalchakra ceremony in Amravati.

"It started from Rebgong Siherji village where two villagers first burnt animal skins. Within half-an-hour three, more families joined. And slowly the campaign spread to other provinces of Tibet where animals skins are being burnt," said Ashok Kumar, vice-chairman of Wildlife Trust of India. Tiger and leopard skins are also vanishing from markets, from where they were being sold.

But, the biggest boost tiger conservationists got was on February 7, when one of the biggest festival — Great Prayer Festival of Molam Quinmo — started. Here, the villagers destroyed hundreds of tiger and leopard skins and vowed to fight against usage of animal skin across Tibet. The festival ended on Sunday. A recent investigation by Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI) revealed that most of tiger and leopard skins from India were going to Tibet for ceremonial robes. "The skins were being smuggled into Tibet via Nepal and business have been booming over the past few years because of easy availability of tiger body parts," said Belinda Wright of WPSI, who was part of the investigating team.

The NGOs were quick to react. A global campaign to save tigers was launched. As part of the effort, NGOs circulated tapes of the investigation at the Kalchakra ceremony and Dalai Lama publicly condemned the use of skins for robes. He also launched Tibetan Conservation Awareness Campaign in which 3,000 Tibetans wowed to support the campaign. The word circulated in Tibet and people started destroying tiger skins. "Injustice been done to the rare animals and we should try and stop it," said Barbara Mass of Care for the Wild International.

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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