SC order on wildlife board jolts Prakash Javadekar

Hit by the Supreme Court putting decisions of the standing committee of the national board for wildlife on hold, the environment ministry would urge the apex court to review its order saying nothing illegal has been done.

Updated on: Aug 26, 2014, 21:49:57 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Hit by the Supreme Court putting decisions of the standing committee of the national board for wildlife on hold, the environment ministry would urge the apex court to review its order saying nothing illegal has been done.

Trying to put a brave face after the court order, environment and forest minister Prakash Javadekar said nothing illegal has been done.

"We have reconstituted the standing committee and the wildlife board. The rules are for the wildlife board not the committee. We would inform the court about the facts of the case," he said when asked about the next course of action in wake of the Supreme Court's order.

The reconstituted committee with just two non-official members - one from an NGO affiliated to the Gujarat government - cleared 140 proposals at its first meeting in August.

Of these projects five were close to tiger reserves including expansion of a national highway passing next to a tiger habitat in Maharashtra and a Border Road Organisation's project in Manipur.

"The expansion was approved with the conditions imposed by the Wildlife Institute of India," a senior ministry official said, adding that most of the projects were held back for a long time on flimsy grounds. A road for Border Security Force passing through a rich flamingo habitat in Gujarat also got approval.

The truncated standing committee was the first major body to be constituted by Javadekar after he took over an environment minister. Earlier the committee used to have five non-official members - mostly independent wildlife experts - to put some checks and balances to mad rush for approval of projects.

The minister reduced the number to two with just Raman Sukumar an elephant expert from Bangalore being an independent member.

The issue of spree of approvals around tiger habitats found some mention at a meeting of National Tiger Conservation Authority chaired by Javadekar on Tuesday.

"Some members raised the issue of the danger of developmental projects coming up near tiger reserves," an official said. The minister reacted by saying that the government will come up with a policy to balance development with tiger conservation.

At the meeting, Javadekar announced that the NTCA with the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau would launch a MIS based tiger tracking system to strengthen the efforts being made to control wildlife crimes around tiger reserves. "This would help in real time monitoring of tigers in 47 tiger reserves in India," the minister said.

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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