Something I wrote on tiger farms...long back
How do you want your Royal Bengal Tiger? Wild and free, as befitting the true king of beasts? Or chopped and brewed into a soup? Crushed and ground into a pill, perhaps? Skinned and fashioned into a rug that drapes the wall? Behind bars, maybe, posing with pigs for tourists?
Don’t let your conscience dictate. You can delude yourself into believing that the slaughtered tiger made the supreme sacrifice -- that he was butchered, skinned, decimated and sold, and the profits used to keep the flame of his dying wild brethren alive.
Introducing the world of tiger farming as a tool of conservation. Breed tigers in captivity, kill them, sell them. The supply of tiger derivatives from the farms will take the heat off, and conserve, wild tigers who are being killed for their skins and bones. Part of the profits can be used to finance to the rehabilitation of a few select ones into the wild. Use the principle of a free market to conserve the animal. After all, say the economists, battery hens have not gone extinct.
If it weren’t so tragic, I would laugh, the logic is so self-defeating. Simply put, this free market medicine for reversing the tiger’s decline is worse than the disease it hopes to cure. The economies of poaching overrule the logic of free market. It costs upwards of $ 3,000 to raise a farmed tiger, but you could get a wild tiger killed for just about $ 10. It makes more business sense to kill tigers for the market than go through the expensive exercise of breeding them in farms. The wild product will always be cheaper. Besides, the consumption of tiger derivatives is motivated by the desire to imbibe the properties of a wild animal – it is the penis of a wild tiger that is believed to boost impotent souls, not one of a tame cat, it is the ‘champagne" of medicines found in the bones of wild tigers that is sought after, not battery-bred pussies.
Even more ridiculous is the notion that tigers born and bred like rabbits in cages have conservation value. They don’t. None at all. It is a well-established fact that captive bred tigers in zoo-like conditions cannot be released and rehabilitated in the wild. A wild tiger cub is ‘trained’ in the art of survival for over two years from its mother. She teaches the cubs to hunt- strength alone will not down prey, young tigers must learn to conceal, attack, hold on to and safeguard their prey from other scavengers. Rough play between siblings is an important step towards learning to defend territories, and so on. Besides, they are too used to humans, therefore vulnerable to poaching, more prone to get into fatal conflict with man, and are also suspect carriers of diseases that will threaten wild populations.
None of this has made any impact on China, a major proponent of the ‘Sell the tiger to save it’ theory. Legalising tiger farming – obviously cloaked under the benevolent motive of conservation -- is being aggressively pushed by China which today has more than 5,000 tigers, owned by private entrepreneurs, and supported by the government, in its farms. Select restaurants in China now openly sell tiger ‘Stir Fried tiger with ginger’ and other such tiger meat delicacies, and you could buy tiger wine, in three different ages, off the shelf, ostensibly from tigers that ‘died’ naturally – if you can believe that. Trade in tiger derivatives is internationally banned, and under international pressure, the Chinese government banned the internal trade in tiger parts in 1993. But, today, the government is lobbying hard to lift this ban. China’s proposal to legalise internal trade in tiger parts was shot down at the CITES (Convention of International Trade on endangered Species) conference held in June 2007. Not that the ban seems to have made any difference. Farms continue with their gory trade, and China has made its intent very clear -- that it would continue to promote tiger farming with the intention of trading in tiger parts,
There is little doubt that giving the trade a legal stamp will be catastrophic. Bones from farmed tigers do not take the heat off wild populations, just the opposite. For one, there is no way, no test to distinguish the bones of farmed tigers from those poached from the wild, giving an opportunity for traffickers to ‘launder’ bones from wild tigers under the guise of legality.
The demand for tiger bones has its lethal impact on India. Looking back in history, in 1990s, the population of tigers again dipped, after a brief reprieve due to the protection accorded by law and conservation of habitat accorded under Project Tiger. It was the first time that tiger poaching was linked to the demand for bones in China. Today, India’s tiger population is at an all time low-there are fewer than 1,300 wild tigers in India –and one of most serious threat remains the demand for skins and bones. The tigers of Sariska were slaughtered for the trade till none remained. As were tigers in Ranthambhore, Panna, Buxa and other reserves across the country –and were the farms to get a legal stamp, it will only provide further impetus.
Farming tigers does not stop the killing, only strict protection does. It is in India and Nepal, countries that have strict protectionist laws that the tiger has survived, not in China, Korea and Thailand that propagate the free market theory, and in fact have been running tiger farms for years. If tiger farming was the answer, why does China have fewer than 25 wild tigers? Remember too, that before law banned hunting in the 1970s, free market ruled the tiger across its range countries – by then tigers had been wiped off 90 per cent of its historical range. A few thousand remained.
Tigers are primarily killed for their bones and other body parts for use in Traditional Chinese Medicine – but the leading experts of TCM now say that they do not want tiger bone-it is giving the medicines a bad name, and there are substitutes.
It would also be worthwhile to look at other species like bears that are milked for bile in the cruelest manner possible in farms, yet they continue to be poached for their bile and gall bladder across South-east Asia, and are today critically endangered. Not only that, there is also trade in live bear cubs to stock the bile farms.
With wild tiger numbers so critically low, the need of the hour is to provide strict protection, save their habitats, not invest hairbrained schemes of eating tigers to save them. The driving force behind the theory of tiger farming is Chinese entrepreneurs who have invested in these farms. The upkeep of tigers is expensive hence the lobby for reopening trade. Farming tigers may serve the Gods of Profit, but only over the grave of wild tigers.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Extinction
“So what if the tiger goes extinct,” argued the economist, “And, err, what was that you mentioned, the bustard. Who knows it exists? Who will know if it goes?” this with a dry laugh. I wouldn’t even try to calculate in fiscal terms, the benefits of the presence of a top predator, or a bird that denotes a healthy desert grassland—of the value of the timber, the oxygen produced, the water and soil retained, and enriched with minerals, water catchments protected, the carbon stored and sequestered, of the delicate web of life that shall get fatally disrupted as the vital cogs slip, and fall into the netherworld.
So many species lost, forever, existing now only in the annals of history. The cheetah, the mountain quail, the pink-headed duck, the passenger pigeon, the Bali tiger, the Tasmanian tiger, the golden toad-and the latest dear departed—a mammal we claim to love, the Yengtze river dolphin. They died unsung, almost unknown—unlike the Dodo, who, being the most famous of them all, has acquired a status among extinct creatures. And also a certain whimsy, possibly owing to the fact that the little-known dodo was first introduced to the literary world by Lewis Caroll as a character in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, perhaps inspiring the now well-worn phrase, ‘as dead as a dodo’. But do we equate it with the gravity of extinction, or is it merely used to announce the death of a fad, or maybe a career gone wrong? Do we pause to mourn the passing of a large, ungainly, flightless bird eaten, and beaten, out of existence from the island of Mauritius?
Somehow, I think not.
So, you argue, so what? Isn’t extinction a natural phenomenon? Haven’t there been huge die-offs before? After all, an estimated 99.9 per cent of the species that have ever appeared on this planet are now gone forever.
But the high extinction rate at the moment is unique, the ‘sixth extinction’ is the fastest in the earth's 4.5-billion-year history—by some estimates we lose three to four species an hour. The mass extinctions suffered before were the result of a natural phenomenon. Like the giant meteorite that hit earth some 65 million years ago, destroying much of life, including the dinosaurs. But life reshaped itself, and a new evolution begun again, and there are those who say that once we are done with ravaging the planet, and all that’s in it, nature will simply renew itself. It might unnerve us to know that the extinctions of yore took with them the culprits—the species that dominated, and destroyed the earth. Which should be indicative of what lies in store for us.
If nature does manage to start from scratch again, new life on earth might not include us. For we must remember, that this sixth extinction is not being caused by any demon meteor, but by we, the people. And unlike the meteor, we know what we are doing. About what we destroy, and what we do to Planet Earth, and its creatures.
So many have gone, so many waiting to go, their numbers down to mere hundreds and declining by the day: The bustard, the dugong, the red panda, the pointy-nosed frog, the Ramaswaran parachute spider, the dancing deer, and...the royal Bengal tiger?
The future of the country’s wildlife is questionable as it struggles against multifold threats-poaching, habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation, and sheer lack of political will to back conservation. The leopard is massacred in great numbers for skin and bones, the rare Asiatic lion-just about 350 of them--faces a litany of threats in its last refuge, Gir National Park. Tuskers are killed for their tusks, and slaughtered as conflicts between man and elephant intensify. The Lion-tailed macaque faces habitat fragmentation in its only home in the Western Ghats, barely 150 hanguls struggle for survival in land ravaged by the gun.
It’s not only the charismatic and the cuddly that are on the list of the doomed-they merely command more attention, inspire more sympathy. They are not the only ones that need to be protected. Snakes and frogs and insects and bacteria—life on earth needs all of them. Impossible as it may seem if the planet lost its beneficial bacteria, it would devastate us—and the death of something as innocuous as bees would mean we would soon be gone. It’s a keystone species. And to repeat Albert Einstein's apocalyptic view, “ 'If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.' And for the record, there has been a catastrophic decline in bee populations, across the world.
Biodiversity is vital for the survival of life on earth. Everything is related, linked, nothing exists in isolation, but in a symbiotic relationship. The loss of crucial links in the chain, and life as we know it would collapse like the proverbial house of cards.
For the moment, I would rather not worry over what will beget us if we continue on this merry path of destruction. Or calculate the losses in economic terms. I would just like you to think: Would I, would you, want to live in a world devoid of diversity; the environment, only a homogenous structure of gray and concrete? Where the only architecture is that of Homo sapiens, built over the graveyard of God’s creations. Where the forests-if any exist at all-are silenced of the roar of the tiger-where the only bird that streaks across the sky is the crow-scavenging of the rubbish of man. Where no whales swim the seas, no elephants tread the land, no peacocks dance to woo their mates, no butterflies flitter from flower to flower, no new leaves unfurl, no tree takes root....
Does this carry a price, can its value be measured?
Or would you say, it’s priceless?
So many species lost, forever, existing now only in the annals of history. The cheetah, the mountain quail, the pink-headed duck, the passenger pigeon, the Bali tiger, the Tasmanian tiger, the golden toad-and the latest dear departed—a mammal we claim to love, the Yengtze river dolphin. They died unsung, almost unknown—unlike the Dodo, who, being the most famous of them all, has acquired a status among extinct creatures. And also a certain whimsy, possibly owing to the fact that the little-known dodo was first introduced to the literary world by Lewis Caroll as a character in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, perhaps inspiring the now well-worn phrase, ‘as dead as a dodo’. But do we equate it with the gravity of extinction, or is it merely used to announce the death of a fad, or maybe a career gone wrong? Do we pause to mourn the passing of a large, ungainly, flightless bird eaten, and beaten, out of existence from the island of Mauritius?
Somehow, I think not.
So, you argue, so what? Isn’t extinction a natural phenomenon? Haven’t there been huge die-offs before? After all, an estimated 99.9 per cent of the species that have ever appeared on this planet are now gone forever.
But the high extinction rate at the moment is unique, the ‘sixth extinction’ is the fastest in the earth's 4.5-billion-year history—by some estimates we lose three to four species an hour. The mass extinctions suffered before were the result of a natural phenomenon. Like the giant meteorite that hit earth some 65 million years ago, destroying much of life, including the dinosaurs. But life reshaped itself, and a new evolution begun again, and there are those who say that once we are done with ravaging the planet, and all that’s in it, nature will simply renew itself. It might unnerve us to know that the extinctions of yore took with them the culprits—the species that dominated, and destroyed the earth. Which should be indicative of what lies in store for us.
If nature does manage to start from scratch again, new life on earth might not include us. For we must remember, that this sixth extinction is not being caused by any demon meteor, but by we, the people. And unlike the meteor, we know what we are doing. About what we destroy, and what we do to Planet Earth, and its creatures.
So many have gone, so many waiting to go, their numbers down to mere hundreds and declining by the day: The bustard, the dugong, the red panda, the pointy-nosed frog, the Ramaswaran parachute spider, the dancing deer, and...the royal Bengal tiger?
The future of the country’s wildlife is questionable as it struggles against multifold threats-poaching, habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation, and sheer lack of political will to back conservation. The leopard is massacred in great numbers for skin and bones, the rare Asiatic lion-just about 350 of them--faces a litany of threats in its last refuge, Gir National Park. Tuskers are killed for their tusks, and slaughtered as conflicts between man and elephant intensify. The Lion-tailed macaque faces habitat fragmentation in its only home in the Western Ghats, barely 150 hanguls struggle for survival in land ravaged by the gun.
It’s not only the charismatic and the cuddly that are on the list of the doomed-they merely command more attention, inspire more sympathy. They are not the only ones that need to be protected. Snakes and frogs and insects and bacteria—life on earth needs all of them. Impossible as it may seem if the planet lost its beneficial bacteria, it would devastate us—and the death of something as innocuous as bees would mean we would soon be gone. It’s a keystone species. And to repeat Albert Einstein's apocalyptic view, “ 'If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.' And for the record, there has been a catastrophic decline in bee populations, across the world.
Biodiversity is vital for the survival of life on earth. Everything is related, linked, nothing exists in isolation, but in a symbiotic relationship. The loss of crucial links in the chain, and life as we know it would collapse like the proverbial house of cards.
For the moment, I would rather not worry over what will beget us if we continue on this merry path of destruction. Or calculate the losses in economic terms. I would just like you to think: Would I, would you, want to live in a world devoid of diversity; the environment, only a homogenous structure of gray and concrete? Where the only architecture is that of Homo sapiens, built over the graveyard of God’s creations. Where the forests-if any exist at all-are silenced of the roar of the tiger-where the only bird that streaks across the sky is the crow-scavenging of the rubbish of man. Where no whales swim the seas, no elephants tread the land, no peacocks dance to woo their mates, no butterflies flitter from flower to flower, no new leaves unfurl, no tree takes root....
Does this carry a price, can its value be measured?
Or would you say, it’s priceless?
Saturday, May 9, 2009
On the tiger hunt....
Enjoy this poem--authored by a Bengali teacher--or so the story goes..
Through the jongole I am went
On shooting Tiger I am bent
Boshtaard Tiger has eaten wife
No doubt I will avenge poor darling's life
Too much quiet, snakes and leeches
But I not fear these sons of beeches
Hearing loud noise I am jumping with start
But noise is coming from damn fool's heart
Taking care not to be fright
I am clutching rifle tight with eye to sight
Should Tiger come I will shoot and fall him down
Then like hero return to native town
Then through trees I am espying one cave
I am telling self - "Bannerjee be brave"
I am now proceeding with too much care
From far I smell this Tiger's lair
My leg shaking, sweat coming, I start pray
I think I will shoot Tiger some other day
Turning round I am going to flee
But Tiger giving bloody roar spotting Bengalee
He bounding from cave like footballer Pele
I run shouting "Kali Ma tumi kothay gele"
Through the jongole I am running
With Tiger on my tail closer looming
I am a telling that never in life
I will risk again for my damn wife!!!!*
Through the jongole I am went
On shooting Tiger I am bent
Boshtaard Tiger has eaten wife
No doubt I will avenge poor darling's life
Too much quiet, snakes and leeches
But I not fear these sons of beeches
Hearing loud noise I am jumping with start
But noise is coming from damn fool's heart
Taking care not to be fright
I am clutching rifle tight with eye to sight
Should Tiger come I will shoot and fall him down
Then like hero return to native town
Then through trees I am espying one cave
I am telling self - "Bannerjee be brave"
I am now proceeding with too much care
From far I smell this Tiger's lair
My leg shaking, sweat coming, I start pray
I think I will shoot Tiger some other day
Turning round I am going to flee
But Tiger giving bloody roar spotting Bengalee
He bounding from cave like footballer Pele
I run shouting "Kali Ma tumi kothay gele"
Through the jongole I am running
With Tiger on my tail closer looming
I am a telling that never in life
I will risk again for my damn wife!!!!*
Monday, May 4, 2009
UPA on the environment scale
‘F’ for failed-is how Bittu Sahgal, Editor, Sanctuary Asia, rates the current government performance on the environment scale, and I couldn’t agree with him more.
In its steady (or should one say unsteady) march to development, environment concerns have been but a blip, casually disregarded and steamrolled over. The most ‘visible’ failure is the tiger—I wouldn’t even fault the government by pointing an accusatory finger on the number-1,411 tigers (and falling)-the lowest numbers ever in the history of the big cat. My problem is with political doublespeak: We shall save the tiger, vows the Prime Minister, even as the other hand signs away vital tigerland to highways, dams, mines, power thermal plants, neutron laboratories. You don’t need to be a scientist to understand that tigers need space—habitat to survive. Yet, under the current UPA regime the loss of forests-including critical wildlife habitats--has been unprecedented. The government has cut at the very root, weakening and diluting existing protectionist policies and laws, ironically framed by the Congress government under the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
The first big blow was the revised National Environment Policy 2006 which carries not an environmental, but an economic agenda. The revised policy has been heavily critiqued as it gives sweeping powers to the states, does not have effective monitoring systems in place, pays lip service to involvement of local people and is mere greenwash, essentially more industry than environment friendly.
According to law all major development, infrastructural and industrial projects require a comprehensive Environment Impact Assessment, but the new EIA notification that came into force on September 14, 2006 has done away with the inconvenience of green concerns. According to investigations by the EIA Response Centre (ERC), since the two years the notification came into force almost all submitted projects have sailed through the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF). Every industrial project for which approval was sought was cleared: 952 industries approved, none rejected, neither did the 134 thermal power plants face any environmental hiccups. For the record--that’s 2,019 projects cleared, averaging four projects per working day.
Let’s look at the case of the ecologically fragile Konkan region which is set to become the hub of coal and nuclear power plants, besides stripping open pristine forests, and prime agricultural land for mining. This will also destroy the livelihood of the local people who depend on fisheries and horticulture, notably the alphanso mango, which is unique to the region.
Our political leaders may espouse the holy cause of democracy, but the pedestal is a flimsy one, as democratic voices are drowned by pecuniary concerns. For example, the EIA process has simply disregarded the voice of the local people affected by the projects. There is no door that the aggrieved party can knock on. The National Environment Appellate Authority (NEAA), to whom aggrieved parties may appeal against EIA clearance) has bowed to profit motive as well. It has dismissed every appeal filed in the last 11 years — since it was formed — save one. The Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh also holds the post of the Minister of Environment and Forests, but as is evident, under his august tutelage, India simply has no environment governance system to speak of.
An official in the MoEF says there has never been so much “interference from the PMO for granting environmental clearances to projects”. The PMO is either directly or indirectly brokering the clearance of ecologically destructive projects. One prime example of the sheer disregard for ecological concerns is that the Prime Minister laid the foundation stone of Dibang Multi-Purpose Project in Arunachal Pradesh, in January 2008, in the face of stiff local opposition, much before the mandatory environmental clearance It is alleged that the ministry is a mere rubber stamp for corporate lobbyists-obviously for financial favours. Writes environmental activist Nityanand Jayaram, “between 2003 and 2007, the Congress party received Rs 52 crores in declared contributions, as per Election Commission of India records. Of this, 75 percent, came from companies and organisations that would benefit from any relaxation of environmental regulation.”
It is the same norm that ruled the land rush for SEZ’s—the formula of buying (usually forcibly or under deceit) land at dirt cheap rates to give it to profit making industries on a platter even in eco-sensitive zones, has met with bitter opposition across the country.
The Coastal Regulation Zone, drafted under the Rajiv Gandhi government in 1991, seeks to protect our fragile coastal areas, from mindless development. This is proposed to be replaced by the CZM notification which is one more example of the government’s doublespeak on environment matters, and in keeping with the trend of recent dilution of policies/laws. The protection and conservation of coastal areas is now subsumed by economic interests, and tends to favour Special Economic Zones and Special Tourism areas over the concerns of fishermen and other coastal communities whose lives-and livelihood are interwoven with a healthy marine biodiversity. True to form, the fishing community was not even consulted in the process, and are up in arms against CZM.
Then came the Schedule Tribes and other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights ) Act, 2006, which essentially provided the political class legal means to barter land for votes. The UPA government of course, takes all credit for passing, “this historic act,” but has provided a platform for all parties, including the UPA president asking for votes-after they had granted them land, hadn’t they? The Act essentially gives away forest land, into private hands, and unfortunately, has opened the floodgates for destruction of forest land. Whether tribals will benefit is a moot question, but the land mafia has already moved in. The Forest Rights Act, with all its disastrous ramifications has been described as “the single greatest negative anti-forest action ever taken by any government in the history of India, “ by M K Ranjitinsh, who was instrumental in shaping the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, in Sanctuary.
It was Mrs Indira Gandhi’s remarkable vision that saw the shaping of strict legislation that ensured the protection of wildlife and forests, and saw the birth of Project Tiger. But for a family that’s rides on the plank of dynasty when it goes to poll, the Congress, as the mainstay of UPA, has sold the sound legacy of its most charismatic leader to votes.
In its steady (or should one say unsteady) march to development, environment concerns have been but a blip, casually disregarded and steamrolled over. The most ‘visible’ failure is the tiger—I wouldn’t even fault the government by pointing an accusatory finger on the number-1,411 tigers (and falling)-the lowest numbers ever in the history of the big cat. My problem is with political doublespeak: We shall save the tiger, vows the Prime Minister, even as the other hand signs away vital tigerland to highways, dams, mines, power thermal plants, neutron laboratories. You don’t need to be a scientist to understand that tigers need space—habitat to survive. Yet, under the current UPA regime the loss of forests-including critical wildlife habitats--has been unprecedented. The government has cut at the very root, weakening and diluting existing protectionist policies and laws, ironically framed by the Congress government under the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
The first big blow was the revised National Environment Policy 2006 which carries not an environmental, but an economic agenda. The revised policy has been heavily critiqued as it gives sweeping powers to the states, does not have effective monitoring systems in place, pays lip service to involvement of local people and is mere greenwash, essentially more industry than environment friendly.
According to law all major development, infrastructural and industrial projects require a comprehensive Environment Impact Assessment, but the new EIA notification that came into force on September 14, 2006 has done away with the inconvenience of green concerns. According to investigations by the EIA Response Centre (ERC), since the two years the notification came into force almost all submitted projects have sailed through the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF). Every industrial project for which approval was sought was cleared: 952 industries approved, none rejected, neither did the 134 thermal power plants face any environmental hiccups. For the record--that’s 2,019 projects cleared, averaging four projects per working day.
Let’s look at the case of the ecologically fragile Konkan region which is set to become the hub of coal and nuclear power plants, besides stripping open pristine forests, and prime agricultural land for mining. This will also destroy the livelihood of the local people who depend on fisheries and horticulture, notably the alphanso mango, which is unique to the region.
Our political leaders may espouse the holy cause of democracy, but the pedestal is a flimsy one, as democratic voices are drowned by pecuniary concerns. For example, the EIA process has simply disregarded the voice of the local people affected by the projects. There is no door that the aggrieved party can knock on. The National Environment Appellate Authority (NEAA), to whom aggrieved parties may appeal against EIA clearance) has bowed to profit motive as well. It has dismissed every appeal filed in the last 11 years — since it was formed — save one. The Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh also holds the post of the Minister of Environment and Forests, but as is evident, under his august tutelage, India simply has no environment governance system to speak of.
An official in the MoEF says there has never been so much “interference from the PMO for granting environmental clearances to projects”. The PMO is either directly or indirectly brokering the clearance of ecologically destructive projects. One prime example of the sheer disregard for ecological concerns is that the Prime Minister laid the foundation stone of Dibang Multi-Purpose Project in Arunachal Pradesh, in January 2008, in the face of stiff local opposition, much before the mandatory environmental clearance It is alleged that the ministry is a mere rubber stamp for corporate lobbyists-obviously for financial favours. Writes environmental activist Nityanand Jayaram, “between 2003 and 2007, the Congress party received Rs 52 crores in declared contributions, as per Election Commission of India records. Of this, 75 percent, came from companies and organisations that would benefit from any relaxation of environmental regulation.”
It is the same norm that ruled the land rush for SEZ’s—the formula of buying (usually forcibly or under deceit) land at dirt cheap rates to give it to profit making industries on a platter even in eco-sensitive zones, has met with bitter opposition across the country.
The Coastal Regulation Zone, drafted under the Rajiv Gandhi government in 1991, seeks to protect our fragile coastal areas, from mindless development. This is proposed to be replaced by the CZM notification which is one more example of the government’s doublespeak on environment matters, and in keeping with the trend of recent dilution of policies/laws. The protection and conservation of coastal areas is now subsumed by economic interests, and tends to favour Special Economic Zones and Special Tourism areas over the concerns of fishermen and other coastal communities whose lives-and livelihood are interwoven with a healthy marine biodiversity. True to form, the fishing community was not even consulted in the process, and are up in arms against CZM.
Then came the Schedule Tribes and other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights ) Act, 2006, which essentially provided the political class legal means to barter land for votes. The UPA government of course, takes all credit for passing, “this historic act,” but has provided a platform for all parties, including the UPA president asking for votes-after they had granted them land, hadn’t they? The Act essentially gives away forest land, into private hands, and unfortunately, has opened the floodgates for destruction of forest land. Whether tribals will benefit is a moot question, but the land mafia has already moved in. The Forest Rights Act, with all its disastrous ramifications has been described as “the single greatest negative anti-forest action ever taken by any government in the history of India, “ by M K Ranjitinsh, who was instrumental in shaping the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, in Sanctuary.
It was Mrs Indira Gandhi’s remarkable vision that saw the shaping of strict legislation that ensured the protection of wildlife and forests, and saw the birth of Project Tiger. But for a family that’s rides on the plank of dynasty when it goes to poll, the Congress, as the mainstay of UPA, has sold the sound legacy of its most charismatic leader to votes.
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