India’s fast-tracked wildlife clearances threaten last wild areas
The country’s apex conservation body on an average clears 28 proposals in one meeting
In the middle of the railway tracks that cut through the core of Maharashtra’s Melghat Tiger Reserve in the forested heart of India, lay a blob of carnivore scat—two or three days old, blackish, bristling with sambar hair, enough to fill a quarter plate. Tiger!
It could be leopard—a DNA test could tell— but was more likely to have come from a tiger, given their consistent presence in the Wan Wildlife Sanctuary that forms part of Melghat. Foresters in the nearby range office spoke of regular sightings of at least one male and two female tigers.
There were other clues, and sightings, of other fauna: Leopard and tiger tracks on the approach road to Wan; a lone sambar, a herd of gaur; marks on the bark of an Ashoka tree indicating that a sloth bear had used the bark to sharpen its claws. A small drab bird took flight—a Forest Owlet, the Athene blewitti thought to be extinct until rediscovered in Melghat in 1997, 113 years after it had last been sighted in 1884. The largest of the owlet’s small, fragmented population of 250-900 birds is found here. It is also the safest such population, not only because this is a ‘Protected Area’—where commercial exploitation and construction activities are prohibited — but also because there is no human habitation in the 206 sq km of the Wan Sanctuary.
Yet, there is little joy in finding rare wildlife in the dense, lush forests of Melghat, only a sense of impending disaster. With a proposal to widen the 176-km Akola-to-Khandawa railway from metre gauge to broad gauge, 39 km of which passes through the reserve, both traffic and speed of trains are expected to increase, threatening more accidents and fragmentation of habitat, thereby isolating wildlife populations on either side of the tracks. The logical end of such splintering of habitat is the local extinction of tigers, and other large, wide-ranging animals.
This wildlife-endangering track expansion was approved by India’s apex conservation body, the Standing Committee of the National Board for Wildlife (SC-NBWL) in 2017. This made it one of the 519 projects cleared in Protected Areas and their ‘Eco-Sensitive Zones’ by the NBWL over the four years of the Narendra Modi-led government. In comparison, the preceding United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government had cleared 260 projects between 2009 and 2013.
The NBWL is responsible for framing India’s policy for wildlife conservation. One of its key tasks is to regulate development projects to safeguard wildlife, but in the last four years it has rarely rejected any damaging projects in designated Protected Areas and has instead fasttracked wildlife clearances to facilitate the ease of doing business. These clearances are often given without scrutiny and in violation of the Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972, conservationists said, because the law only provides for any diversion of land in a national park, sanctuary or reserve if it benefits wildlife.
The minutes of 17 meetings over four years to 2018 reveal that the SC-NBWL has, on average, placed about more than 40 proposals on the table in a meeting that typically lasts a few hours. The average number of proposals cleared was 28. Activists argue that such hasty decisions speak of a lack of concern for wildlife and place at risk a variety of endangered species, including tigers.
The clearances chip away at India’s increasingly fragmented protected areas, which, as a proportion of the country’s land area, amount to 4.9 per cent, just about half of the global average of 9.3 per cent. Protected Areas provide vital ecosystem services—they are the last repositories of valuable biodiversity, serve as watersheds and help mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon.
As per the Wildlife (Protection) Act and orders of the Supreme Court, the NBWL is a statutory body chaired by the prime minister to frame and monitor conservation policies and regulate projects in Protected and Eco-Sensitive Zones. Since it is impractical for all 47 NBWL members to meet frequently, the standing committee (SCNBWL) meets every three months. The law mandates a majority of expert independent members of the board to enable its independence. However, its negligible rejection rate has “converted the NBWL into a project-clearing house”, as former NBWL member Praveen Bhargav wrote in The Hinduin September 2016.
The rate of clearances by the SC-NBWL has accelerated sharply under the Modi government, which views such checks and balances as “roadblocks to development”, asthe Indian Expressquoted the then environment minister, Prakash Javadekar, as saying in July 2014.
No more than 1.1 per cent projects were rejected, on average, annually between June 2014 and May 2018, dropping from 11.9 per cent under the UPA between 2009 and 2013, according to a recent analysis by the Delhi-based advocacy, Centre for Science & Environment. This works out to 130 proposals recommended, on average, every year—more than double the 52 during the second tenure of the UPA.
The overall loss of wildlife habitat is 24,329 ha—an area twice the size of Chandigarh. This represents only the actual land diverted. Such projects influence a far larger area due to the disturbance caused by construction and ancillary development such as roads.
In its first meeting in August 2014, the reconstituted SC-NBWL cleared 133 projects and rejected one. The then environment minister Javadekar reportedly said projects could not be held up due to “frivolous reasons”. One of the projects cleared at this meeting was the construction of the Gaduli-Santalpur road in Gujarat’s Kutch Desert Wildlife Sanctuary, which hosts thousands of flamingos and was named ‘Flamingo City’ by the late ornithologist Salim Ali.
The Kutch sanctuary is the only known nesting site of flamingos in India. Flamingos you might see across the country, be it at Chilika Lake in Odisha or Najafgarh in Delhi, all wing their way here to their nesting grounds. A site visit report submitted to the NBWL stated that construction of the road would upset the fragile aquatic ecosystem crucial for flamingos, leading them to abandon the site. It was for this reason that the earlier Standing Committee had advised against “constructing it under any circumstance”.
The consequences of widening the railway line in Melghat were ignored as well, even as forest officers and the National Tiger Conservation Authority advised against it. The “digging of tunnel, blasting with explosives, civil works requiring heavy machinery will have irreparable losses to wildlife, especially tiger”, warned M S Reddy, the then deputy conservator of forests for wildlife posted in Melghat, in a letter dated March 3, 2011, reviewed by IndiaSpend.
At 2,769 sq km, Melghat is one of the country’s largest and oldest reserves, notified in 1973 when Project Tiger was launched. The railway line runs 39 km through Melghat with a 17.3-km stretch passing through the reserve’s core critical tiger habitat, which has to be inviolate for tiger conservation under the law.
To this purpose, six villages from areas adjacent to the train tracks have been voluntarily relocated at a cost of over ~2 billion. With the relocation and the removal of anthropogenic pressures, the fields are now pristine meadows, flush with new grasses attracting herbivores such as cheetal that were rarely seen earlier. Where there is prey, predators follow. “The population of tiger has also shown an increase from 3 in 2012 to 8 in 2015 in and adjoining Wan Sanctuary,” the Chief Wildlife Warden noted in a 2015 site report.
“This recovery of tigers will suffer a massive setback if the gauge conversion goes ahead,” a forest officer told IndiaSpend, requesting anonymity. Greater frequency of trains will also mean increased access for hunting and poaching.
“The train route has been used for illegal trade of wildlife derivatives—tiger skin, medicinal plants and timber. With increase in traffic, this will only accelerate,” warned Kishore Rithe, member, Maharashtra’s State Board for Wildlife.
The decision of the SC-NBWL is even more untenable as there is an alternate route available, which will connect 100 villages and a population of 250,000, as against nine villages with no more than 6,000 people if it passes through Melghat.
The SC-NBWL has nonetheless gone ahead and approved expansion of the railway line, based on loss of forest outside of the reserve and escalation of project cost along the alternative route. This has been challenged, with the Supreme Court’s Central Empowered Committee (CEC) saying the recommendation “lacks application of mind and is prima facie not in the interest of protecting wildlife ”. The CEC’s mandate is to scrutinise the decisions of the SCNBWL and raise objections if it finds decisions to be damaging to wildlife.
Another decision widely criticised was the clearance given to the Ken-Betwa river linking project inside the Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh. “The project if approved will lead the death of Panna Reserve,” said Sreenivas Murthy, a forest official then the field director of Panna, in a 2014 note to the NTCA. The ~180-billion project involves building a 2 km-long Daudhan Dam in the heart of Panna, affecting at least 28 per cent of the reserve’s core critical tiger habitat. It will also drown the nesting sites of critically endangered vultures whose population has declined 97 per cent in about 15 years. The SC-NBWL discounted Murthy’s warning in clearing the Ken-Betwa link.
The application to the CEC questioned this authority of the SC-NBWL to allow diversion of land in Panna National Park. “There is nothing in the (Ken-Betwa link) plan which remotely suggests that it is for the better management and improvement of wildlife,” noted the petition filed by the founder-editor of Sanctuary Asia, Bittu Sahgal, and retired Indian Forest Service officer Manoj Mishra.
But the CEC has failed to prevent, or even question, the clearance. “The CEC application was filed in February 2017, but it is yet to give its report in spite of several reminders,” said environment lawyer Ritwick Dutta. Dutta pointed out that “to date the CEC has not opposed any decision of the SC-NBWL and has become a rubber stamp ”. The Supreme Court has asked the CEC to submit its report by October 31, 2018.
An exhaustive scrutiny of the minutes of meetings over the last several years reveals that few, if any, of the approvals to divert Protected Areas are backed by evidence that they benefit wildlife. The committee has granted clearances, setting aside earlier rejections that the project concerned would endanger wildlife, as in the case of the road through the Kutch sanctuary. At its 34th meeting, the SC-NBWL approved the widening of national highway-17 through Maharashtra’s Karnala Bird Sanctuary, ostensibly to smoothen traffic, reduce emissions from recurring traffic jams and thus benefit wildlife. The proposal had been unanimously rejected at the 17th and 29th meetings as alternative routes were available.
“This is illustrative of the dilution and subversion of ‘independent’ institutions mandated to safeguard wildlife interests: state and national boards,” Dutta said.
The environment ministry lists its high rate of approving projects among its ‘achievements’. When questioned about the damage that such a high approval rate could cause to wildlife, Soumitra Dasgupta, inspector-general of forests for wildlife, told IndiaSpend that the SC-NBWL “cleared the proposals in its wisdom”. Repeated emails to the three non-official members of the committee elicited no response.
The problem is not just the number of approvals but the quality of assessment on which these are based. A recent trend has been of asking for a site inspection after granting clearance —as was done in the case of a check dam in Kudremukh National Park in Karnataka, and the widening of National Highway-17 to four lanes in Karnala Sanctuary. “A site visit post the decision is a facade, taking away the possibility of rejection if ground surveys indicate detrimental wildlife impacts,” Dutta said.
In effect, said Dutta, the NBWL is facilitating the “legal and statutorily approved destruction of wildlife”.
Reprinted with permission from Indiaspend.org, a datadriven not-for- profit organisation