First snow leopard conservation centre to come up in Uttarakhand
DEHRADUN: India’s first Snow Leopard Conservation Centre will soon be set up in Gangotri National Park, officials said.
It will be built by the Uttarakhand forest department along United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as part of its six-year-long project, SECURE Himalayas.
The project aims at securing livelihoods, conservation, sustainable use and restoration of high range Himalayan ecosystems and also looks into the conservation of snow leopards and other endangered species found in the Himalayas.
NB Sharma, deputy director of Gangotri National Park said, “The Snow Leopard Conservation Centre will be the first of its kind in the country. The place where it is being built is also the entrance point of the Gangotri National Park, so this will cater to researchers, training of forest officials and tourists. There will be facilities for researchers, for making presentations as part of awareness generation about the big cats.”
Rajiv Bhartari, chief wildlife warden of Uttarakhand said that the work for building the conservation centre is at a concept stage and architectural design has been approved.
“We have a proposal for building the conservation centre and UNDP had commissioned a Dutch architect for making the design. The designing phase is now over and based on the design, the forest department will be submitting a detailed project report,” said Bhartari.
“The design uses principles of sustainable architecture and it can be a model of construction which showcases the use of local material blending with the nature. This building is being conceptualised as a one-stop centre, which will meet the requirement of tourists, researchers and trainees,” added the chief wildlife warden. He added that livelihood oriented training programmes being conducted in nearby villages are also likely to be compiled so that people can be trained from one centre. The forest department is also planning to look into snow leopard tours (similar to jungle safaris of Corbett Tiger Reserve) in this area, he added.
The centre will be made at a place named Lanka, near Bhaironghati bridge at the entrance point of Gangotri National Park.
The snow leopard is a Schedule I animal under Wildlife Protection Act of India and is listed as “endangered” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The national protocol for snow leopard population assessment will be undertaken by Dehradun-based Wildlife Institute of India (WII) along with Karnataka-based Nature Conservation Foundation. The project will be on the lines of the global project named ‘Population Assessment of World’s Snow leopards (PAWS)’ carried out by 12 countries where the highly rare animal is found. WII had made an estimate of snow leopards based on an extrapolation from habitat quality and snow leopard density. According to this extrapolation, S Sathyakumar, senior scientist at WII had earlier said, “India may have about 516 snow leopards.” The current estimated distribution of the big cats across Himalayan states is 86 in Uttarakhand, 90 in Himachal Pradesh, 285 in Jammu and Kashmir, 13 for Sikkim and 42 in Arunachal Pradesh.