THE GREAT WILD HOPE
India wakes up to the need for mitigation measures such as underground transmission lines and animal overpasses to curb wildlife mortality, even if it means driving up solar energy and highway costs
India wakes up to the need for mitigation measures to curb wildlife mortality
IN2018, THE NUMBER OF WILD
ANIMALS LOST in road and rail accidents was 161. Two hundred elephants have been killed in rail accidents in three decades, 65 in the past three years. Power line collisions have killed one per cent of the total sarus crane population in India. Leftover food dumped from the pantry cars of trains has resulted in accidents killing over 100 animals, including five tigers and seven leopards, at the Ratapani Tiger Reserve station in Sehore district over the past five years.
These are the chilling statistics the Wildlife Protection Society of India offers. As urbanisation and rapidly growing infrastructure edge out animal habitat, animal-human conflict and wildlife mortality have only risen. Taking cognisance of this, the Supreme Court, on
April 21, 2021, made discretionary mitigation measures mandatory in developing linear infrastructure that poses a potential risk to wildlife and environment. The order, by a three-judge bench comprising the then Chief Justice S.A. Bobde and Justices A.S. Bopanna and V. Ramasubramanium, came in response to a public interest litigation filed by the noted environmentalist and ex-bureaucrat M.K. Ranjitsinh two years ago. Upholding the cause of environmental justice, the judges observed that it could be achieved “only if we drift away from the principle of ‘anthropocentrism’, which is human interest-focused, to ‘ecocentrism’ which is nature-centred, where humans are part of nature and non-humans have intrinsic value. In other words, human interest does not take automatic precedence and humans have obligations to non-humans independently of human interest”. The National Wildlife Action Plan and the centrally-sponsored Integrated Development of Wildlife Habitats Scheme, it noted, were already based on the principle of ecocentrism.
The judgment is expected to have farreaching consequences as funds for mitigation measures for wildlife, including birds, will now have to be part of project costs. The court, for instance, has ordered the undergrounding of transmission lines to save the Great Indian Bustard, which will involve an expenditure of Rs 22,000 crore in Rajasthan alone. Several renewable energy projects are planned in the Thar, for which a massive network of high-voltage transmission lines will be required—these will have to be undergrounded to save the Great Indian Bustard, a species native to the Indian subcontinent. The numbers of the heavy flying bird have dwindled to just 150 in India in 2018 from an estimated 250 in 2011. They have a 15 per cent mortality rate due to electrocution from these wires as per a survey by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun. Thanks to their narrow range of frontal vision, and the habit of scanning the ground while flying, they fail to manoeuvre across power lines within close distances only to collide and die. In addition, solar energy panels are being set up on vast tracts of their homeland, depriving them of space to lay eggs. “Solar energy is not so green,’’ says Ranjitsinh.
India is the current president of the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), which approved its concerted action plan for the Great Indian Bustards in February 2020 and is pioneering a Conservation Breeding Programme in Jaisalmer, where 17 chicks have been born in captivity and will now serve as a founder population. Dr Bivash Pandav, director, Bombay Natural History Society, says, “The Thar desert is the only intensive care unit of the Great Indian Bustard in India, with just a hundred remaining.” Y.V Jhala, dean at WII, has for long asked for the protection of the priority area for these birds so that the captivity-bred population, when released, does not get killed either by electric wires or feral animals.