INDIA – PROTECT YOUR WILDLIFE BETTER!!

With wildlife disappearing at an unprecedented pace across the world, reports in 2016 identified India as an ecological black spot where around half of the wildlife lives in the danger of being wiped out. India’s wildlife conservation is suffering due to the disinterest and inability of protecting wildlife.

India is a nation on the move with new infrastructure, so goods can be delivered at record speed; the result is that the environment takes a back seat. The Government ministries that are supposed to protect India’s sustainability find themselves backtracking in the face of political maneuverings to increase resources.

Reckless development is fragmenting vast areas of the country, with railway lines, highways, wires crisscrossing the reserves. There are towns, villages, mines and townships within these areas and in the immediate vicinity creating additional problems. Other issues like Construction and expansion of roads through protected areas, and the expansion of gas fields in elephant habitat etc. help worsen the situation.

Two examples of bad wildlife management has been the potential danger of sanctioning a river link. If carried out, it will submerge 53 kilometers of the Panna Tiger reserve along with the tigers that live there. The irony is that these tigers were brought here with Government support in 2005 after they had been declared extinct in the area. Like a curse covering the majority of the civilized world not just India, material gain overtakes environmental demands, overlooking the fact that clean water and air originate from the forests, where trees act as an oxygen basin.

In 2013, the National Wildlife Board chaired by the Prime Minister made several recommendations for the security and safe passage of tigers and other wild animals for highways passing through tiger reserves, but the Madhya Pradesh Forest department ignored his demands which resulted in tiger fatalities.

The Indian government attempts to portray optimism in their wildlife conservation and poaching programs. The results present a different story! Yes, there are a few shining lights, but the overall picture is one of apathy and inefficiency.

One cause for optimism is that after fifteen years of seeing Rhinos being hunted ruthlessly in Kaziranga, the tide has turned and now only two were killed in the National park in the last year. Compared to 143 since 2001 being killed, sustained surveillance by park

Now with modern technology, the rangers can catch the poachers before they strike; and forest guards also have improved arms so they can match their opponents’ weaponry. The main deterrent in the region’s anti-poaching system is the setting up of a fast-track court, coupled with confiscating weapons from villagers near the parks. Sustained efforts and better interaction have been made to rehabilitate and provide alternate employment to poor villagers who are usually approached by poachers for their task.

Why the government wildlife institutions cannot replicate this program in other areas mystifies me, as other states conspicuously hide figures of Rhino and Tiger deaths and provide false information to Government authorities! Wildlife poaching and trafficking throughout the Indian sub-continent is an ongoing major concern for all wildlife conservationists and park wardens as many endangered species are at a very high risk of becoming extinct. The Indian government tends to ignore the gravity of the wildlife poaching trade, they should also realize that it is a link to financing terrorism and arms smuggling. Their actions suggest that although their intelligence gathering has improved somewhat, they are woefully ill-equipped to deal with organized crime of this scale.

In October 2017, no sooner had the Indian nation been celebrating their wildlife week highlighting the country’s richness and diversity of their flora and fauna, there was news of the conviction of a notorious group of wildlife traffickers.

This gang had been involved in the smuggling of body parts of 125 tigers and 1200 leopards over a fifteen year period. What was inexcusable was the disproportionately small punishments and sentence carried out considering the magnitude of the crimes they committed. How could the Indian judicial system justify their actions!

There have been other similar issues throughout the year, namely a raid by the Directorate of Revenue intelligence at the home of a former high ranking Indian military officer and his son in the Northern part of the country who were involved in the hoarding of a large cache of animal skins, parts and meat. Then in August, in Assam a huge consignment of animals’ heads, bones and skins were seized.

According to the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI), since the beginning of 2017, over 416 Leopards have been killed in India, of which 156 or 40% have been killed by poachers, the remainder being killed by accidents, human-wildlife conflicts and natural causes. The WPSI is one of the more efficient organizations in the world compiling data on endangered species in their own ‘backyard’ providing results on poaching and other mortalities. This data is generated and reported by police stations, wildlife sanctuaries and outside protected forest areas, and then sent to their head office in New Delhi for validation.

Much of the media attention in India focuses on Tigers, which attracts away from the big problem facing Leopards in all the major states. As efforts have been increased to protect Tigers, it leaves Leopards more vulnerable. The question of Leopard protection needs a greater priority as they are easy targets.

India on the outside is shown to be a cultured, tolerant nation advocating respect and calmness in their way of life. However, the dark side of the nation shows its ugly head towards their wildlife heritage. We have seen mobs kill and dismember a Royal Bengal Tiger, burn alive a leopard and beat to death another. Elephants and Bears have also been targeted for straying into human settlements that are often encroached wildlife habitat. Wildlife trade smugglers have ties to villagers who are poisoning wildlife and using explosives in the area of Ramanagaram, a number of forested areas which are a habitat to many endangered animals.

Every year, media footage shows frenzied mob-lynching brutally killing scores of protected and endangered animals with impunity, often in the presence of helpless law enforcement officials. Yet there is a lack of judicial action against the perpetrators even though photographs and videos of such incidents are widely circulated!

The most recent example occurred when a baby elephant died twenty four hours after being traumatized by the following events. The calf, believed to have been injured when it followed its mother out of the jungle and into a built up area. Crowds of villagers from Kurabarahandi in the southern Karnataka state tried to drive the elephants away with firecrackers and noise to protect their crops, but only made the situation worse by separating the mother and calf. After losing sight of its mother, he became a focal point of a media and public frenzy with sightseers. The Sanctuary’s wildlife photographer of the year for 2017, Biplap Hazra won the award for his image of the elephants fleeing the mob; it was called ‘Hell is here.’

In addition, the Humane Society International of India in November 2017 urged the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting of the Indian government to develop a protocol for human wildlife conflict reporting.

Recently, there have been many instances of misinforming the public about the real events concerning human wildlife conflict. The Indian news media use provocative headlines to increase ratings, and don’t realize the repercussions of their stories and how they harm wildlife.

On electronic media, videos of animals in conflict often have violent music in the background with visual effect to portray the animals as the villain, when the reality is; they are reacting in panic surrounded by an unruly mob. Typical of today’s media, they play up every incident of conflict, without paying heed to the bigger impact it is making on the wildlife and people living those areas.  As in many range states throughout the world, villages and tribal areas bordering wildlife national parks provide an abundance of potential recruits for organized poaching gangs to lure and kill wildlife. Pointing out that no program can succeed solely because of government policies, people’s participation is critical for success.

Since there are 50 million people living around national parks and sanctuaries, they need to have incentives as working partners in environment conservation throughout the country. There are over 3,000 villages that border eleven wildlife reserves in western, central and southern India. 70% of households surveyed have lost crops to wild animals, 17% have lost livestock and 3% have had human injury or death result from a run in with wildlife. There is a great need to understand the methods used to mitigate the impacts of human wildlife conflict and is crucial to designing better policies to deal with the problem.

Many of these conflicts are the result of growing human populations encroaching even further into established wildlife territory. Reserves in the Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh region have experienced high incidence of human wildlife conflicts and appear to gain the highest levels of compensation in all of India. At the other end of the spectrum, families in the state of Rajasthan were the least likely to employ measures to protect their crops and property. These rural families employ a dozen different mitigation techniques, with night watches, scare devices, and fences being the most widely reported. People may be better served by deploying early warning, compensation and insurance programs.

India’s biggest challenge is the implementation of laws, due to the scarcity of staff among monitoring authorities. Lack of political will and governance failures worsen the situation. The bottom line is that large scale poaching continues all over the country, but is swept under the carpet by the Government wildlife institutions. The government and the Prime Minister should start taking decisive action and change this perception. There is a dire need to start to run efficient management conservation programs and anti-poaching operations, and to improve his judicial system.

He should ensure all states under his authority adhere to his rulings and timetables to protect all wildlife throughout the country.  He should also appeal to the nation to refrain from such brutal actions on their wildlife heritage, instead of the media depicting elements of his population as barbaric and inhumane!