While sanitising our worlds, can we save the earth in distant sanctuaries?


David Attenborough will showcase 10 endangered animals from around the world in a new BBC Two wildlife special — Attenborough’s Ark — next week. A BBC release (read here) says that what interest Attenborough are not the tiger or panda but the unusual. In the show, he will explain why his picks — such as the Sumatran Rhino, Darwin’s frog and Black Lion Tamarin — are so important, and highlight the work of biologists who fight to keep them alive.
While it’s a novel attempt to shift the focus from the usual headline-grabbing big mammals, the show will be yet another measured, intimate attempt to make the viewer marvel at and sympathise with the fascinating animals in distress and feel relieved that some work is being done somewhere by some researchers to save them. For decades now, Attenborough shows have had that effect. But if someone could save nature somewhere else for us, the loss of biodiversity would not be touching new lows virtually every day.
Years after Attenborough institutionalised his classical approach, Steve Irwin’s generation made wildlife fun and apparently handle-able. The influence of both schools shapes contemporary green programming. So on the one hand, we have survival or reality shows where peppy presenters dare and triumph over the wild. On the other, there are dreamlike, endearing tales that bring to our living rooms pristine landscapes and a bounty of animals capable of human-like behaviour.
The first approach discounts the fact that the wild do not enjoy human contact and have a right to exist even if they do not have any exotic — ugly, cute or bloodthirsty — appeal. The second creates an illusion that all is well in the fantastic natural world far away from our polluted cities. Beyond such spectacles, the green channels have little appetite for complex issues –the socio-economics of environmental degradation, for example — other than a bunch of alarmist shows by professional doomsayers who bring in the TRPs.

But the media is not the only unreal instrument here. It only reflects, and is in many ways influenced by, the conservation models preached in seminars and practised on the ground. If calendar-quality shots stitched together in TV documentaries make the average viewer feel good, the success in increasing the numbers of a few wild species in some isolated protected areas surrounded by biodiversity graveyards makes self-delusional conservationists proud.
Cambridge professor Bill Adams described this phenomenon brilliantly in his recent essay Once the wild is gone (read here): nature works, it doesn’t just exist. One cannot fence off nature and expect it to survive. But the strategy of setting aside spaces for nature, writes Professor Adams, is in vogue since the late 19th century. The effort has been to find “remaining intact ecosystems” — areas that are still relatively unchanged by human action – and protect them.
In the last century, legally designated “protected areas” add up to nearly one-eighth of the earth’s area but, on ground, they are scattered, disjointed patches. The long-term viability of biodiversity depends on the continuity of nature’s web. The smaller the islands. the faster is the loss of species. In this interlocked web, conservation cannot work in faraway forests while we pollute every drop of water and sanitize every inch of land around us.
Also, there is hardly any “wild” place as we like to imagine it on earth. For centuries, indigenous people lived in forests all over the world. The policy of protected area management considers these native populations dispensable. Some are compensated for leaving their traditional home. Others are simply kicked out. The US military removed the Ahwahneechee people from Yosemite. The Maasai Mara and the Serengeti banned traditional livestock herders. Lakhs of tribals have been resettled out of Indian’s national parks. The resulting antagonism has significantly added to the biological impossibility of island conservation.
Yet, we seek false comfort in the idea that biodiversity is something far away and in need of protection from the local communities, while avoiding the fact that the greatest driver of biodiversity loss is our economic activity, or rather the growth in consumption of natural resource and energy that accompanies it. This, argues Adams, helps us deny responsibility.
“Particularly in the rapidly industrialising countries of Asia,” he explains, “the standard economic growth model is having some success in helping people to escape poverty, and others to become rich. This is admirable but also, for a conservationist, very disturbing. Global consumption of raw material and energy (and production of wastes) has risen inexorably… The Western model of consumption is unsustainable for any but a few, and the model has to change… Focusing conservation efforts on residual pristine landscapes is a way to treat symptoms not causes. It is displacement behaviour: the real issues are elsewhere.”
Peter Kareiva, chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy, described the extent of human transformation as the “domestication of nature”. So it is not a matter of finding unchanged nature anymore, but responding to the impacts of that transformation. The challenge today, argued Emma Marris in her recent book Rambunctious Garden, is to save nature in a “post-wild world”. Conservation, she felt, must celebrate nature wherever it finds a place in and around (and in spite of) human lives and aspirations.
To recognise that the fate of humans and the natural world are intertwined, writes Adams, we must reintegrate conservation and justice by seriously factoring in the welfare and aspirations of people as well as the biodiversity they live with. With more than half of the world’s population already living in cities, the focus has to be on industrial and urban landscapes that easily become biodiversity graveyards.
How do we do it? Adam’s advocates developing “other spaces where wild species can thrive, clean watercourses where children can play and that absorb floods, novel environments such as green roofs or linear parks, and a culture of celebration of wild nature, from migrant birds overflying skyscrapers to butterflies on window boxes.” In India, this should also include letting the occasional leopard pass by in the outskirts of Nasik or Guwahati, or not wiping out entire populations of butterflies and a host of other life forms with the mindless spraying of pesticides.
Scrutiny of our growth strategies, however, will require years of enlightenment still. The inclusion of such policies in the election manifestos of political parties could be a beginning only when the mass electorate learns to realize how deeply biodiversity issues impact their livelihood security. Inclusive conservation could the first chapter in the story of inclusive growth.
Next week though, thousands of Indians, including myself, will watch and marvel at Attenborough’s new show with the rest of the world. Thousands more will travel far to national parks chasing tigers this winter. Many there will reward local NGOs for stopping the village herders from letting their cattle loose in the forests. Of course, still more will buy their second cellular phone of the year just because new models have been launched.
Meanwhile, every park in space-starved urban landscapes gets sanitised and manicured. Worse, city forests are chopped down to create gardens. Delhi’s sprawling Buddha Jayanti Park, for example, was curved out of its vibrant ridge forests. In Mumbai, rivers and mangroves are reclaimed, destroying vital ecosystems and triggering seasonal deluges. Each and every pond in Kolkata is strangled with cemented embankments that now hold dead waters.
To borrow from Adams yet again, nature is not a consumer good or a rare resource, to be chased down in some remote tourist destination. It is where home is. How we live, in nature, with nature, and as part of nature, matters, perhaps more than anything else.

Mini Projects, Mega Disaster


To evade Central scrutiny, Karnataka splits and dresses up hydel projects as mini units that threaten to sever the only surviving link between the north and south Western Ghats


INDIAN LAWS give the best protection to wilderness, on paper. Under the Forest Conservation Act (FCA), no forestland can be used for non-forestry purpose, such as roads, railways, dams or industries, without the State’s permission. Applications for land diversion are examined by the Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MOEF) and, if the region harbours wildlife, National Board for Wildlife (NBWL).
But if a project requires less than 5 hectares of forestland, the states have the power to decide. When it comes to generating hydro-electricity, no clearance is required under the Environment Protection Act (EPA) if the installed capacity is less than 25 MW. So in Karnataka, projects are being broken down by all possible means till the components appear small enough to escape the legal filter.
Nearly two-thirds of the lush Western Ghats rainforests lie in Karnataka, which hosts 20 percent of India’s elephant population. The state has an enviable record in conservation and supports five national parks and 21 sanctuaries. Ironically, it also suffers possibly the country’s worst man-elephant conflict in Hassan district. Yet, the state decided to come up with a 200 MW hydel power plant at the heart of this conflict zone in 2008.
The Gundia power plant required submergence of 754 hectares of thick evergreen forests and drew flak from all quarters. Then environment minister Jairam Ramesh famously said in 2009 that both Karnataka and the country could ill-afford the project. While the state remained adamant about the mega project, it seemed to have quickly learnt its lessons.
While envisaging the Gundia plant, the Karnataka Renewable Energy Development Ltd also allotted 72 mini-hydel projects in the Western Ghats. Of these, 27 lie in the Sakleshpur region, which is the only link between Pushpagiri Wildlife Sanctuary in the south and Kudremukh National Park in the north and a hotbed of man-elephant conflict. So far, the Forest Department has cleared six out of these 27 projects.
To avoid scrutiny by the FAC and NBWL at the Centre, the land requirement of each project was kept below 5 hectares and the capacity below 25 MW. But what appear to be mini individual projects on paper are, in fact, parts of bigger projects on the ground. Moreover, to dress up these broken down projects as ‘mini’ — as details of two projects in Kagneri and Kanchanakumari reserved forests show — land required for paving access roads through forests was not factored into the proposals.
The result is potential devastation of the forest landscape with clusters of so-called mini projects coming up nearly in every valley of the Western Ghats in the state. Biodiversity loss apart, such proliferation will ruin the water systems of the rainforests. The elephants of Hassan, already squeezed for space, will be pushed further into conflict with people.
The High Court-appointed Karnataka Elephant Task Force (KETF) cautioned the court against the mini-hydel projects, saying: “From all available evidence, the location of these projects is at critical points of elephant movement, thereby if constructed, they will significantly reduce the quality of elephant habitat.”

THE STAKE 

Spread across six states, from Gujarat to Kerala along the western coast, the rainforests nestle 39 UNESCO World Heritage Sites and over 300 globally endangered species. The 1.6 lakh sq km of the Western Ghats covers around 5 percent of India’s land area but hosts one-fourth of its biodiversity, including at least 1,500 plant, 116 fish, 97 reptile, 94 amphibian, 37 butterfly, 19 bird and 14 mammal species that are not found anywhere else on earth. One of the four watersheds of India, the rainforests are the source of rivers such as Godavari, Krishna, Cauvery and Mandovi.
Once secure in the care of native tribal communities, the lush forests were lopped for timber, tea and coffee plantations since the middle of the 19th century. Ravaged for more than 100 years, a few surviving stretches of this fragmented wilderness have been secured under wildlife and forest laws since the 1970s. But nearly 90 percent of its unprotected territory continues to bear the brunt of development.
Last year, the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) designated the entire 160-km forest stretch as an ecologically sensitive area and recommended a three-tier protection mechanism for its different regions. The government sat on the report for nine months and refused to accept it when it was finally made public.
Karnataka has been sceptical about heightened protection of the middle range of the Western Ghats that runs through the state. It has opposed the UNESCO tag to 10 wildlife areas in the state, arguing that it would restrict developmental activities in the coastal districts. Despite objections from the WGEEP, it even went ahead with the construction of the Gundia hydel plant without waiting for statutory clearance from the Union ministry.

THE TRICK

In May 2008, Hassan’s then Deputy Conservator of Forests (DCF) KH Nagaraj sought clearances for two mini-hydel projects in Kagneri and Kanchanakumari reserved forests proposed by Maruthi Power Gen (India) Private Limited. In his recommendation, the DCF claimed that there were no rare, endangered or unique species of flora and fauna in the area.
On the contrary, the reserve forests host the tiger, elephant, leopard, lion-tailed macaque, Travancore flying squirrel, slender loris and Ceylon frogmouth among other endangered species. They are also home to critically endangered frog species, including the Gundia Indian Frog, which is found nowhere else in the world.
Moreover, the two projects — 18.90 MW Hongadahalla (4.18 hectares) and 19 MW Yedakumari (4.20 hectares) — were, in fact, parts of the same hydel plant on ground with a common powerhouse. “The central clearance process,” observed the KETF report submitted to the court earlier this month, “was avoided by disingenuously representing the two turbines as two independent projects so as to slip in below the 25 MW threshold for clearance.”
However, based on the claims made by the project proponent and the DCF, the regional office of the MOEF cleared the projects in March 2009 as the land requirement in each was below 5 hectares and the capacity under 25 MW.
By November 2010, environmental NGOs and activists moved the Karnataka High Court against the development rush in the Western Ghats and sought quashing of 20 hydel projects coming up in the ecologically sensitive areas.
In April 2011, the HC stopped construction of all mini-hydel projects listed in the PIL, except the two Maruthi projects as the company falsely claimed that 70 percent of work was already completed. In July, the state government assured the court that it will not permit any more mini-hydel projects in the Western Ghats.

THE PLOT 

The two Maruthi projects continued till November 2011 when the Forest Department filed a case for 13 violations and the Hassan DCF recommended cancellation of the lease of forestland to the company. This February, the court stopped work after an inquiry by top forest officials confirmed a slew of irregularities:
• It was one project and not two as permitted
• The capacity of the project was over 25 MW, requiring approval under the EPA
• The area required was above 5 hectares, requiring clearance from New Delhi
• Deviations from the original plan submitted for approval
• Presence of endangered species, such as elephants, in the project site
• Construction of a 1.6-km tunnel without forest clearance


In March, the vigilance wing of the Forest Department pointed out further violations such as encroachment on forestland, construction of bridges and roads without clearance, and blocking natural streams with debris. The company, however, argued in the court that existing forest roads should not be calculated as part of the total land diversion required for the projects. Curiously, the state government counsel agreed that use of forest roads did not require any clearance even though all nonforestry activities need permission under Section 2 of the FCA as per orders in Working Plan 202/1995.
On the back foot, Maruthi was ready to dump the Yedakumari project. The Forest Department conducted yet another survey only to confirm that the Hongadahalla project could not be implemented within the proposed 4.18 hectares and the roads additionally accounted for more than 4 hectares of forestland. So, the Principal Secretary (Forests, Ecology and Environment) wrote to the Forest Department, permitting it to cancel Maruthi’s lease.
Instead, the Forest Department conducted yet another inspection in July and top forest officials of Hassan district reiterated the violations for the fourth time. The officials said that the forestland requirement for the Hongadahalla project alone was 10.6897 hectares, including 4.488 hectares for roads, and that the company had already encroached 6.5166 hectares of rich, evergreen forestland. Also, no permission was sought for putting up power transmission lines.
But when the company lawyers repeated their argument on excluding existing forest roads from the project plan, the government counsel, without any permission from the Forest Department, agreed to submit a report without taking into account the road area. If this contravention of the FCA was not enough, the Hassan DCF — a signatory of the July report — made another submission in August stating that the Hongadahalla project required only 4.18 hectares of forestland as originally proposed. It did not mention the roads, the encroachments, the dumping of debris, nothing.

THE TWIST 

On 4 September, Karnataka’s Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (PCCF) AK Varma wrote to the principal secretary, confirming the previously mentioned violations and some more. Yet, in the last hearing on 17 October, the government did not place the facts in court.
In his letter, the PCCF referred to a joint site inspection by the forest staff and the company on 18 August, 10 days before the Hassan DCF supported Maruthi’s claims in his submission before the court. Besides already noted violations, the inspection found that the company had expanded the existing 1-metre wide roads to 6 metres. The letter concluded that “a minimum area of 6.1239 hectares (excluding the area of already existing coupe roads) is required for establishment of 18.90 MW Hongadahalla Mini Hydel Project”.
Hassan DCF RN Lakshmana claimed that he was not aware of the PCCF’s letter. “The views of my seniors will supersede mine. I did not know the PCCF wrote such a letter,” he said, explaining that his August submission deviated from the July report because “the court has asked us not to consider the roads”. State PCCF Varma did not comment as he was on leave.
In its submission to the HC this month, the KETF has categorically pointed out that “the forest clearances granted to several mini-hydel projects were inappropriate” and recommended their immediate withdrawal and prosecution of the officers involved in providing such clearance “on the basis of misrepresentation”.
“The outcome of this case will impact all projects on forestland across the country. If use of existing coupe roads or digging tunnels don’t need permission anymore, the governments will lose several hundred crores annually and may have to return all the revenue collected as Net Present Value for diversion of forestland for such purposes in the past,” says Guruprasad Timmapur, wildlife conservationist, who has been following the case closely.
All eyes are on the state now for the stand it will take when the case comes up for hearing again on 7 November.

In an aspiring India, why poor is suddenly a four-letter word


It is terrible enough to have to carry a yoke all your life, but what does it mean to be kicked around for it too?
If you are still poor in today’s reforms (and corruption) rich India — and that spectrum of poverty has space for pretty much everyone, from the disenfranchised tribal to city dwellers who cannot afford a car — you know the answer. The power elite shower scorn on you. Public policies are sanitised of your interests. Even public interest litigations seek to deny you space on the road.
But has not poverty been the most hallowed and milked term in the Indian discourse all these decades? Just when did it fall from its symbolic grace?
In the early years of Independence, poverty was destiny. Many even wore it as a badge of integrity. By the 1960s, the burden became socially unbearable, prompting Prime Ministers to wage wars against it. Irrespective of the sincerity of campaigns such as garibi hatao, mass poverty was acknowledged as a malaise, and promising its cure became the staple of electoral politics.
Even in the 1990s, when the poor were often blamed for lack of initiative and entrepreneurism, not even the most liberal of economists could deny that inequity – the lack of level playing fields — was at the root of poverty. Politicians continued to do their penance at the door of the predominantly poor aam aadmi every election. While in power, they still winced at every thought of breaking the rules of the games of subsidy.
So why did the Planning Commission and the government suddenly make a travesty of statistics and common sense by appointing multiple panels to define poverty and thereby the number of the poor? Why did the Finance ministry set up a super committee to unconditionally clear — irrespective of legal and public interest imperatives — rich investments of R1000 crore or more?
How could the Chief Minister of one of India’s poorest states set up a sarkari armed force available on hire to industries for cracking down on any opposition with legal impunity? How could the Law minister of the country be so liberal with expressions such as “guttersnipes”, and his colleague set the benchmark for corruption in crores rather than lakhs of rupees?
In his dull contempt for the mango people, none less than the country’s most infamous son-in-law inadvertently provided clues to the answers to these questions.
Poverty has always been power fodder. But since everything was justifiable in the name of the poor, no politician, not even Sanjay Gandhi, ever dared deviate from the public benisons reserved for this easily-malleable constituency. The façade started wearing off one and half a decades into liberalisation when growth rates achieved by mindlessly using up natural resources during all those years became difficult to sustain.
Our banana republic reached a point where the easy loot was over: partly because a lot of readily harvestable resources were already exhausted, and partly because the resistance to the loot gained momentum. The swelling ranks of both the poor and the billionaires belied the promises of liberalisation.
Yet, the greed for artificial growth was being fuelled by the select few who benefited from it. Since the rest of the population was served by a sad trickle-down form of this economic oligarchy, the urgency to grab more resources by displacing the poor was also driven by the compulsion to provide the middle class with just enough to keep it interested in the growth story.
The equations have not changed since. But it is a difficult model to push in a functional democracy. The wealth divide between the rich and the not-so-rich has become so stark that the lines between the poor and not-so-poor are crumbling. So there is an increasing demographic overlap between the civic society’s criticism of corruption and the grassroots movements against the resource loot.
At the receiving end of this combined onslaught, the rich and the powerful are finding it increasingly difficult to play one section of the opposition against another. After sidestepping laws and quashing dissent for so many years, suddenly, the ruling elite are not only being asked questions on accountability but also being pressed for answers.
The arrogant are feeling frustrated and the masks are slipping. The self-contained order of the chosen few has finally started owning up what it always believed in: the dispensability of the poor. This attitude is not even restricted to the high priests in the government or business chambers.
Delhi, for example, has more cars than other three metros combined but the majority of its residents do not own vehicles. For all its structural flaws and teething problems, the dedicated bus corridors (BRT) of Delhi were a move towards the right direction for decongesting roads of too many private vehicles by offering convenient public transport.
But the plan required cars to sacrifice half the road space to plebeian buses. When a few VIP cars were penalised for trying to evade traffic jams by taking the bus-only lanes, a PIL urged the Delhi High Court to scrap the BRT as too many vehicles piled up on the car-lanes. After nine months, the court threw away the petition last week with a sobering judgment: “A developed country is not one where the poor own cars… but where the rich use public transport”.
The temerity of the PIL is but one example of how intolerant Delhi’s rich have become of its poor who would be considered super-rich by those at the other extreme of the poverty spectrum in places such as Vidarbha or Bastar. The age-old divide was never this sharp and India’s rich, the 5 per cent who possess two-fifths of the country’s assets, never rubbed it in so brazenly.
Now that the mask is off, will the equation change? The poor may welcome it as the end of hypocrisy that will allow them to fight the battle of inequity for what it is. But if the rich and mighty romp home yet again, it may perpetuate the myth that the guttersnipes are really dispensable.

Happy compromises, happier charities


Having bulldozed green laws in the name of development, the PM makes big promises and a small investment in biodiversity


PRIME MINISTER Manmohan Singh has committed $50 million (Rs 260 crore) to “strengthen the institutional mechanism for biodiversity conservation in India” for meeting the 2020 Aichi targets on conservation at the Convention on Biological Diversity in Hyderabad this week. He set aside another $10 million for capacity-building in other developing countries.

In case one wondered if this was a joke, the PM allayed such doubts by flaunting before the international community the enactment of the Forest Rights Act, which “empowered the best friends of biodiversity”, and also calling for a “happy compromise that will secure a future that provides ecological and economic space” for all. The developed countries, unfortunately, were not sold on the idea and did not rush to pledge funds.

It will require an annual investment of up to $440 billion for the world to aspire for the Aichi targets. According to the UN Environment Programme, loss of biodiversity already costs the world 3 percent of its GDP or over $2 trillion annually. The European Union alone loses around $450 billion. Footing the Aichi bill will not immediately reverse these losses. But business as usual will drain 7 percent of the global GDP by 2050 and may push the cost and scope of mitigation beyond us.

The global leadership is predictably indifferent. But who could have expected such sense of humour from our PM? After all, the Special Protection Group, which protects him, his predecessors at the South Block and the Nehru-Gandhi family, was allotted Rs 279 crore during 2011-12. So should it take more than Rs 260 crore to secure the country’s biodiversity from the growth graph unleashed by the State?

While the “country” gets “richer” and the displaced tribal waits for her turn, impatience with laws that safeguard the wilderness is threatening to quash the democratic process of decision-making. One popular argument is that the damage caused by single-minded development can be reversed once a country is rich enough to afford it. This absurd claim does not answer how one can replenish non-renewable resources, such as minerals, used up for growth; compensate for loss of ancient forests by planting saplings; or revive species gone extinct.

Japan, Asia’s most developed nation, lost more than 50 percent of natural coasts and around 40 percent of tidal flats due to land reclamation. Though the recent emphasis on conservation is helping a number of wild species of the archipelago, dozens have been lost for good and few of the hundreds of endangered ones may ever recover. In prosperous South Korea, 30 percent of mammals, 48 percent of reptiles and 60 percent of amphibians were either extinct or endangered by 1994.

Flowing through 10 countries, the Danube supported Europe’s most bristling ecosystem until the end of the 19th century. Then, massive regulation of the river, numerous dams, deforestation and pollution throttled the basin wetlands. The relatively less developed Danube delta has been restored in the recent decades. The white pelicans survived but even a reintroduction programme could not restore the range of the once omnipresent Danube beavers. The black poplar trees that lined the waters have vanished altogether.

Despite its advantage of low human population density, North America and Europe have forfeited much of their biodiversity. The US lost two sub-species of wolf, the eastern cougar, the Arizona Jaguar and innumerable smaller species. More than half of Europe’s land area is a biodiversity graveyard. These include vast agricultural fields where not even many wild flowers bloom.

Biodiversity loss is irreversible and it affects our food and health security. Money cannot buy it back but timely investment may arrest its slide. The PM’s prescription of “happy compromise” rang hollow coming soon after the National Investment Board, set up to safeguard development projects worth Rs 1,000 crore or more against green laws. But by investing just one-fourth of that benchmark in biodiversity, Manmohan Singh has honestly signalled where conservation stands in this new order.

SC relents but what did the ban achieve anyway?

FirstPost, 17 October, 2012

The interim ban on tourism in core areas of India’s tiger reserves lasted exactly 12 weeks. These three months saw a lot of drama in and outside the courtroom and the issue of irresponsible tourism became a popular talking point. But if the fuss was about reining in mushrooming resorts and unruly tourists, the ban achieved nothing.
This prolonged uncertainty inconvenienced all shades of tourism operators and tourists—the good, bad and ugly—who could not initiate the advance booking process for the post-monsoon season. That would have been a fair cost had the interim ban delivered the shakeup expected of it. Instead, all we achieved is the notification of a set of evasive, arbitrary central guidelines.
The National Tiger Conservation Authority’s re-revised guidelines remain surprisingly sparing on specifics. Our federal structure demands that states have their say in the framing of such regulations. But what is the point of issuing guidelines without offering guidance or reference points? The NTCA might as well have listed eco-tourism related issues and left it to the states to frame their own rules on those points. That would have saved so much paperwork.
Mostly non-committal, the guidelines do propose a few figures. For example, the NTCA envisages a conservation fee to be paid by hotels and resorts for “eco-development and local community upliftment works” and suggests a range of Rs 500-3000 per room per month based on a “luxury classification system”. No, there is no incentive for hotels that make the effort to be more eco-friendly than others. A “green classification” would have been too imaginative for our forest bureaucracy.
The guidelines say that all tourist facilities, old and new, shall aim to generate at least 50 percent of their total energy and fuel requirements from alternate sources such as solar and biogas. It sounds almost existential. Aim to generate? Is there any penalty if one fails to generate or just doesn’t aim? How can one tell anyway?
Nevertheless, that mysterious percentile is a welcome break from toothless banalities such as “tourism infrastructure shall conform to environment-friendly, low-impact aesthetic architecture, including solar energy, waste recycling, rainwater harvesting, natural cross-ventilation, proper sewage disposal and merging with the surrounding habitat”. Didn’t we all grow up listening to Father McKenzies telling us about not lying and such?
However, the guidelines suddenly spew too many figures when it comes to the carrying capacity i.e., how many tourists a forest can take. An annexure has been devoted to complex-looking formulae which are actually no good due to exclusion of a number field factors. But let’s not get mathematical. Instead, sample the simpler propositions: minimum distance between vehicles while spotting wildlife will be 50 meters and all vehicles will keep “a minimum distance of more than 20 meter” from all wildlife. Without getting into the puzzle of “minimum of more than”, let’s understand these figures.
A 20-metre viewing radius offers a circumference of 126 metres which can accommodate a maximum of three vehicles at a distance of at least 50 metres from one another. But since safari vehicles are not permitted to leave the dirt-tracks and go off-road, it is unlikely that all three of these legitimate viewing positions will ever be accessible. Therefore, each wildlife sighting will serve at best two vehicles or four (if the animal lingers for over 15 minutes which is the new limit for a vehicle to “monopolise” a sighting).
Most tourists would love such exclusivity but it would also heavily diminish the chances of wildlife sighting. While there is no warranty in forests and mega fauna (read tiger) are not the only attractions, eco-tourists are also consumers who deserve both exclusivity and fair odds of wildlife sighting. The only way to ensure both would be to spread the load of safari vehicles thin and wide over a larger forest area. But the guidelines do not agree.
For long, the NTCA claimed that the core forests were the “tiger’s bedroom” where disturbance affects its breeding. In a volte face, it now concedes in the guidelines that breeding and density of tigers have not been affected in current tourism zones due to safaris. But a reluctant convert, it has allowed tourism only in 20 percent of the core area. It seems like the NTCA has carved a small living room out of the tiger’s bedroom so that the big cats can meet guests before retreating to more serious business.
Seriously, tigers are territorial and the ones residing in tourism areas rarely have access to the rest of the forest for breeding. So if these tigers and their productivity have not suffered due to safaris, why should their clan need protection from tourists in the rest of the forest? Anyway, why fix the cap at 20 percent and not more or less?
Even more bizarre is the recommendation not to expand the present tourism zones where such areas are below 20 percent of the core. This will disallow ecotourism, described in the guidelines as a vital tool for conservation, livelihood and education, to realise its potential in the majority of 41 tiger reserves currently less popular with tourists. As a result, the crowd will continue to swell at the few established destinations.
The guidelines are particularly evasive on curbing the worst aspect of unregulated tourism: the construction boom on the margins of our reserves. There is a provision for half-yearly monitoring of “tourist facilities in and around tiger reserves vis-à-vis environmental clearance, area of coverage, ownership, type of construction, number of employees etc for suggesting mitigation and retrofitting measures if needed”. But what will be monitored if there is no recommended benchmark for fences, built-up and open area ratio, the number of stories allowed or restriction on change of land use etc?
The last triumph of specifics in the guidelines is a reference to the subsection (2) of 38-O of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972. In other words, contravention of any provision of the guidelines will invite a jail term of three-seven years. Should anyone be scared? Not until the NTCA comes up with guidelines on how to hold one culpable for not “aiming” to comply with this and that.

The HUNTED


Rhinos hacked. Tigers poisoned. Elephants butchered. Otters skinned. Mongooses clubbed and plucked.  It is easy game for poaching syndicates and the brazen plunder has reduced state protection for India’s rich wildlife to a cruel joke. Worse, the spoils are funding terrorism and elections alike.


Surrounded by cops, Devi Singh Moghiya seemed too soft-spoken and dignified to be a poacher. His melancholic whispers belied the chilling admission that he was one of the six shooters who took out 22 tigers in Ranthambhore between 2003 and 2005. They roamed the forest looking for pugmarks. Once a trail was established, they took positions on trees after sundown. One shot in the moonlight was all it would take.

How did they get away with killing so many under the nose of 273 forest staff that guarded India's most high-profile reserve? Devi Singh looked puzzled: “You can always dodge them during the daytime recce. And which forest guard comes looking in the night when you fire your gun?” His team earned R 40-60,000 per tiger. He had no idea how much the traders made in the international market.

Devotees of Lord Vishnu take home hundreds of boxes of Tirupati laddoos through the Chennai airport. In the cargo scanner, the laddoos, like any biological material, appear a shade of warm orange and no security staff gave those little globes a second look till it was discovered how thousands of star tortoise hatchlings tightly packed in sweet boxes were slipping through.

Typically, the traders stopped giving the tortoises water days before the transit to avoid stench of urine. Just before the scanning, the handler would give the boxes a violent shake so that startled hatchlings retreat completely into their shells and appear suitably round. Some even use a touch of chloroform to discourage movement.

Up to 30,000 star tortoises worth several crores of rupees are still sourced from southern states for R10-15 each but the consignments now leave the country for Malaysia and other East Asian destinations through the Kolkata airport. Some also take the Bangladesh route via Dhaka.

Last month, when several rhinos were poached in Kaziranga, a local source with a past in the trade described how the shooters had hit the rhinos in “all wrong places” and how the horns were chopped off with “sloppy, unclean slashes”. Even parts of ears were torn off to establish the authenticity of horns before the buyers. Apparently, new operators are at work — a disturbing possibility in the aftermath of the Bodo-Muslim clashes.

Brazen, bizarre and desperate in turn, the trade in wildlife is flourishing. The demand overseas is fuelled by an absurd faith in traditional medicine or a craving for exotic fashion, furniture, stationery and pets. The cheap skill of subsistence hunters ensures unhindered supply and there is little check by way of enforcement. With profit to the tune of 20-50 times, top syndicate bosses such as Sansar Chand can afford to flout the toughest laws and engage the country’s best legal firms.

The result is worse than decimation. Some species, from the mighty elephant to little otters, have taken such a hit that the trade in their derivatives has actually ebbed. By the late 1980s, the selective killing of males for tusks triggered a genetic response. From 20 kg, the average weight of tusks dropped to below 10kg and the number of makhna (tuskless by birth) males shot up.

Alongside, the standard 1:7 male-female ratio in an elephant population slid to below 1:25 in the forests of Chamrajnagar and Mysore districts in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu’s Sathyamangalam where Veerappan operated for more than three decades. “Today, most males are young with just about 5-10 kgs of tusk which is again not hard enough for carving,” explained an old trading hand.

There have been few exclusive hauls of otter pelts because hardly anyone was looking. But till a few years ago, the smooth skins would show up frequently in consignments of big cat pelts. Then, there were easy pickings no more. Nobody is counting but experts fear a 50-70 per cent dip in otter populations outside protected forests.

The mongoose may soon follow. This June, 51 kg mongoose hair and 50,000 mongoose hair brushes were confiscated in Meerut. With each animal accounting for only 10-20g of hair, the brush industry’s annual demand for 8-12 quintals has probably killed more than a million mongooses in the last two decades.

A lot of the buying has shifted to the internet for anonymity and speed of transaction. Hill mynahs are in high demand and each cost more than an economy flight to London. Trade in red sanders, a tree species endemic to the Eastern Ghats, is probably worth up to R 50,000 crore. Horse shoe crabs, a living fossil, are being harvested from the Orissa coast by the truckloads for their medicinal value and flown out from Kolkata. Even tiny insects such as butterflies and tiger beetles are a catch at a few hundred dollars each.

Most traders take land route to Tibet via Ladakh and Nepal, and to Myanmar via Manipur. Delhi is the main transit point for goods heading to Tibet. In the North-East, syndicates are shifting from the traditional Dimapur-Kohima-Imphal route to ferrying consignments through Arunachal Pradesh along the northern boundary of Assam and then down to Nagaland. A third route through Silchar is also active. The extermination of rhinos in Manas took some business away from Siliguri but it remains a key hub for its proximity to Nepal and Bhutan. The Sunderbans waterways are the busy, invisible channel to Bangladesh.

While Bengal tigers still make the loudest headlines, leopards are the bigger kill by quantity in open forests. As tiger numbers slide, leopards are also being targeted as a tiger substitute. Besides, perceived medicinal value makes the bones of a big cat worth up to ten times its pelt. A range of tiger bone wine sells for $80-3,000 per case in China.

Since 2010, by official count, 66 tiger and 466 leopards have been poached -- amounting to at least 4000 kg of bones. Yet, seizures mostly throw up only skins. Worse, very few skin seizures lead to recovery of bones. While anti-poaching agencies claim success in confiscating skins, poachers make a fortune trading in bones.

Foolproof physical protection of our wilderness is impossible. Unless we literally fortify our open forests into zoos, intruders will always stand a chance and wildlife wander out of protected zones. The only effective deterrence to poaching is the fear of getting caught, prosecuted and punished. But even after the setting up of the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau in 2006, intelligence gathering and prosecution remained suspect.

The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) has introduced E-eye, a thermal imagery system, for round-the-clock surveillance. Plans are also afoot to introduce drones to watch remote terrains. But there is no substitute for quality human resources. Every forest management needs eyes and ears on the ground. Since sleuthing is not the forte of the average bureaucrat, field managers should be handpicked to fit the job profile. Every forest division also requires a dedicated legal cell with trained officers to make a robust case when a poacher is caught.

But one cannot fight an unacknowledged enemy. The culture of denial is so deeply embedded that most forest officers refuse to accept that poachers have struck. First, they play the jurisdiction card. Nobody is held accountable for poaching of, say, rhinos just outside Kaziranga or tigers adjacent to Corbett. The management practically disowns the animal the moment it steps out of park limits. And officers in charge of areas outside parks never have the resources to fight poachers nor are they expected to.

When a carcass cannot be disowned, imaginative authorities attribute the death to anything from food poisoning to heart failure to fight with another animal. “Tomorrow, I won’t be surprised if someone classifies a tiger death as suicide,” a senior Environment ministry official recently quipped.

A desperate NTCA had to issue a directive this May, ordering that “to ensure due diligence and topmost priority, every case of tiger and leopard death would be henceforth treated as a case of poaching, unless otherwise proved beyond reasonable doubt”. But trust our forest bureaucracy to find a way around this too.

The result is there for all to see. While Sansar Chand (wife Rani runs his syndicate) and Shabbir Hassan Quereshi (son Sarfaraz controls the family business) stay behind bars, few other kingpins have ever been arrested. Some, like Tashi Tshering, are busy in Nepal. Others, like Pema Thinley, operate from China and Tibet. A bunch of middle-rung operators are picked up every now and then but they either walk out on bail or get away with serving brief sentences.

But a multi-billion dollar industry cannot trust its fortune on administrative weaknesses alone. Veerappan allegedly funded political parties in two states for over a decade. Sansar Chand’s mysterious diary apparently had tell-tale signs of collusion with the who’s who of India’s power elite. Left insurgents value the dense forests in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand as cover but are accused of funding arms deals by clearing Indravati of its tigers.

In the North-East, almost every militant group harvested wildlife during the 1980s and 1990s when a number of prime forests, including Manas national park, became virtually inaccessible to the administration. The official count for rhino poaching alone touched the 550-mark.

Shoot at sight orders against poachers at Kaziranga slowly helped the rhino bounce back. From 1999 to 2006, the park lost 41 rhinos to poaching at an annual average of just 5 animals. Then, the 2006 Assembly elections unleashed what sources call “reward killing”. The toll jumped to 20 in 2007 and the poachers were back. After the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, around two dozen animals were killed till 2010. Last year, only one rhino was poached before the Assembly elections in May. The toll has again crossed two dozen since.

Will the SC get into the zone?


The court may lift the interim ban on tiger tourism next week but the real game changer is slotted for 2 November 


The interim ban on tourism in core tiger forests will enter its 12th week when the Supreme Court convenes for the next hearing on 16 October. While the resumption of safari tourism in parts of core reserves is expected soon, suspense continues over what mitigation and punitive measures the court will come up with to regulate pollution, use of natural resources and land use (construction) at the edge of the forest.

Though tiger reserves have notified buffer areas under the Wildlife Protection Act (WLPA), there is no legal provision to check the consumptive growth of tourism infrastructure. It does not seem likely that the soon-to-be-notified eco-tourism guidelines will force any definitive restriction or penal structure. Since the menace of mushrooming resorts flourishes on non-forest land bordering forests, its most effective remedy cannot be sought under the WLPA. In fact, we found the solution in the Environment Protection Act (EPA) a decade ago but have been sitting on it since.

The Wildlife Conservation Strategy 2002 recommended that land within 10 km of national parks and sanctuaries should be notified as eco-fragile zones under the EPA. The Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) sought proposals from chief wildlife wardens of all states. But since densely populated habitations, including cities, fell within the proposed 10-km ring, many states objected that such demarcation would adversely affect development.

Therefore, the National Board for Wildlife (NBWL) in 2005 decided that the “delineation of eco-sensitive zones (ESZ) would have to be site-specific and relate to regulation, rather than prohibition, of specific activities”. But the states continued to drag their feet.

In 2006, hearing a PIL, the SC directed the MoEF to seek ESZ proposals from all states within four weeks. The court also ordered that all cases, where environmental clearances were granted for projects within 10 km from protected forests, be referred to the NBWL. But given the lack of political will, few ESZs could be notified.

Last year, in a bid to end the deadlock, the MoEF issued a flexible guideline. While the width of an ESZ could still go up to 10 km or even more where sensitive corridors were present, it said that the width and the types or extent of regulations may not be uniform all around a reserve and could also differ from reserve to reserve. Most states remained unresponsive.

Finally, sensing the enormity of a case-to-case exercise, the SC-appointed Central Empowered Committee (CEC) recommended a new graded formula last month. For four categories of protected forests – above 500 sq km, 200-500 sq km, 100-200 sq km and below 100 sq km – it proposed ESZ widths of 2 km, 1 km, 500 metres and 100 metres, respectively.

Though many have trashed the dilution as an invitation to mining and mega development, this graded approach is pragmatic. For example, under a blanket 10-km width policy, forest areas of 400 (20x20) sq km could require 1200 (40x40 - 400) sq km to be declared ESZ. But for a 100 (10x10) sq km forest, the ESZ requirement could be a staggering 800 (30x30 - 100) sq km.

The proposed ESZ widths, however, requires reconsideration. The few sizeable chunks of wilderness demand protective rings that stretch over a minimum of 5 km. The ecological integrity of smaller forests needs at least a 1-km low-impact zone to benefit at all. Also, these graded stipulations serve best as the minimum mandatory widths of respective ESZs and should be extended based on site-specific threats.

Hopefully, these concerns will be addressed when the SC hears the MoEF’s views on November 2 and sets the ball rolling for time-bound notification of ESZs across the country. The potential is enormous. Rajasthan, for example, has proposed regulations that bar construction on more than 10 per cent of land holding within ESZs. Once notified, such rules will be far more effective than some evasive ecotourism guidelines in curbing proliferation of polluting and resource-guzzling resorts around our best forests.

Have you shifted the lake? Now please go soap it up

FirstPost, 7 October, 2012


Playing god is not easy. It takes a lot of confidence. Almost as much as it takes not to doubt the afternoon freshness of one’s body. Or is it the other way round? Can there be a better advertisement of confidence than a proclamation of godly powers and wanton freedom?
So we watched a few sharp, good men discuss the progress of a hydel power project at a scenic hill location by a lake. One decidedly less sharp, nay-saying subordinate tells the boss why the project was not possible because of the lake. “Well, shift the lake up,” orders the boss, “it takes just a phone call.” As the subordinate mumbles if he should call God to accomplish the feat, he is told to contact Kirloskar instead. The tagline –“a challenging task at hand, a call is all it takes” – reinforced the capability of the group’s widest range of engineering solutions.
This 30-second ad – “the planned city” – stumped many in December 2010. A few years earlier, I had participated in a green film festival sponsored by the Kirloskar group and heard its owners proudly flaunt their environment-friendly pumps, which were meant to usher in a revolution for agricultural growth. It was rather inexplicable why the brand would draw up such an arrogant message that so clearly flouted environmental values and norms.
But then, Kirloskar’s proudest moment came when it set up 26 mega concrete volute pumps on a canal of the Narmada project and moved a lot of water (630 cubic meters per second) uphill in Gujarat’s Saurashtra. Therefore, technically, the claim of lifting a lake was not an overstatement. But, seriously, can anyone — even god, except through the apparently ungodly act of an earthquake – really shift a lake, or a river?
A water body is much more than just water. A lake, for example, is a lentic (static water) ecosystem with numerous layers. Depending on its depth, it has three broad zones — pelagic (open water), benthic (side slopes and shore) and profundal (lakebed not exposed to sunlight) – which support a host of biotic and abiotic diversity. Shifting the water up or down can be a technological possibility but nothing can transplant these living systems or create their equivalent at a new location overnight.
The brazen message of the campaign was not lost on the viewers. This AV was among the 38 ads against which complaints were lodged with the Advertising Standards Council of India’s National Advertising Monitoring Service which came into being this year. In June, the Consumer Complaints Council upheld the objection against the Kirloskar AV. Yet, the spot has not been taken off air.
Kirloskar’s overenthusiasm to move (read pump out) lakes may justify the group’s motto of “giving life to water” but what explains Cinthol’s new campaign, that is all about putting soap to water? A press note released by the company says, “The iconic Cinthol brand has always been synonymous with Confidence… Right from the 1980s with Vinod Khanna riding a horse on a beach… Cinthol has been able to build a strong equity around Confidence.”
That does it. Cinthol had shied away from showing Khanna abandoning his black horse to embrace the waves with his “body confidence soap” but that was the 1980s. Three decades on, the confidence has grown. The “Alive is Awesome” campaign portrays an “innovative adventure bathing” concept. We see youths soaping in the wild under a waterfall, on elephant back, in an arctic ice pond and being splashed by black kids with several bucketfuls in a water-scarce Africa.
The bit set in an African village is perhaps only an ethical concern but the rest of the ad is a travesty of science and common sense. No soap, not even the so-called biodegradable ones (which Cinthol is not), is safe for use in natural water systems. The chemical contamination is lethal for aquatic life. It is a health hazard for others who bathe in the same water. When the contamination reaches the groundwater, the damage is permanent.
Several upmarket international soap brands are associated with the term river but the only bathing aid any veteran camper will recommend in the wild is a washcloth. The invisible damage soaps cause became startlingly apparent three years ago when a minor chemical spill from a detergent factory near Manchestor in UK resulted in a 2-feet-deep layer of foam covering a 5-km stretch of the river Irk downstream. The erring company, Robert McBride Ltd, was subsequently made to cough up £81,200 in damage control and fines.
While it is not uncommon in India to find people using soaps in community ponds and rivers that flow through villages and towns, the danger of chemical contamination of surface and groundwater is not lost even on the uneducated. At most religious places where thousands take a dip in holy rivers or hot-springs daily, soap and oil is prohibited. A few years ago, I was pleasantly surprised to see a bunch of well-to-do pilgrims thrown out of waters by local volunteers at Haridwar for soaping up in the Ganga.
So what about the youth in the Cinthol ad? Sajan RaJ Kurup, founder and chairman of Creativeland Asia, has been quoted in the media as saying that “creating this campaign has been an adventure in itself” as it “celebrates and recognises a more adventurous and international India… a less inhibited and intimidated Indian”. For Sunil Kataria, executive VP, Sales & Marketing, Godrej Consumer Products, “the idea of shooting in Iceland along with a few breathtaking locations in India was to get this ‘Awesome’ experience”.
This, the ad is a projection of a new India — adventurous and international — and its youth — less inhibited and intimidated – who reach out to breathtaking, wild locations only to spoil it by soaping up in any natural water available just because they want to feel alive and awesome. Just like the embodiment of the technological prowess of a new India in Kirloskar is threateningly restless to lay its hands (and pumps) on any lake or river around.
Does such ignorance of environmental realities in an increasingly evolved time reflect how these brands actually assess their target audience? Or do they demand a creative licence for knowingly sidestepping basic hygiene and ecology to make a simplistic brand appeal? Either way, it does not wash.