Why no one is talking about how biodiversity is being compromised around Sabarimala
- A robin redbreast in a cage
- Puts all heaven in a rage
- – William Blake.
In the current brouhaha and political drama playing out at Sabarimala, what everyone seems to have forgotten is that the Sabarimala temple is actually an enclave within the Periyar tiger reserve.
What this mass pilgrim activity does to the tranquility of the reserve and the well-being of its denizens one can well imagine. For the past 30 years, the temple authorities, the Travancore Devaswom Board (TDB), has reportedly been carrying out illegal construction activities.
About 15 years ago, the National Board for Wild Life (NBWL) directed one of its members Darshan Shankar to prepare a master plan for the sustainable development of Sabarimala over 12,675 hectares of forest land, which was approved in 2007. The acquisition of the Downtown Estate, spread over 208 hectares of forest land, between the Ranni forest division and the Periyar Tiger Reserve, as a buffer zone to ensure a corridor for the free movement of animals was recommended in the master plan.
But reports suggest the TDB carried out its alternate development schemes detrimental to the flora and fauna of the reserve and every development measure it carried out after 2015 flouts the recommendations of the NBWL master plan. A committee appointed by the Supreme Court has submitted a report on indiscriminate commercial activity around the temple, in gross violation of environmental norms.
Sabarimala is not an exception in a country that has, in its eagerness for ‘development’, declared war on its environment, pinching a little here, snatching and grabbing there, pulling out clumps wherever possible, of its rich greenery and forest cover, and legitimising the illegitimate with clever sleights of hand. Builders look for loopholes and the administration, entrusted with the care of our natural resources, gladly hands them out on a silver platter. In a shocking display of callousness, Sudhir Mungantiwar, Maharashtra state forest minister, no less, reportedly demanded of activists proof of whether the Goregaon Aarey Milk Colony, one of the last remaining green covers in the city of Mumbai, was indeed qualified to be a forest, and by implication, worth preserving.
On June 28, 2017, he reportedly demanded documents to show that the BMC had identified 4.86 lakh trees in Aarey Colony. In June 2015, Vanashakti and another citizens’ association, Aarey Conservation Group, had filed a petition with National Green Tribunal’s western bench in Pune against the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation (MMRC), seeking that Aarey be designated as a forest and construction of the 33-hectare car shed be carried out elsewhere.
The construction of the Metro-3 car shed would lead to destruction of 3,000 trees.
They were compelled to withdraw the petition in September this year after being told by the tribunal that the case would be dismissed as “only a high or Supreme Court could give them relief”.
It is not as if Aarey has not been violated before.
Aarey, a lush green and densely covered 3,166 acre forest area once upon a time, has changed alarmingly since it was founded by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1949, to revolutionise the processing and marketing of dairy products in the city.
“Existing central government and state institutions (like a veterinary college, MHADA, SRPF, Film City, NDDB) have already leased out land here. But the past decade has seen many new projects come up in this ‘No Development Zone’ at a rapid pace. Residential towers, a petrol pump, marriage lawns, a crematorium and cemetery, Force one camp, gymnasium and numerous religious structures have been built or are proposed at the expense of precious green cover. The biggest and most controversial project has been the Royal Palms estate on the periphery of Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP). The permission to build a golf course was misused to construct offices, villas, apartment complexes and hotels. Besides being an eyesore these buildings have infiltrated the serene landscape of Aarey colony which is contiguous to the Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP).” — Aarey Conservation Group's website reads.
Encroachments and developmental activities, and infrastructure projects are eating into the forest area, displacing the wild animals there — and incidents of leopard attacks have risen over the years in the surrounding villages (a total of 27 tribal settlements, with 7,000 residents scattered across around 1,000 acres) where there is access to food such as dogs, pigs and poultry.
Aarey specifically is not a notified forest and is under the administrative jurisdiction of the dairy department. Aarey, however, comes within an eco-sensitive zone around SGNP, identified by the government in 2016.
According to Stalin Dayanand, project director, Vanashakti, the delay in transfer of forest lands under the revenue department to the forest department has also led to a rise in encroachment cases as the latter can take action on notified areas only. Meanwhile, Maharashtra’s total forest area at the close of the year was 61,723.82 sq km, which is 20.06 per cent of the state’s geographical area, as against the stipulated 33 per cent expected cover.
Maharashtra minister for environment and forests Sudhir Mungantiwar would do well to study the Aarey Milk Colony, Mumbai as Forest Territory-A Status Report as well, which conclusively proves that it is a contiguous extension of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park.
The human-animal conflict (HAC) has been growing in India and has several narratives surrounding it.
While some incidents are the inevitable tragic fallout of animal ‘encroachments’ in human habitations (a very ironic term, considering it is actually the other way round), others are engineered due to corporate vested interests. The killing of Avni, the tigress, who has left behind two cubs, has been further mired in controversy with the autopsy revealing that the tigress was apparently not shot in self-defence as claimed.
Incidentally this claim of self-defence was made by the same Sudhir Mungantiwar, who had also given orders for the killing.
Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray claimed he was told that the state government had killed tigress Avni in an area that is the proposed site of one of Anil Ambani’s projects. As urban India spreads its ectoplasmic fingers into our wild spaces, and the population of Indians keeps growing, reports pour in from all parts of the country detailing deaths of elephants caught on the tracks of speeding trains in Jalpaiguri, West Bengal, frequent electrocution of elephants in Odisha, tiger cubs from the nearby Tadoba sanctuary run over in Maharashtra, and so on and so forth, adding up to a pathetic report of our conservation policy.
On the other side of the HAC, statistics released by the environment ministry count a total of 1,144 people killed between April 2014 and May of 2017. That includes 426 human deaths in fiscal 2014-15, and 446 killed in 2016. The ministry released a partial count for 2016-17 of 259 killed by elephants up to February 2017, along with 27 killed by tigers through May 2017.
The three states of Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand exemplify what is wrong with our conservation policies. Uttarakhand has a total area of 53,483 sq km, of which 86 per cent is mountainous and 65 per cent is covered by forest. Most of the northern part of the state is covered with the high Himalayan peaks and glaciers.
The recorded forest area in Chhattisgarh is 59,772 sq km which is 44.21 per cent of its geographical area. Reserved, unclassed and protected forests constitute 43.13 per cent, 16.65 per cent and 40.21 per cent of the total forest area, respectively. Forests in Jharkhand spread over an area of 23,605 sq km, which constitute about 29.61 per cent of the total area of Jharkhand.
Moreover, out of the 23,605 sq km of forests, 82 per cent of the area falls under the protected forests, whereas 17.5 per cent of the land falls under reserve forests. All three are largely forest states. Each has a substantial population of tribals that find their economic and socio-cultural sustenance in forests. However, large tracts of land have already been deforested in all of them. In both Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, the tyrannical management of forests has utterly alienated the people and Naxalite movements have gained ground with support from the local population. Therefore, the first challenge for these states is to get the people involved in regenerating their forests in a way that they establish their own agency and ownership over their green spaces and are invested in their sustainable management.
Beginning with greater control over minor forest produce that would increase their income — something along the lines of the recent Van Dhan programme started in Bastar district — the people could plant trees on deforested tracts and earn substantial returns at a later stage.
Agriculture in these states must be revived. All the three relatively new states receive high rainfall, an annual average of more than 1,000 mm. Yet, agriculture remains poor. A major programme for community-based rainwater harvesting, followed up with a more comprehensive watershed development programme, can significantly improve productivity.
The survival of indigenous peoples is reciprocal to the survival of indigenous species. Conservation should center on protecting the land rights of the people to whom these vitally important areas are home. Tribal peoples are better at looking after their environments than anyone else – their survival depends on it. From the Amazon basin, there is growing evidence that when indigenous territories are legally recognised and managed by indigenous peoples, the rainforest is better protected.
South Asia’s tribal people have coexisted with the tiger for thousands of years, but now, they are facing eviction in the name of protecting the animal. There is evidence, for example, from the Chitwan National Park in Nepal that tiger densities can actually be higher in the areas where people live than in those from where they have been evicted. People provide a variety of different habitats and eyes and ears to detect and deter poachers.
In India, instead of recognising tribal peoples’ rights over their land, the government has created more parks, carried out more evictions, and endeavours to bring in more tourists.
And here lies the rub.
The preponderance on tourism as a rationale for conservation is a self-defeating exercise that goes directly against preserving the biodiversity of any environment. It also defines our ecological gaze. Tourists largely are enamoured of animals like the tiger, lion, rhino, whales, giant pandas, etc., that have become global conservation icons. Our ecological gaze and that of the media focuses on these emblems of conservation and prioritizes them to the exclusion of other animals equally important on the food chain.
The blue algae or the phytoplankton may not be as glamorous as the Royal Bengal Tiger or the White Rhino but their position on the ladder of holistic survival and sustainability is none the less important. There is a butterfly effect that is set off, a chain of events if we exclude even one creature from this circle of life.
Perhaps this gaze of ours is due to the Disney-like anthropomorphism we have been reared in, the cultural bias and set of attitudes that favors cute cuddly mammals we can relate to as opposed to slithery reptiles and creepy-crawly spiders and bugs that naturally repel us, but we are, in the true sense of the phrase, “missing the woods for the trees.” There is absolutely no point in demarcating a safe zone for animals within an officially recognised tract of land that qualifies as a forest while polluting the groundwater a few miles away from a factory. One that is built on the same contiguous space that finds its way inside the reservation and infects microorganisms with toxic content.
The Western Ghats are biologically rich and biogeographically unique — a veritable treasure house of biodiversity. Though covering an area of 180,000 sq km or just under 6 per cent of the land area of India, the Western Ghats contain more than 30 per cent of all plant, fish, herpetofauna, bird and mammal species found in India.
It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is one of the eight ‘hottest biodiversity hotspots’. This region has over 5,000 species of flowering plants, 139 mammal species, 508 bird species and 179 amphibian species.
It is likely that many undiscovered species live in the Western Ghats. Yet, because of resorts coming up on the ghats by encroaching upon forest land, extension of farm estates, hydel power projects that will displace over 3,00,000 tribals, the fragile ecosystem of the Western Ghats is seriously threatened today. An Avni has been murdered and become the cause célèbre of the media and animal lovers. One does not notice the thousands of ‘lesser’ creatures being slaughtered every day due to our sheer callousness and ignorance, and the number of species in both flora and fauna going extinct that have been invisibilised by our myopic approach to conservation.