In August last year, India’s beleaguered conservationists found something to cheer about after the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) announced that the elephant would now be declared the country’s National Heritage Animal. Whatever that meant. Minister Jairam Ramesh also declared emphatically that the ministry would constitute a National Elephant Conservation Authority (NECA) with the same degree of visibility, importance and criticality as accorded to the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA). Conservationists blew the trumpet. The media too painted the town red.
But eight months down the line it appears that the ministry was only flattering to deceive. The Prime Minister’s Office has just nipped the proposal in the bud. Only the newspaper which broke the story, The Times of India, has carried the news. No other media outlet has even followed it up. The massive mammal has simply disappeared into a gaping news hole. Even murmurs are not to be heard.
It would be easy to call Manmohan Singh names and brand him anti-environment. It would, however, be easier still to examine things surgically and come to our own sweeping judgments. Once we know what the NECA would have essentially meant for the Prime Minister’s socio-economic policies, it would become evident to all and sundry why Singh simply could not have gone ahead with this new authority.
To do that one would have to browse through the recommendations made by the Task Force on Project Elephant, which was constituted in February last year. The terms of reference for the panel led by Mahesh Rangarajan had been amply clear. The committee, among others, was to recommend measures to strengthen elephant conservation in the country. It was to devise an institutional framework; identify, catalogue and define elephant reserves and ranges; and simultaneously develop a framework for preparing long-term perspective plans for elephant ranges. The Task Force did its job and submitted a comprehensive 187-page report Gajah: Securing the Future for Elephants in India.
The elephant is more beleagured in India than the country's conservationists are. The Indian sub-continent is considered to be the last remaining stronghold of the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus). With more than 26,000 elephants, it is home to more than half the global Asian elephant population in the wild. Habitat loss, and fragmentation and degradation of elephant habitat are considered to be the primary cause for the decline in elephant numbers.
It is estimated that their geographic range has shrunk by 70 per cent since the 1960s. Threat to life of elephants still looms large. Three out of 10 elephant deaths are attributed to illegal killing, train accidents, and electrocution. Human-elephant conflict is another major threat to the Asian elephant. Nearly 400 people and 100 elephants lose their lives due to this conflict every year.
The Task Force talked of taking the elephant to the people. The panel's members knew that the best way to conserve wildlife in India is having the people on your side. The first thing the Task Force therefore recommended was the constitution of a statutory body called the National Elephant Conservation Authority (NECA), which would also have state-level councils. It advocated the creation of, what it called, Operational Reserve-Level Committees for each Elephant Reserve. Among members would be local peoples’elected representatives (MPs, MLAs, and representatives of zilla parishads, panchayats and gram sabhas), researchers and conservationists/ scientists, NGOs and officers-in-charge of line departments such as railways. It had adopted an inclusionist approach.
This of course could not have been a cause for anxiety for Manmohan Singh. You never what worries politicians, but this set of proposals should not have been one of those. There were, in fact, many other words of counsel that would have got the goat of all those driving the nihilist development bandwagon.
To start with, the Task Force report called for Elephant Reserves to be looked at as the basic management unit for focused elephant conservation in the country. At that time, there were 32 Elephant Reserves that had either been declared or proposed. The panel wanted these to continue. In terms of area, that would have been 65,270.8 sq km spread across 10 elephant landscapes.
Read on, for this is where it gets better.
The Task Force wanted all critical elephant habitat and corridors to be brought under the Protected Area network, in addition to the National Parks and Wildlife Sanctuaries and other PA categories already existing in the Elephant Reserves. This would have meant a lot of land. As of now only 18,732.03 sq km of the Elephant Reserves come under Protected Areas. At a time when there’s a mad scramble for land and diversion/denotification of forest tracts, any proposal for more Protected Areas could not have curried favour with a dispensation that has veritable track record in gifting away land to industry.
Wait, it keeps getting better.
The panel suggested that the entire Elephant Reserves should also be notified as Ecologically Sensitive Area under the Environment Protection Act. This, it argued, would help provide safeguards against changes in the landscape without harming pre-existing rights (of people). What this also meant was that landgrabbing would now become more than a tad tougher.
The boundaries of a few reserves, the Task Force assserted, may need to be rationalised so that they may be more in conformity with scientific and ecological principles ensuring the effective conservation of elephants and associated biodiversity and wildlife. It also wanted ground realities such as human habitation to be taken into account. Taken together with the proposed Operational Reserve-Level Committees, this meant that the people would not be excluded from grassroots decisionmaking.
Yes, it gets better progressively.
The Task Force on Project Elephant also came up with an entire set of recommendations for securing elephant corridors. It said 88 documented, priority one corridors should be notified as state elephant corridors by the respective states. Any land diversion in an identified Elephant Corridor irrespective of its size would have to come to the Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) in Delhi, and not to the regional offices of the MoEF. This decentralisation of decisionmaking would not have gone down well with Manmohan Singh.
As wouldn’t have a number of other findings and observations. Elephant conservation is about landscape and habitat. It is about huge swathes of land, it is about halting the fragmentation of forests. In other words, it is about everything that industry would find loathesome in a frenzied milieu where double digit economic growth is all that matters. And standing in the way is one abominable pachyderm.
Close to a third of the Task Force’s actual report was devoted to securing elephant landscapes (and included ecologically detrimental aspects of so-called development activities) and mitigating human-elephant conflict. What this meant essentially was that neither the mining mafia nor the corporate monoliths could any more secure the land of their choice by fair means or foul, or run amok with the tracts thus secured. Obviously, this did not please the Indian Prime Minister.
One might ask why then has Manmohan Singh been apparently taking so much interest in the tiger if he is prima facie not that wildlife-friendly. There is an answer to that, but that would only be empirical evidence: the tiger agenda worldwide is today driven by the World Bank. Had this global financial bully been taking interest in the elephant, the Indian Prime Minister probably be singing a different tune.There's another difference at the international level. While all tiger range countries ostensibly want to save the tiger, in case of the elephant there are many countries in South Africa that want to sell of their stockpiled ivory. The World Bank does not find it prudent enough to intervene. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in India concurs and has, therefore, decided to rubbish the Task Force report.
The Task Force, for its part, had concluded in the introduction:
Gajah is a symbol of a search for better compact with nature, our land and our common natural heritage. The rest of Asia and the world look upon us to rise to take a lead.
So declaring it the National Heritage Animal will give it due place as emblem of ecological sensitivity. It will also mark recognition for its centrality in our plural cultures, traditions and oral lore.
Someswara wrote almost eight centuries ago, it is the realm with many elephants in its forests that will be truly most secure.
India cannot fail Gajah. The latter’s survival and ecological security is linked to our very own.
Manmohan Singh, obviously, did not agree. Do you?
