The call of the wild

The call of the wild

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The call of the wild

July 16, 2012 01:23 PM

By Deepak Parvatiyar
Remember the ‘My heart bleeds for India’ campaign by the Congress during the 1989 general elections? Despite this catchy slogan the Congress lost the election. (Bofors was the reason).

Over two decades later, this slogan has stuck to me simply because I struggle to find an answer to the question – why does my heart bleed for India? I wish to clarify that Bofors is not in my mind at this juncture. After years of exposure, I find myself immune to corruption, nepotism, terrorism, road rage, and food inflation. Occasionally I do take pride in our country being seen as an emerging economy and a super power. But that satisfaction is short-lived. What comes as a final blow is the fact that we care the least even for the martyrs who sacrificed their lives during the Independence movement – a fact brought out by a book by one of my friends.

• Hog deer’s meat has entered the local cuisine as ‘never before’ in Assam. The reason: poaching in the flooded Kaziranga. As I write this column, already 518 hog deers are killed alongwith 14 one-horned rhinos this monsoon because of flood and poaching.

• Wildlife Protection Society of India figures show that as many as 188 cases of leopard mortality have been reported in first six months of 2012, of which 81 were cases of poaching.

Enough reasons for why my heart bleeds for India? I offer another reason – our dwindling wildlife and diminishing forest cover. It is only too obvious. We know that even our holy rivers Ganga and Yamuna are heavily polluted and the money earmarked for their cleaning has simply gone down the drain; that ghariyals and dolphins in Ganga have become endangered species and so have our national bird peacock and our national animal, tiger. (Scores of peacocks continue to die mysteriously in Haryana villages in the Aravalis). Vulture is almost extinct in the country and even the common sparrow is at the brink of extinction. We also know that poaching goes on in Corbett, Gir etc. and that many of our national parks don’t really have wild animals left. We know that despite its good intentions, the ‘Project Tiger’ initiative failed to revive the tiger population and after thirty- three years of the Project and an expenditure of billions of rupees, today, we have lesser number of tigers than what we had started with in 1973. We also know that Kaziranga – a world heritage site that hosts two-thirds of the world's Great One-horned Rhinoceroses – is flooded almost every monsoon, and that India’s forest cover has further declined this year.

Everything is so obvious. Our concern for the environment ends with a debate on the developing versus developed nation’s requirement. We forget that deforestation is a major concern in developing countries than in the developed countries. (In the course of the last 8,000 years, the earth’s forest cover has been reduced by almost half from 62 million square km to 33 million square km, and much of this loss has occurred in the last three decades). The government acknowledges that climate change will have an adverse impact on India’s forest cover. Yet, disappointingly in the last 11 years, 8,640 sq km of forests were cleared for non-forest use in our country and if reports are to be believed, compensatory afforestation, meant to revive degraded forests and to replace forests lost to industrial projects, is not working.

Isn’t this an alarming situation given the fact that forests have the highest species diversity and endemism of any terrestrial ecosystem in the world?

Now consider the last week’s developments in our forests:
• Hog deer’s meat has entered the local cuisine as ‘never before’ in Assam. The reason: poaching in the flooded Kaziranga. As I write this column, already 518 hog deers are killed alongwith 14 one-horned rhinos this monsoon because of flood and poaching.

• Wildlife Protection Society of India figures show that as many as 188 cases of leopard mortality have been reported in first six months of 2012, of which 81 were cases of poaching.

• A leopard strays into the shelf of a shop in Odisha’s Sonepur district. It is captured without the use of a tranquiliser dart — the standard procedure prescribed by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) — and put in a cage. Not accustomed to being in the public glare, it repeatedly banged itself against the sides of the cage and suffered injuries when it was reportedly forced to entertain senior district officials and local residents for four hours, before being finally handed over to the Nandankanan Zoo.

• Four tigers, including three cubs, died in the Corbett national park since June 7 – a fact denied by the forest officials. The same officers had egg on their faces when a forensic examination indicated that contrary to their claims of a jackal, a tigress was killed in the park about a month ago. Reportedly, forest officials had even found clothes, an empty box of sweets and ash at the Bijrani range deep inside the reserve but tended to ignore such circumstantial evidences.

I hope that I don’t take sides. There is a certain degree of truth when the forest officials claim that rumours are spread by people with vested interests to demoralize the officials.
But what should we say about the officials harassing the leopard in the cage? How can we justify poaching? Why should the forest officials overlook the circumstantial evidence to call a tiger, a jackal? Why can’t the authorities step up arrangements to ensure that endangered animals are not killed because of floods? Why can’t the officials determine the cause of the deaths of the peacocks?

We know that even our sanctuaries face acute shortage of staff, vehicles, radio sets and other tools of management. Isn’t it time we not just think over it…than keep lamenting about the state of our jungles and wildlife? Perhaps a little resolve will help.

PS: The killing of cattle heads in a bone crushing factory in village Joga in Punjab triggered unprecedented violence last month and curfew had to be imposed in Mansa and Sangrur districts. The public anguish compelled the authorities to act and book the culprits, and make the Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal announce setting up a Cows' Memorial in the factory premises at Joga. Isn’t it time that the people have the same resolve to save our jungles and our ‘bleeding’ wildlife?

(The writer is a New Delhi based senior journalist and film maker)