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INITIATIVE TO SAVE INDIAN WILDLIFE IN PERIL
I ndia is richly endowed with a wide variety of flora and fauna. There is perhaps no other country in the world that can rival it in biodiversity and natural wealth. With a forest cover of 19 per cent of its total geographical area - of which as much as 11 per cent is good or dense forest, India is home to 350 mammalian, 200 bird and 300 reptilian species. It is the only country to have all the five major vertebrates - the tiger, lion, panther, elephant and the rhino.Although there are as many as 500 protected areas in the country, representing over four per cent of the total forest cover, its wildlife, indeed its biodiversity wealth, is under severe threat today. Threats vary from poaching and illegal trade to dwindling forest cover and habitat thanks to development and population pressures. The ever-increasing demand in wildlife products in the international markets, particularly in South-East Asia, Europe and North America, pose a challenge to the Government and conservationists. Several species, including the tiger, rhino and the elephant, are being slaughtered to feed the lucrative illegal trade in wildlife. WWF-India's wildlife monitoring arm, TRAFFIC-India, says that this trade is next in value only to the narcotics and illegal arms trafficking. The global trade includes at least 40,000 primates, ivory from at least 90,000 African elephants, over a million orchids, four million live birds, 10 million reptile skins, 15 million furs and over 350 million tropical fish. In terms of consumption, the U.S. tops the list. Among the countries exporting wildlife are Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Columbia, Congo, Honduras, Indonesia, Nepal, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and the U.S., besides India. The major wildlife-consuming countries are Canada, China, the European Union, Hong Kong, Japan, North and South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, UK, US, UAE and Yemen. WWF-India has over the years established nature clubs for the youth and employed educational and communication methods in its attempts to spread mass awareness about environment issues and nature protection. Now, in a unique and perhaps yet unattempted programme, it has embarked on a country-wide grassroots movement to grapple with the continued onslaught on our wildlife. Initiated in collaboration with the Nehru Yuva Kendra Sangathan, (NYKS), Wildlife Watch - as the programme is called, will involve the people in monitoring the wildlife situation at the field level. The initiative essentially aims to involve people and empower them to play an active role locally, support the government by supplementing and complementing their actions, and establish links between local and national organisations. It is believed that the initiative will help in bringing together like-minded people and agencies, and creating local pressure groups for timely action by the agencies concerned. The Wildlife Watch initiative has been conceived to take advantage of the commonalities between NYKS and WWF-India. The initiative entails designating NYKS's District Youth Coordinators (DYCs) as Wildlife Watch Coordinators (WWCs) in their respective districts. Of the 571 districts in the country, 273 have been identified as important for wildlife conservation. The ultimate aim is to cover these districts in a planned manner. In the initial phase, the initiative is being taken up in 12 districts. These include Khammam (Andhra Pradesh), Jodhpur (Rajasthan), Ropar (Punjab), Chandel (Manipur), Dhubri (Assam), Katni and Seori (Madhya Pradesh), Kendrapara (Orissa), Kozhikode (Kerala), Pithoragarh and Dehradun (Uttar Pradesh), and Siliguri/New Jalpaiguri (West Bengal). The Wildlife Watch initiative assumes added importance in the light of the series of poaching incidents that have rocked the country in the past two years. In order to maintain a close watch on the wildlife situation and to prevent such incidents in the future, the initiative will be expanded to cover about 100 districts by the year 2000. In keeping with the participatory approach, the initiative will be undertaken in close cooperation of partner NGOs, Government agencies and others. These include, among others, the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History (SACON), Coimbatore; Bombay Natural History society (BNHS), Mumbai; Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun; Aligarh Muslim University, Department of Wildlife; and the Environmental Planning and Coordination Organisation, Bhopal. To effectively implement the initiative, the Wildlife Watch coordinators and volunteers will be trained and provided orientation in aspects of Indian wildlife, legislation and local need-based problems. Each training/orientation workshop will also include issues such as sensitive information handling and media relations. The first such orientation workshop was held in New Delhi at the WWF-India Secretariat on July 30-31. The programme is being implemented in three phases. While the first phase will focus on awareness generation, the second will be the implementation phase. The third phase would really be keeping track of the feedback/information coming from the field through reports from the district collectors, media, WWF-India Field and State Offices and DYCs. Inputs: Courtesy WWF-India
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