Natural victims of development

Book review of 'The Vanishing: India's Wildlife Crisis'

The Vanishing 

India’s Wildlife Crisis 

Prerna Singh Bindra

Penguin Random House; 320 pages; Rs 599

At a time when a national highway is being carved through the Corbett Tiger Reserve and prime tiger habitats of central India will be drowned by the proposed linking of the Ken and Betwa rivers, The Vanishing: India’s Wildlife Crisis by environmental journalist Prerna Singh Bindra examines the increasingly fraught relationship between economic development and conservation practices in India.

Having served on the National Board for Wildlife from 2010 to 2013, the author provides a rather frustrated insider’s view of the politics behind the decision-making, exposing the lack of thought and foresight behind the present flood of approvals for dams, roads and mines. In a sense, the book seems too little, too late. Ms Bindra writes that when she was preparing for a trip to see some of the last remaining great Indian bustards in the wild, it felt as if she were visiting a beloved relative on the deathbed. The lingering, biting melancholy is appropriate. 

Ms Bindra’s critique of the National Board for Wildlife (she calls it the “Notional” Board for Wildlife) is frank and hard-hitting. Decisions regarding environmental clearances are taken in the same amount of time, she writes, that it takes to make instant noodles — two minutes. She describes how she was part of a two-and-a-half hour meeting during which the committee cleared 58 projects, including the sanctioning of a dam that would submerge 82 square km of a wildlife sanctuary in Rajasthan; denotified the entire Trikuta Wildlife Sanctuary in Jammu, and allowed limestone mining in the Son Gharial Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh. 

Often, she writes, the information provided to the committee was incomplete (deliberately so, at times) to fast-track “development” projects. For example, the proposal for the 800 Mw Kol Dam conveniently failed to mention that the project would submerge 125 hectares of the Majathal Sanctuary in Himachal Pradesh, home to the Cheer pheasant, a Schedule One (i.e. legally protected) species like the tiger. At the same time, Ms Bindra avers, half the dam had been constructed and National Thermal Power Corporation had spent Rs 2,197 crore on it before the wildlife clearance had been obtained in 2010! The project was rejected at first. It was sent back for approval in 2013, by which time 80 per cent of the work had been completed.

The depressing state of environmental affairs under the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance went into free fall when the National Democratic Alliance came to power. The new Wildlife Board had only three members (15 are mandated by the Wildlife Protection Act) and it cleared 133 of the 240 projects up for consideration in its very first meeting. Ms Bindra compares this to the committee under the previous government, which cleared 260 projects in five years. 

The author’s frustration is evident; the reader can almost hear her grinding her teeth when she describes a bridge over a Gangetic Dolphin sanctuary that was being designed with speed breakers to prevent accidents with “wild” animals. However, being passionate and frustrated isn’t enough. The Vanishing offers few practical solutions to reverse, or at least mitigate, the damage.  

A 20-page chapter and the Afterword focus on the destructive role of roads in wildlife habitats, but neither offers any suggestions on making non-invasive roads (of which there are several examples worldwide). Elsewhere, Ms Bindra draws attention to biodiverse areas that have been de-notified in the name of development. Rather than worrying about nomenclature, a better solution may be to lobby for better conservation practices in the presently protected areas; simply calling an area “protected” does not make it so. 

Conservationists across the world have noted the beneficial effects of responsible tourism on wild spaces. Yet, the author remains strangely silent on the role tourism can play in stemming the vanishing of our wild spaces. In this context, the author’s conviction that the best way to conserve forests and wildlife is to isolate them, seems unrealistic, unnatural even. After all, men, trees, animals and the earth are bound inextricably together in the same ecosystem. Surely, if human development has been the root cause of the silencing of our wilderness, it must be part of the solution too. 

Ms Bindra herself offers some heart-warming examples, Odisha’s Athgarh Elephant-conflict Mitigation Squad being a case in point. It is a ragtag group of daily wagers employed by the forest department that, with mobile phones and empathy, tries to ensure that humans co-exist peacefully with wild elephants. Many other examples, in this book and beyond, demonstrate the wisdom of rebuilding human relationships with the wild to further the cause of conservation. Relocating villages on the fringes of the forest, something which the author seems to advocate as being good for people as well as the wild, could sever the connection to nature and cause it to become, as Ms Bindra herself bemoans, the “other” in our lives. 

The Vanishing is brave book that exposes the politics behind our country’s environment policies. Readers may get the sense that The Vanishing brings little that is new to the conservationist’s table (except, perhaps, a little more despair), but what it says is important enough to be stated over and over again. Tigers and the pristine wild spaces they inhabit are in less danger from poachers as they are from the government’s obsessive chase for double-digit economic growth. And this chase is going to cost us all dearly.