A sub-committee of the Planning Commission has suggested merging the three centrally-sponsored schemes relating to wildlife – Project Tiger, Project Elephant and the Integrated Development under Wildlife Habitat – into a single wildlife protection programme. This will be in line with the Planning Commission’s policy of reducing the number of centrally-sponsored schemes, to avoid duplication of effort and to capitalise on synergies. Earlier, the Commission gave similar advice to the agriculture ministry, which operates more than a score of centrally-sponsored schemes. On wildlife, the Plan panel has argued that the amalgamation of the different schemes is advisable in view of the pressing need to save other endangered species specific to states, such as lions and rhinos.
As might have been expected, the proposal has not gone down well with tiger lovers, including non-official members of the National Board for Wildlife, who feel that merging different schemes would adversely affect efforts to conserve the country’s national animal. They fear that, post-merger, nearly 20 per cent of the central funds for wildlife conservation would get diverted to safeguarding state-specific animals, giving the states’ greater control over conservation programmes; this may divert attention from the tiger, which currently forms the prime focus of animal conservation efforts.
The Planning Commission’s proposition is not without merit. All animals, and not tigers alone, constitute the Earth’s animal biodiversity. Besides, single species-based conservation has not been without glitches. Despite Project Tiger being in place since 1973, the population of these big cats had dipped from over 3,000 in the mid-1980s to less than half that number by 2006. Following the subsequent revamping of Project Tiger, the tiger population is reckoned to have rebounded from 1,411 in 2006 to 1,706 in 2010, but the “tiger occupancy area” (read habitat) is estimated to have contracted during the same period from 93,600 sq km to 72,800 sq km, increasing man-animal conflict. At the same time, several other animals – notably lions, leopards, Asiatic black bears and the one-horned rhinoceros – are turning scarce. There are hardly any lions left outside the Gir forest reserve. Leopards are being killed in large numbers every year; nearly 269 deaths having been recorded in the first nine months of the current year. Besides, more than 2,000 of the surviving 2,350-odd one-horned rhinos are now in a single habitat, Assam’s Kaziranga National Park. Any calamity there can threaten the survival of this magnificent animal species. It is, therefore, prudent to spread out these animals into wider tracts to allow them more space to roam, mate and live. This is needed also to prevent the in-breeding that invariably leads to the downfall of a species.
However, critics would argue that for all practical purposes lions in India have been mainly confined to Gir for decades, as rhinos to Kaziranga. Nothing new has happened to threaten their existence. Indeed, even without merging different schemes, efforts have been made to move some of the Gir lions to Madhya Pradesh, and nothing prevents the same being done with rhinos. As for leopards, they get refuge in tiger reserves too. The merger of different schemes is a general efficiency measure that has been recommended periodically for at least two decades, and it is indeed true that there are far too many centrally-sponsored schemes. But if a merger is going to put the tiger population at risk, it should be thought through very carefully.
