WILDLIFE CONSERVATION TRUSTMore at http://www.sanctuaryasia.com |Conservation Action
Three hundred and ninety-nine proposed projects pass through
tiger corridors and could/would negatively impact connectivity. The
proponents of 345 of these proposals were clueless about the impact on
wildlife corridors.are often sanctioned as a right and
not a privilege! Roads, railways, power
lines and canals usually require a
narrow strip of land amounting to a
few hectares and this fact is used to
obtain speedy clearances with minimal
due diligence. The negative impacts are
disproportionate to the area diverted,
and those on wildlife connectivity often
range across hundreds of kilometres.
Only a handful of cases involving
roads through iconic landscapes,
have managed to invoke substantial
outcry. Lesser-known corridors are
being severed, with little awareness
or resistence. Expansion of roads
passing through the Kanha-Pench
corridor, Bandipur National Park and
the Kaziranga-Karbi Anglong corridor
have found media coverage and seen
protracted legal battles between the
development agencies and the wildlife
conservation community. The results
have been mixed at best, and project
proponents pressure the system to
dilute mitigation measures, quoting
huge project-cost escalations.
Despite legal protection(see box on
page 64) accorded by way of the 2006
amendments to the Wild Life (Protection)
Act, 1972 (WLPA), rampant road
constructions in critical wildlife habitats
continue apace without wildlife clearances
(see box on page 65). Surprisingly, the
power to protect corridors was invoked
for the very fi rst time in 2015, nine years
after legal protection was provided by
law. The National Tiger Conservation
Authority (NTCA) exercised its powers
to protect corridors in the Kanha-Pench
corridor for the expansion of National
Highway 7 (NH 44). Legal challenges in
a few cases resulted in projects being
trapped in the judicial labyrinth with huge
cost overruns, which are ultimately borne
by the taxpayer (see box on page 65).DIGGING DEEPER
Saving each corridor at the cost of
hundreds of crores of cost overruns and
decade-long legal battles is not the ideal
outcome. Prime Minister Narendra Modi,
in his speech at the Global Tiger Forum,
claimed: “I strongly believe that tiger
conservation, or conservation of nature,
is not a drag on development. Both can
happen in a mutually complementary
manner. All we need is to re-orient our
strategy by factoring in the concerns
of the tiger in sectors where tiger
conservation is not the goal. This is a
diffi cult task but can be achieved. Our
genius lies in ‘smartly’ integrating theABOVE The ecologically-comprehensive map of the entire Central Indian and Eastern Ghats
landscape shows the tiger corridors (in purple) and proposed linear infrastructure (in red).
See http://www.connectivityconservationindia.org for a high-resolution version of the maps.
FACING PAGE An aerial view of the world’s longest and India’s fi rst dedicated and functional
underpass for wildlife on NH7 (44), passing through the Kanha Pench Corridor. An outcome of a
decade-long battle by conservationists.