PM Modi chairs his first Wildlife Board meeting: History, role, impact of the body

The last full-body NBWL meeting was held on September 5, 2012, chaired by then PM Manmohan Singh. The PM is the ex officio chairman of the NBWL.

What is the National Board for Wildlife?

The present-day National Board for Wildlife was created in 2003 after amending The Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972.

The NBWL basically restructured the Indian Board for Wildlife (IBWL), established in 1952. The intent was to give it more teeth by making it a statutory body and giving it a more regulatory character to implement the Wild Life Protection Act.

The NBWL is the country’s apex body on matters of framing wildlife policy, conservation of wildlife and forests, and on giving recommendations to set up new national parks and sanctuaries.

The NBWL consists of 47 members with the Prime Minister as its chairperson and the Union environment minister its vice-chairperson. Senior members include Chief of the Army Staff; secretaries of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Tribal Affairs and the Department of Expenditure of the Ministry of Finance; three Lok Sabha MPs; one Rajya Sabha MP; and the Director General of Forest.

Ten eminent conservationists, ecologists and environmentalists and five persons from the non-governmental sector are also appointed to the board.

The NBWL has a standing committee, to which are delegated key tasks such as appraising projects situated on forest lands inside and around national parks and sanctuaries as well as projects within 10-km of protected areas. The standing committee’s decisions are recommendatory, which the environment ministry can overrule.

Why has the board recently faced criticism?

Over the past decade, the NBWL has cleared several development projects in and around wildlife habitats, leading to controversy and protests from ecologists. These include the Ken Betwa river linking project’s Daudhan Dam, which will submerge nearly 100 sqkm of Panna National Park and Tiger Reserve, and an oil exploration project of Vedanta in the eco-sensitive zone of the Hollongapar Gibbon sanctuary, home to the endangered Hoolock Gibbon, India’s only ape species. Also, in 2021, the Galathea Bay Sanctuary in Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a nesting site of leatherback sea turtles, was denotified.

After the BJP government came to power in 2014, the NBWL was reconstituted. The move faced allegations of dilution of powers, as only three non-governmental members were appointed, of which one was the Gujarat Ecological Education and Research Foundation (GEER), an autonomous body under the Gujarat government.

The last standing committee of the UPA era had seven members not linked to the government — four conservation experts, and three representing non-governmental organisations.

Since 2014, the standing committee has held 50 meetings without the requisite number of conservation experts and non-governmental members.

Modi’s meeting at Gir was the 7th full-body NBWL meeting. Of the previous six, five were chaired by Manmohan Singh and the first one was chaired by Atal Bihari Vajpayee on October 15, 2003.

What is the board’s history?

The NBWL’s predecessor, the Indian Board for Wildlife, took birth in March 1952 as the Central Board for Wildlife. It was named IBWL in its first meeting held at the Lalitha Mahal Palace, Mysore, from November 24 to December 1, 1952. The IBWL was formed to address the decline of wildlife populations.

Sri Jayachamaraja Wadiyar, the Maharaja of Mysore, was its first chairman. Delivering a lecture at the Jayachamaraja Wadiyar Birth Centenary Celebrations on February 20, 2020, in Mysore, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said that during the first IBWL meeting, the board split into four committees. These related to national parks, trophies and trading, union and state legislation, and administrative matters.

Ramesh said in the same lecture that the Mysore royal continued to be the IBWL chairman through the 1950s and 1960s. In an important meeting in February 1961, the board declared the peacock as the national bird.

The IBWL was instrumental in ushering in the initial framework and architecture for conservation in the country with the support of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who took personal interest in issues of wildlife.

These included setting in place the Wild Life Protection Act, 1972, establishment of the Gir National Park for Asiatic Lions, declaring the tiger as the national animal, among others.

The Wild Life Protection Act (WLPA) laid down the framework for notifying national parks, provided a legal backing for wildlife and habitat conservation, banned hunting and poaching of endangered species, and regulated wildlife trade. This also paved the way for Project Tiger in 1973.

In the book Indira Gandhi: A Life in Nature (2017), Jairam Ramesh writes that the IBWL was reconstituted in June 1969 and Karan Singh, the then Union minister of tourism and civil aviation, was appointed its chairman. He remained chairman till 1977. Later, Indira Gandhi became the IBWL chairperson, until her death in 1984. This period saw the establishment of the Keoladeo National Park, Rajasthan, in 1982, and adoption of the National Wildlife Action Plan in 1983.

For nine years between 1988-1997, no IBWL meeting was convened. On March 13, 1997, PM HD Deve Gowda chaired an IBWL meeting, with issues such as ‘tiger crisis’ and ‘control of poaching and illegal trade’ on the agenda. Later, answering a question in Lok Sabha on May 13, 1997 on the long gap in IBWL meetings, then environment minister Saifuddin Soz said, “The meeting could not be held during the last 9 years due to delay in finalisation of its members as well as changes at ministerial level.”

Meetings chaired by Manmohan Singh saw the constitution of the tiger task force in March 2005, in response to poaching and local extinctions of tigers.