Listening to Jitendra Patil as he points to images of birds on a computer screen, it is hard to believe that he has spent less time poring over ornithology books and more in front of the control panel of a nuclear plant. Patil, who is an assistant controller at the Narora Atomic Power plant, is just one of the 250-odd strong conservation conscious team that the Nuclear Power Corporation of India (NPCIL) that builds and operates the country’s nuclear power plants, has nurtured over the last year under its Environment Stewardship Program. Come September, Patil and other NPCIL volunteers will don their binoculars to help conservationists monitor different species of birds at Rawatbhata, Kalpakkam and Kudankulam atomic energy plants. “We have trained them to survey in a scientific manner and NPCIL volunteers have shown willingness to take up even bigger areas in the vicinity of the atomic plants and we expect to be able to identify and study change in the number and habitats of different birds,” says Dr Asad Rahmani, Director, Bombay Natural History Society. Nuclear plants have an exclusion zone, an area 1.6-km around them where no activity is permitted. This ‘no man’s land’ is where NPCIL discovered a host of opportunities to conserve fragile habitats. The wide spectrum of locations of these plants ranging, from the semiarid in the case of Rawatbhata and Kakrapara to the coastal ecosystems of Tarapur, Kudankulam and Kalpakkam, is now helping conserve a diverse and significant range of threatened or vulnerable species (see box). “Once in the wetlands in the Narora station we spotted these white and black birds with an unusually long beak. From the way they would dive down and almost skim the water’s surface, we realised they were Indian Skimmers, globally threatened birds!” says A I Siddiqui, an engineer and a deputy general manager with the NPCIL, who was among the first to spend many a mornings in pursuit of these avian wonders. The joy of catching a glimpse of Skimmers in Narora was followed by the thrill of sighting flocks of vultures at the Rawatbhata atomic energy plant last year. “These areas provide seclusion to the birds, that is important to for their foraging, their habitats,” says Neeta Shah, advocacy officer for BNHS’s vulture conservation program. The BNHS was among the first agencies the NPCIL approached to hold workshops to train its volunteers. Other organisations like the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust followed. Beginning with birds, the volunteers are now looking beyond, for instance, at conserving the dolphins in the Ganges. And they have their eyes set on more. “We plan to share the data we collect with national and international agencies. For this we will set up infrastructure to document our findings through photography, on video,” says Siddiqui.
