Wildlife Week — No cause for cheer

Sources said that the two-year time frame set by the Supreme Court for revenue officials to settle the final awards related to protected areas across the country ended last August.

Entrusted with the responsibility of conserving endangered flora and fauna in diverse climatic conditions from the high-rainfall hot spots of Western Ghats to the semi-parched plains of madhya Maharashtra, the wildlife wing currently manages five national parks and 33 wildlife sanctuaries together covering an area of 15323.875 sq km in the State.

If a recently prepared status report on the sanctuaries and national parks in the State is any indicator, Maharashtra’s first tiger project at Melghat and the national parks of Pench, Navegaon (all in Vidarbha) were still to be notified under section 35 (4) of the Wildlife (Protection) Act.

The report underlines the need to amend the original notifications declaring the sanctuaries for many other protected areas. “In some cases we are back to square one,” sources said, pointing to pending revenue inquiries over the decades.

Notifications for a few sanctuaries were found to have ignored private lands and gaothan (village) areas. This, remarked the status report, has defeated the idea of transforming the sanctuary areas into the wilderness areas. Notifications excluding the villages have left no room for settling the claims of the villagers who were needed to be shifted from the core areas of the sanctuary.

The Great Indian Bustard (GIB) and the prestigious Bhimashankar sanctuaries in Solapur-Ahmednagar and Pune district top the list of sanctuaries which are now “back to square one.”

Declared in 1979, the GIB sanctuary has been an intriguing case. Going by the notification, even Solapur city falls under the sanctuary and is needed to be evacuated along with a few other cities, towns and villages spread over 8496 44 sq km to create the “wilderness area.”

This had led to a furore in the region and Dehradun-based Indian Wildlife Institute had recommended heavy reduction in the sanctuary area, resizing it to a mere 400 sq km.

Incidentally, the GIB sanctuary, as it stands today, alone accounts for over 55 per cent of the total sanctuary and national park areas of Maharashtra. Yet the GIB sanctuary statistics are interesting. Over 88 per cent of the notified sanctuary area are private lands and a major portion of it has been under cultivation. The wildlife wing currently owns only 5.67 per cent of the total notified area.

The sanctuary status report lists as a major hurdle the fact that inquiries into claims of private land owners has come to a standstill.

“GIB sanctuary today is like a honeycomb area for us,” sources said, adding that a two-prong renotification would soon be issued for the sanctuary. In wildlife official circles, the feeling is that revenue authorities should undertake status survey of forest revenue lands. Unchecked encroachments is construed another headache for the foresters.