Common Ground
For decades, conservation efforts in the country treated humans as encroachers in forests. Gradually, that has been changing.
Ishan Kukreti
Design | Rubin D'Souza
One day in the early 1990s, two scholars met in the auditorium of the Wildlife Institute of India in Dehradun, for its annual research seminar.
One, Raghu Chundawat, a returning alumnus, was a pioneer in India in radio telemetry – the technique of using radio collars on animals to track their migratory behaviour. Chundawat had completed his PhD on snow leopards in Ladakh in the late 1980s, and was in the institute to share some results from his latest project – a wildlife management plan for the then state of Jammu and Kashmir.
The other was a PhD scholar named Yash Veer Bhatnagar, who had by this time spent around three years in the Hemis National Park in Ladakh, studying the snow leopard and its interaction with local communities.
During Chundawat’s presentation and conversations with him later, Bhatnagar realised that there was a fundamental problem with India’s approach to conservation in the region.
The approach was in line with the still dominant model of conservation in India, which focuses on creating “protected areas”, such as wildlife sanctuaries and national parks. Humans are kept out of these areas, and animals are ostensibly protected within them.
But after looking at Chundawat’s maps of biodiversity distribution in Jammu and Kashmir, “I remember thinking, these animals are all over the place, even outside the Protected Areas,” Bhatnagar said.
National parks like Hemis were “the result of the earlier conservation ethos that emerged in India in the 1970s,” Bhatnagar added. “The fact that the animals were not restricted to the boundaries of these areas points to the limitations of that model.”
Chundawat explained that when these protected areas were created, “the philosophy that everyone believed was that tigers and wildlife need inviolate spaces. The problem was that we didn’t have any conservation-oriented research. So how big the parks were supposed to be, we had no information.”
The meeting between Chundawat and Bhatnagar would prove to be a significant moment for the evolution of conservation sciences in India. Bhatnagar and two colleagues, MD Madhusudan and Charudutt Mishra, went on to create an organisation called Nature Conservation Foundation in 1996, which would seek to address the problem with the field, with a particular focus on the snow leopard.
Their approach, which looked at a landscape in totality, and included people in conservation efforts, formed part of a still-evolving strain of conservation called landscape-based conservation. While this approach had had proponents across the world for around two decades, Bhatnagar and his colleagues were its pioneers in India.
This model treats landscapes as mosaics shared by both people and wildlife, and stresses on the need to improve livelihood as a basic tenet of conservation. Despite its radical departure from earlier modes, this approach has quickly gained acceptance among the scientific community – though it has yet to see wider expansion on the ground in India, owing to bureaucratic hurdles and a paucity of funds.
As with any science, conservation in India evolved through a variety of approaches over the years. The story of Indian conservation as we know it today began exactly 50 years ago, when the Indian government passed the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972; a year later, the government launched Project Tiger, the single biggest conservation effort in the world at the time. But its roots go deeper, to the time when India’s forests were the domain of maharajas and British administrators.
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