Conservation

The rupees 446 crore, seven-year loan to fund the Odisha (Orissa) Forest Sector Development Project (OFSDP) from the Japanese government ended in March 2013. Its legacy, says the author, will not be easy to understand.

I have spent the last five years doing field work in many parts of the Pakke Tiger Reserve. I often rue the fact that I have never seen a tiger, while other researchers have seen tigers from their base at anti-poaching camps. Even visitors who come for a quick visit have been lucky enough to have sightings!

Try as I might, I could not see the elephants. I had a great vantage point on the upper-most level of the tall Sairandhri watch tower. I could hear the elephants feeding as they snapped off branches and bamboo stalks.

Some 20 years ago, on a November morning, we arrived at a grassland patch or kancha as they are called, near Hyderabad, just as dawn was breaking. A few wisps of clouds could be seen above the dimly lit grassland, which was coming alive to the calls of bushchats and the restless fluttering of lapwings.

In the last few months, there has been widespread debate in India on the role of tourism in conservation. Nirmal Kulkarni shows us how Wildernest, a tourism venture, has become a hardcore conservation project that has saved species and restored critical wildlife corridors at the tri-junction of Goa, Maharashtra and Karnataka.

Hundreds of birds – Spot-billed Pelicans, Grey Herons, Asian Openbills and Black- headed Ibises – lie dead on the floor. Scattered among the carcasses of birds are smaller mammals – monitor lizards, Indian hares, jungle cats, palm civets and even jackals. This is Puducherry or Pondicherry, specifically, a small stretch of road between Villianur and Koodapakkam. S. Prasad, writes here of thousands…

Degradation of wildlife corridors and fragmentation of natural habitats on account of agriculture, human settlements, roads, mines, encroachments and other developmental activities, affect elephants and other species that use such forest corridors to migrate. Paramesha Mallegowda, a researcher from the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), has been involved in research on…

Artist, naturalist and photographer, Vishwajeet Naik is all these things and more. But above all, writes Bittu Sahgal, he is passionate about birds, an involvement gifted to him by his father, Dr. Sattyasheel Naik, an orthopaedic surgeon and ornithologist, who mentored him along his avian adventures.

"Given the trauma that the tiger is currently facing with poachers, miners, dam builders and more chipping away at its future, perhaps it is time to revisit and article that Valmik Thapar and Bittu Sahgal wrote in 1996, and which was published in Sanctuary Asia. If anything, today, the tiger is in a worse position than it was. And our prescriptions for its survival remain…

An answer to the now deafening call of tiger vulnerability and poaching, the Save Our Tigers campaign represents common ground between all groups of Indian society and the economy. An Aircel-NDTV initiative, knowledge-driven by Sanctuary Asia and implemented by Hemendra Kothari’s Wildlife Conservation Trust (WCT), the Tigerthon lasted 12 full hours on July 15, 2012 and collected over a million…