About the Blog

My blog post are of varied topics ranging from personal experiences, travel, wild life photographs, interesting news, of happenings around the world that catches my fancy. In other words i write about anything when i am in a mood to write

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Reduction of forest cover, Wildlife deaths and poaching – Rambling of a frustrated nature lover



2008 Satellite Imagery
The buzz word these days in India is wild life conservation but then little is being done by the government toward the conservation of wildlife. Projects in the name of development are being schemed and it invariably involves reduction of the forest in various parts of India. The forest cover has drastically reduced in last 8 years and it is evident from the satellite image of the green cover taken in 2008 and 2015.
2015 Satellite Imagery
This in turn has a direct impact on the wildlife as the unhampered space for them keeps shrinking due to the avarice of the humans who continuously keep encroaching into the forest land.
States of Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand, Meghalaya, Kerala, Arunachal Pradesh, Karnataka and Telangana have suffered huge loss of forest cover  .Animals that are affected the most are Elephants , Tigers and Leopards . Elephants keep moving about various forests following a set path for centuries that has been ingrained in their memories and is known as the elephant corridors and due to the encroachment of the forest land and the human habitation coming up on this land blocks the corridor and this is the reason why the elephants keep entering villages and towns. Similarly the reduction of forest causes the predators such as tigers and leopard to move nearer to human habitat as they may have been driven out by stronger animals. Cascading effect of this is increasing human animal conflict in which humans are always the winner.


Next big threat to the wildlife of India is poaching of wildlife and this is on increase due to lack of stringent laws and greed of easy money. Though the government keeps stating that they are doing everything to prevent the threat the ground realities are quite different. Take the case of the National animal tiger... we do have over 50 tigers missing from 2012 till date and their fate is unknown. Quite a lot of the missing tigers are Iconic tigers which have been extensively sighted and photographed by wildlife photographers from all over the world. Sultan, Dendu, Veeru, Jai, Munna are few tigers that were in news as their disappearance were publically noticed since these tigers were from the tourism zone of the wildlife reserve whereas there is hardly any news of the missing tigers which are from the core areas....even the forest department are clueless and a definite number cannot be ascertained and possibly have been poached.

As per various newspapers and the electronic news media there are 12-15 tigers missing from Ranthambore,6 tigers missing from Nagzira including the current heart throb Jai, 3 tigers from Telangana, 10 tigers from Pilibhit UP and from various parts of India for which there is no information unless recorded by wildlife enthusiast.  A tiger cannot be declared dead unless the carcass is found and the tiger mortality count does not consider these missing numbers. Iconic Jai gone missing has garnered so much publicity and you have so many NGO’s, individuals and the FD searching for him, even a reward has been announced by Maharashtra Government for finding him.

In addition to the missing tigers this year has seen a total of 82 tiger deaths as per Wildlife Protection Society of India and this includes mortality, poaching and skin seizures as of July end 2016 as compared to 92 tiger in whole of 2015 ...this is quite depressing especially after having cheered the increase of tigers in the wild to 2226 numbers in the last census.

List of various animals being poached keeps growing and it is quite depressing to read or hear and as a frustrated nature lover i sincerely hope this threat is neutralized at the earliest so as to retain the wild life that is in the forest of India safe.Jai Hind

 PS: Images Courtesy Google Images