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| 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.
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.
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| 2015 Satellite Imagery |
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
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