The Wildlife India

Early Tuesday morning ( August 12) , the sleepy village of Karira in Rajasthan’s Sawai Madhopur district found itself at the centre of an unusual wildlife drama. Nestled in the buffer zone of Ranthambhore National Park, the village is used to the occasional leopard sighting or tiger rumor, but this time the visitor was an animal none of the villagers had ever seen up close — a cheetah. And not just any cheetah. This was Jwala, a radio-collared female brought from Namibia in 2022 and currently part of India’s ambitious cheetah introduction project at Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh. Somehow, she had strayed nearly 180 kilometres from her designated home and ended up in the heart of rural Rajasthan. Cheetah in the Village The first hints of trouble came at dawn, when villagers awoke to find goats bleating unusually as if sounding alert .The villagers were terrified after they spotted an animal — much slimmer than a leopard, with tear-like markings down its face — had been seen in ...

 A quarter century old railway project continues to pose a threat to the Western Ghats , one of the eight biodiversity “hottest hotspots” of the world. Like many other jungles of India, the Railways intend to cut a large number of trees as it proposes a 164.44 km Hubballi-Ankola railway project (HARP) through a dense  forest patch , also a corridor for two iconic species- the tiger and the elephant. In fact, not one but three elephant corridors will be impacted. In the times when climate change is a reality,   the governments- both the centre and the state- push the project preferring economics over environment.    Tiger Conservation Of Entire Western Ghats At Stake The railway project, conceived in 1998, is proposed to pass the forests between two major protected areas — Kali Tiger Reserve and Bedthi Conservation Reserve. More than 80% of the  railway line has to pass through the dense forest lands of the Western Ghats, and this entails the diversion ...

    Promises made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Cop26 climate change summit in Glasgow in November 2021 seem to contradict actions taken by his government back home. Amidst protest and litigation, millions of trees are proposed to be axed for the projects including coal, diamond mining   and river linking projects in Chattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. After protests against Ken Betwa River linking project threatening the very existence of a tiger reserve  and   voices against diamond mining in Madhya Pradesh, indigenous people in Hansdeo Arand , one of the richest bio-diverse Indian forests located in Chattisgarh, hold protests to save their “home”- a pristine virgin Sal forest. An estimated four and half lakh trees are expected to be axed to make way for coal mining in the jungle, an important wildlife corridor which is also the origin of the river Hansdeo. All this is happening when Climate Change has become a reality.  The Environmental W...