What is meant by Critical wildlife habitat? Discuss the challenges present in the declaration of critical wildlife habitat and suggest preventive measures to overcome it. (200 Words)
Refer - The Indian Express
Enrich the answer from other sources, if the question demands.
IAS Parliament 4 years
KEY POINTS
· The COVID-19 pandemic has driven migrant workers back to their villages, including many situated inside or on the fringes of forested areas, including sanctuaries and national parks. It pertains to the declaration of a Critical Wildlife Habitat (CWH), which a PIL in the Bombay High Court seeks to get the department to urgently notify.
· CWH is a provision under the Forest Rights Act, 2006 (FRA). The Act primarily focuses on recognising the historically-denied rights of forest-dwellers to use and manage forests.
Challenges
· The first and biggest illegality is that the process of recognition of rights under the FRA is incomplete. The case of Melghat Wildlife Sanctuary, which has been pursued most vigorously by the FD, is quite revealing.
· A monitoring committee set up by the Tribal Development Department (TDD) — which included some of us — has found that many villages were resettled when they had rights claims pending, others had their claims illegally rejected or incompletely granted, and several had not even applied till this controversy erupted.
· The constitution of the expert committees is faulty. They do not contain expert social scientists familiar with the area. Wildlife enthusiasts are sometimes substituted for experts in life sciences.
· The criteria being used by the committees to determine the threat of “irreversible damage” to wildlife are quite extreme, and are not supported by any consensus even among ecologists. The FRA, in fact, begins by recognising that forest dwellers “are integral to the very survival and sustainability of the forest ecosystem.
Measures
· A careful reading of the CWH provisions in the FRA shows that it is open to both possibilities, as long as they are arrived at through a rigorous and participatory process.
· It requires setting up a multi-disciplinary expert committee, including representatives from local communities. It also requires determining — using “scientific and objective criteria” and consultative processes — whether, and where in the PA, the exercise of forest rights will cause irreversible damage and threaten the existence of important wildlife species.
· It then requires determining whether coexistence is possible through a modified set of rights or management practices. Only if the multi-stakeholder expert committee agrees that co-existence or other reasonable options are not possible, should relocation be taken up, again with informed consent of the concerned gram sabhas.
K. V. A 4 years
Pls review
IAS Parliament 4 years
Good attempt. Keep Writing.
