The recent approvals granted by the National Board for Wildlife permitting ecologically destructive activities within national parks and sanctuaries have generated a lot of concern. A significant part of the concern is with respect to the timing, and whether it is appropriate to approve projects during the COVID-19 lockdown. Other larger issues of concern point to the fact that the NBWL has become a “clearing house” for projects, where, irrespective of its impact on wildlife, projects are approved and that the decisions of the board are guided more by economic, strategic, political and other considerations and rarely in terms of wildlife conservation. The NBWL is the apex body for conservation of wildlife and its habitat, and the NBWL’s role is of critical importance to ensure the long-term protection of India’s biodiversity.
Wide participation at the grassroots is an important prerequisite for effective documentation, management and monitoring of biological resources. India has long recognised the need for the documentation of biodiversity and associated knowledge.
Farmlands and farm practices are increasingly getting homogenised due to the all-pervasive intensification of agriculture. Often blurred in this production maximising system is the biodiversity in and around farms—both wilderness and agricultural—that dots farm neighbourhoods. Unfortunately, unlike biodiversity associated with more recognisable landscapes, such as protected areas and nature reserves, loss of biodiversity in and around farms due to agricultural intensification has not gained as much attention as it deserves. This paper highlights the potential roles that it can play to address challenges of food and nutritional security and securing rural livelihoods by drawing upon specific case studies across India and elsewhere.
In India, mainstream environmentalism and development situate biodiversity conservation and human well-being as mutually exclusive goals. This is contentious because a large section of India’s population has inextricable economic, social, political, and cultural linkages with its rich biodiversity. The 4-Cs framework is suggested to address human well-being within the purview of ecosystem assessment and management by incorporating multiple social-ecological variables. Examples of domains, attributes, and indicators of human well-being are examined in the context of the Forest Rights Act (2006). Further, the framework can be tailor-made to guide conservation practitioners, establish the discourse on human well-being in the field of biodiversity science, and broaden the normative understanding of human well-being as an essential outcome of biodiversity conservation.
“Sustainable development” and “sustainability” may be among the most used phrases across discourses, both mainstream and radical, on “development.” As in any conceptualisation, disciplinary frameworks and value judgments matter here as well.
Whether the “practising Adivasi” or the practitioners of traditional knowledge are subjects of different rationality is examined here. Through a study of the Lepcha traditional practices in the east Himalayas, it is argued that the practising Adivasi or indigenous peoples are indeed presenting empirical sites of “ethico-political articulations,” or “Ecosophy,” a term Félix Guattari uses in The Three Ecologies to advocate a normative theory and a “futuristic” approach. The study affirms that the recalcitrant Adivasis, who, as groups of our times, are presenting us with life-sustaining zones of pristine biodiversity as alternatives to the nature-devouring, deep industrialisation models of the modern state.
Eco-Sensitive Zones are being touted by the government as transition zones around protected forest areas, that would minimise forest depletion and man-animal conflict. This report, from the Corbett National Park, suggests how ESZs marginalise local interests and would prove detrimental to conservation in the long run.
Preserving the fragile ecosystem of the mountains and its rich biodiversity requires people's initiative, involvement and commitment. Women in a village in the Kumaon Hills faced with the gradual destruction of the forests around have come together to protect and nurture them.
Biotechnology was created within a politics of anxiety and desire in India. The paper attempts to understand the social construction of biotechnology. It locates biotechnology within the wider debates on development and describes an orchestra of positions each of which captures one part of the debate.
