THE GREAT WILD HOPE

India wakes up to the need for mitigation measures such as underground transmission lines and animal overpasses to curb wildlife mortality, even if it means driving up solar energy and highway costs

- ROHIT PARIHAR

IN 2018, THE NUMBER OF WILD ANIMALS LOST in road and rail accidents was 161. Two hundred elephants have been killed in rail accidents in three decades, 65 in the past three years. Power line collisions have killed one per cent of the total sarus crane population in India. Leftover food dumped from the pantry cars of trains has resulted in accidents killing over 100 animals, including five tigers and seven leopards, at the Ratapani Tiger Reserve station in Sehore district over the past five years.

These are the chilling statistics the Wildlife Protection Society of India offers. As urbanisation and rapidly growing infrastructure edge out animal habitat, animal-human conflict and wildlife mortality have only risen. Taking cognisance of this, the Supreme Court, on April 21, 2021, made discretionary mitigation measures mandatory in developing linear infrastructure that poses a potential risk to wildlife and environment. The order, by a three-judge bench comprising the then Chief Justice S.A. Bobde and Justices A.S. Bopanna and V. Ramasubramanium, came in response to a public interest litigation filed by the noted environmentalist and ex-bureaucrat M.K. Ranjitsinh two years ago. Upholding the cause of environmental justice, the judges observed that it could be achieved “only if we drift away from the principle of ‘anthropocentrism’, which is human interest-focused, to ‘ecocentrism’ which is nature-centred, where humans are part of nature and non -humans have intrinsic value. In other words, human interest does not take automatic precedence and humans have obligations to non-humans independently of human interest”. The National Wildlife Action Plan and the centrally-sponsored Integrated Development of Wildlife Habitats Scheme, it noted, were already based on the principle of ecocentrism.