Whose Right of Way?

“American roads are good not because America is rich, but America is rich because American roads are good.” These words, attributed to John F. Kennedy, take pride of place on a wall in the office of the Union Minister of Road Transport and Highways.

An aerial view of the world’s longest and India’s first dedicated and functional underpass for wildlife on NH7 (44), passing through the Kanha Pench Corridor. An outcome of a decade-long battle by conservationists. (Photo: Sourced from internet)

A wildlife biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Trust and a member of the IUCN WCPA Connectivity Conservation Specialist Group Milind Pariwakam, and President of the Wildlife Conservation Trust and member of the National Tiger Conservation Authority Dr. Anish Andheria, believe that a well-planned policy framework could offer a win-win solution for India’s wildlife corridors and the surface transportation sector.

Transportation networks, which move goods and people, are vital to the growth of any economy, and India is no exception. Successive governments have consequently been speeding up linear infrastructure projects as never before, including roads, railways, power lines and irrigation canals.

Roads in India are being built at the rate of 21 km./day and the current government has an ambitious target of increasing this to 44 km./day. Railway networks are being broad-gauged and plans are on for new alignments and bullet trains. Power lines, pipelines and irrigation canals are also being pushed through with haste. Some are proposed through our Protected Areas (PAs), but most will in any event slice wildlife corridors and biodiversity-rich habitats to form insurmountable barriers.

Forests, wetlands, rivers, lakes, mangroves and shores are infrastructure in their own right, with major, but often hidden, economic benefits. Identifying such vulnerable assets in advance, would enable project proponents to incorporate mitigation measures that satisfy both, conservation and infrastructure goals.

Linear infrastructure projects require environment, forest and wildlife clearances, a process meant to serve as a safeguard for environmental protection, which is largely diluted by categorising the projects as being of ‘public importance’. These clearances are often sanctioned as a right and not a privilege! Roads, railways, power lines and canals usually require a narrow strip of land amounting to a few hectares and this fact is used to obtain speedy clearances with minimal due diligence. The negative impacts are disproportionate to the area diverted, and those on wildlife connectivity often range across hundreds of kilometres.

Only a handful of cases involving roads through iconic landscapes, have managed to invoke substantial outcry. Lesser-known corridors are being severed, with little awareness or resistence. Expansion of roads passing through the Kanha-Pench corridor, Bandipur National Park and the Kaziranga-Karbi Anglong corridor have found media coverage and seen protracted legal battles between the development agencies and the wildlife conservation community. The results have been mixed at best, and project proponents pressure the system to dilute mitigation measures, quoting huge project-cost escalations.

Despite legal protection accorded by way of the 2006 amendments to the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972 (WLPA), rampant road constructions in critical wildlife habitats continue apace without wildlife clearances. Surprisingly, the power to protect corridors was invoked for the very first time in 2015, nine years after legal protection was provided by law. The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) exercised its powers to protect corridors in the Kanha-Pench corridor for the expansion of National Highway 7 (NH 44). Legal challenges in a few cases resulted in projects being trapped in the judicial labyrinth with huge cost overruns, which are ultimately borne by the taxpayer.

Three hundred and ninety-nine proposed projects pass through tiger corridors and could/would negatively impact connectivity. The proponents of 345 of these proposals were clueless about the impact on wildlife corridors.

Ecologically comprehensive map of the entire Central Indian and Eastern Ghats landscape shows the tiger corridors (in purple) and proposed linear infrastructure (in red). See www.connectivityconservationindia.org for a high-resolution version of the maps. (Photo: WCT)

Digging Deeper

Saving each corridor at the cost of hundreds of crores of cost overruns and decade-long legal battles is not the ideal outcome. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his speech at the Global Tiger Forum, claimed: “I strongly believe that tiger conservation, or conservation of nature, is not a drag on development. Both can happen in a mutually complementary manner. All we need is to re-orient our strategy by factoring in the concerns of the tiger in sectors where tiger conservation is not the goal. This is a difficult task but can be achieved. Our genius lies in ‘smartly’ integrating the tiger and wildlife safeguards in various infrastructures at the landscape level…”.

WCT therefore set out to achieve precisely what the Prime Minister proposed – to evolve policy solutions to integrate safeguards for wildlife at a landscape scale.

We soon identified two key problems. First, most corridors were not spatially defined and therefore remain unknown. This situation is further accentuated by a dearth of quality maps in the public domain. Secondly, timely information on proposed project was missing in the public domain, which negatively impacted specific corridors, thus hindering our ability to implement legally-mandated safeguards on time and at minimum cost.

Our team comprised connectivity scientists, landscape ecologists and policy professionals who found that existing government databases on project clearances were a gold mine of spatial and temporal information. For the Central Indian and Eastern Ghats tiger landscape, the team managed to put together datasets of (i) Protected Area (PA) maps, (ii) forest cover, (iii) information on mammal species outside PAs (using WCT’s multi-year camera trapping exercises outside PA networks), (iv) the NTCA-Wildlife Institute of India (WII) database, part of the three All India Tiger Estimation exercises carried out, and (v) information on tiger dispersal using fecal DNA.

ABOVE LEFT An eye-level view of the ‘openness’ of one of the largest wildlife mitigation structures on NH7. The ample clearance/openness is expected to facilitate the movement of multiple species of wild animals. (Photo: Aditya Joshi)
ABOVE RIGHT One of the authors with possibly the first recorded evidence of a tiger pugmark below one of the wildlife mitigation structures along NH7. (Photo: Aditya Joshi)

Relying on these datasets and using the latest GIS modelling techniques, our team constructed an ecologically comprehensive map of tiger corridors across the Central Indian and the Eastern Ghats landscapes, across 11 states, to cover a network of 191 PAs, of which at least 145 either harbour or have the potential to harbour tigers.

Through this comprehensive mapping exercise, we identified a minimum of 150 ‘legally explicit‘ tiger corridors between PAs in the Central Indian and Eastern Ghats landscape, and discovered that only 26 of these were actually identified and tagged by the state and central governments. We were able to obtain data on a staggering 1,699 linear infrastructure project proposals across 11 states, which were overlaid on corridor maps. 399 of these passed through tiger corridors that could/would negatively impact connectivity. The proponents of 345 of these proposals were clueless about the impact on wildlife corridors. In some instances linear projects bisected corridors, where ecologically viable alternatives were not possible. A north-south road, for instance, would bisect an east-west corridor whether it was moved to the right or left of the proposed alignment. The only plausible solution in such cases was to either not build that road, or deploy functional, scientifically-valid mitigation measures.

While the WCT policy framework refers to Central India and the Eastern Ghats, the principles can be adapted and applied to other critical landscapes, across biogeographic zones.

Working toward policy and landscape scale solutions

Realising the scale of the problem and the potential of these landscape maps to provide a win-win solution for both conservation and development, a report with large-scale maps was sent out to statutory bodies, ministries (environment, highways, canals, powerlines and railways), Niti Aayog, NTCA, State Forest Departments and members of civil society. The detailed report and associated maps are freely available in the public domain at www.connectivityconservationindia.org.

It is notable that the collective budgets of the 399 proposed projects examined in the Central Indian and the Eastern Ghats landscape totalled around Rs.1,30,000 crores. Incorporating ecologically meaningful mitigation measures at the planning stage would reduce project costs by hundreds of crores avoiding inevitable cost-escalations caused by legally justifiable litigation. Additionally, connectivity for several endangered species of wildlife could be safeguarded at a landscape scale.

This last point is vital because failure to protect wildlife corridors would amount to ‘islanding’ biodiverse-rich habitats, vital to larger national interests, such as water and food security and carbon sequestration, in an era of galloping climate emergency.
While the WCT policy framework refers to Central India and the Eastern Ghats, the principles can be adapted and applied to other critical landscapes, across biogeographic zones.

Scientists across the globe now recognise that biodiversity and climate change are conjoined twins. One cannot be tempered, if the other is not curbed. Wild species have evolved over millions of years and have a much older claim to their right of way over wildlife corridors than the legal right of way, often wrongly, claimed by the infrastructure development agencies. That is the reality that the infrastructure developers must sit together with the conservation fraternity to accept as a part and parcel of national development.

This article was first published in the Sanctuary Asia magazine, June 2019 issue.

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About the Authors: Milind Pariwakam is a wildlife biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Trust and a member of the IUCN WCPA Connectivity Conservation Specialist Group.

President of the Wildlife Conservation Trust (WCT), which is involved in several wildlife conservation projects in central India, Dr. Anish Andheria’s focus research area has been predator-prey relationships. An accomplished naturalist and wildlife photographer, he has authored several scientific papers and books.