By D N Singh
Politics and propaganda are two sides of the same coin, almost. Politicians are seen adept at shifting focus to camouflage a grinding current crisis by re-introducing another. That is politics and no party is free from this pathological pretensions.
With deep concern for the environment it can be said, at a time when the nation is in the grip of severe inflation and a common man’s affordability to purchase is diminished by it, the recent show of ‘Cheetah’ in India has somehow been an eye-sore.
The recent initiative Project Cheetah is obviously done on exchanges but by cost. The project would cost India a whopping Rs. 990 crore and the annual maintenance would be Rs.500 crore per year.
The Cheetah was released on the soils of Gujarat whereas Gujarat’s pride the Gir forest, known for lions, struggling hard to redeem its enviable past.
Not that, cheetah is indispensable as an extinct species from the woods of India but the burden it is going to load on the exchequer raised a logical question.
It was said that Cheetah has become extinct in India since 1952 and since then there had been no initiative to work on that aspect. Which, may be, factually wrong.
However, leaving aside the political tu-tu-mein-mein over it, during the UPA regime there was an initiative on Cheetah but God knows or the concerned politicians know better, what happened to that.
142,500 species in IUCN Red-list
Anyway, coming to the present, in last 500 years, human activities have led to the extinction of over 500 species, and according to one estimation, there are over 142,500 species are in the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s( IUCN) Red list.
Which reveals that it were not big cats or Cheetah’s alone but 26,500 species are in danger of extinction. Which includes the amphibians, conifers, reef-building corals, mammals and birds. Among the suffering nations the name of India is there.
Where are the efforts to conserve back the rapidly extinction of myriad species in India. Why cannot such a fabulous package be earmarked for other important species on the verge of extinction.
Desertification has already left the Indian Cheetah or Pink-headed duck and Great Indian Bustard to near total extinction. Among the other critically endangered species in India are, Indian Asiatic Lion, Bengal Tiger or RBT, snow leopard, Nilgiri Tahr, Kashmiri Red Stag, Black buck and even horned rhinoceros.
According to the IUCN, since 1750, more than double the number of plants, from India, have disappeared. India had a 6.49% of Fauna species in the world. There is no estimation as to what extent the climate change has caused the havoc in depleting untold number of floras and faunas.
