PM Modi chairs its first meeting of the Wildlife Board of Directors: History, Role, Impact of the Body | News explained

The last Complete NBWL meeting took place on September 5, 2012, chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the time. The PM is the president of the former NBWL office.

What is the National Wildlife Council?

The current national council for fauna was created in 2003 after changing the 1972 law on wild life (protection).

The NBWL has essentially restructured the Board Indian Board for Wildlife (IBWL), created in 1952. The intention was to give it more teeth by making a statutory body and giving it a more regulatory character to implement the law on the protection of wild life.

The NBWL is the body of the Apex to countries on the questions of wildlife policy, the conservation of fauna and forests, and on the recommendations to set up new national and sanctuar parks.

The NBWL is made up of 47 members with the Prime Minister as President and Minister of the Union, his vice-president. The upper members include the chief of staff of the army; Secretaries of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs and the Ministry of Expenditure of the Ministry of Finance; Three Lok Sabha deputies; a deputy from Rajya Sabha; and the director general of the forest.

Ten environmentalist, eminent environmentalists, environmentalists and environmentalists and five people in the non -governmental sector are also appointed to the board of directors.

The NBWL has a permanent committee, to which are delegated key tasks such as evaluation projects located on forest land inside and around national parks and sanctuaries as well as projects within 10 km from the protected areas. Permanent decisions are recommended that the Ministry of the Environment can prevail.

Why did the board of directors recently face criticism?

Over the past decade, the NBWL has eliminated several development projects in and around fauna habitats, which has led to the controversy and protests of environmentalists. These include the Daudhan du Ken Betwa River Project dam, which will overwhelm nearly 100 m² of the Panna National Park and the Tigers reserve, and an oil exploration project in Vedanta in the huge area of ​​the Hollongapar Sanctuary Gibbon, sheltering the Hoolock Gibbon in the process of Hollongapar. In addition, in 2021, the Galathea bay sanctuary in the Andaman islands and Nicobar, a nesting site for the Turtles de la Mer de Leatherback, was denoted.

After the BJP government came to power in 2014, the NBWL was reconstructed. The move was faced with allegations of dilution of powers, because only three non -governmental members were appointed, one of which was Gujarat Ecological Education and Research Foundation (Geer), an autonomous organization under the Government of Gujarat.

The latest Standing Committee in the UPA era had seven members not linked to the four government experts, and three representatives of non -governmental organizations.

Since 2014, the Standing Committee has held 50 meetings without the required number of conservation experts and non -governmental members.

The Modis meeting in Gir was the 7th NBWL meeting full of the body. Of the previous six, five were chaired by Manmohan Singh and the first was chaired by Atal Bihari Vajpayee on October 15, 2003.

What is the history of the board of directors?

The predecessor NBWLS, the Indian Wildlife Board of Directors, gave birth in March 1952 as the central fauna council. He was appointed IBWL at his first meeting held at the Palais de Lalitha Mahal, Mysore, from November 24 to December 1, 1952. The IBWL was formed to discuss the decline of wild populations.

Sri Jayachamaraja Wadiyar, the Maharaja of Mysore, was his first president. Offering a conference to the centenary celebrations of the birth of Jayachamaraja Wadiyar on February 20, 2020, in Mysore, the chief of the congress, Jairam Ramesh, said that at the first meeting of the IBWL, the board of directors was divided into four committees. These were linked to national parks, trophies and exchanges, union legislation and states and administrative issues.

Ramesh declared in the same conference that the Royal Mysore continued to be the president of the IBWL in the 1950s and 1960s. At an important meeting in February 1961, the Council declared the peacock as the national bird.

The IBWL has helped inaugurate the initial framework and conservation architecture in the country with the support of the Prime Minister of the then Indira Gandhi, who became personal in terms of fauna.

These include setting up the Wild Life Protection Act, 1972, of the creation of the GIR National Park for Asian Lions, declaring the tiger as the national animal, among others.

The Wild Life Protection Act (WLPA) has established the framework of the notification of national parks, provided legal support for the conservation of fauna and housing, the prohibition of hunting and poaching of threatened species and regulated wildlife trade. This also opened the way to Project Tiger in 1973.

In the book Indira Gandhi: a life in nature (2017), Jairam Ramesh writes that IBWL was reconstructed in June 1969 and that Karan Singh, then Minister of Union, Tourism and Civil Aviation, was appointed president. He remained president until 1977. Later, Indira Gandhi became the president of the IBWL, until her death in 1984. This period saw the creation of Keoladeo National Park, Rajasthan, in 1982, and the adoption of the National Wildlife Action Plan in 1983.

For nine years between 1988-1997, no IBWL meeting was summoned. On March 13, 1997, Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda chaired an IBWL meeting, with questions such as the Tiger crisis and the control of poaching and illegal trade on the agenda. Later, by answering a question to Lok Sabha on May 13, 1997 on the long gap in IBWL meetings, then the Minister of the Environment, Saifuddin Soz, said that the meeting could not be held in the last 9 years due to the delay in the finalization of its members as well as changes at ministerial level.

The meetings chaired by Manmohan Singh saw the constitution of the Tiger working group in March 2005, in response to poaching and local extinctions of the tigers.