The Centre has created a 25-year roadmap for Venture Lion that contains no provisions for any such translocation, nine years after the Supreme Court docket gave it a six-month deadline for moving lions from Gujarat to Madhya Pradesh and four years after it assured the apex court that the order could be carried out.
According to sources in the Environment Ministry and Wildlife Institute of India (WII), the Project Lion roadmap will instead focus on “assisted natural dispersal throughout Saurashtra” and possibly to Rajasthan by the time India celebrates its 100th anniversary of independence in 2047.
Satya Prakash Yadav, who led the drafting of the roadmap as extra director basic (Forest) within the Setting Ministry and director in Dehradun-based WII, declined to answer a question from The Indian Specific on whether or not the roadmap would quantity to contempt of court docket.
Shyamal Tikadar, chief wildlife warden of Gujarat, mentioned he would “handle queries solely after the discharge” of the plan.
The preliminary proposal of September 2020 below Venture Lion, which was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on August 15 that 12 months, recognized seven websites, together with three every in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, for relocation.
By August 2021, information present, Gujarat ready a contemporary 10-year roadmap with a finances of Rs 2,000 crore to populate Barda wildlife sanctuary and some different areas, with no provision for shifting lions exterior the state. This plan has been modified at WII right into a 25-year roadmap to facilitate pure dispersal of lions and set up new lion populations inside Gujarat.
In a written reply to a query within the Lok Sabha on Monday, MoS Setting Ashwini Kumar Choubey restricted the scope of assessing the suitability of a brand new habitat for lions to potential websites in Gujarat.
The 25-year roadmap, say sources, envisages a two-pronged dispersal technique for the supply inhabitants in Gir nationwide park throughout Saurashtra: north-west in direction of Barda wildlife sanctuary, the place a brand new inhabitants can be hemmed in by the ocean; and north-east past Rajkot, skirting the Rann of Kutch, and following the Banas river probably into Rajasthan.
“It’s wishful at this stage however we hope that’s how the assisted pure dispersal ought to occur within the subsequent 10-25 years. The preliminary problem is to make the lion cross the Rajkot-Porbandar and Ahmedabad-Rajkot highways by guiding them with feeds to culverts, and many others,” mentioned an official aware about the plan.
“No one will cease the lions in the event that they wish to enter Madhya Pradesh” after they attain Rajasthan, the official mentioned.
Following the relocation of 24 villages from Kuno and the affirmation of an ample prey base, the Centre in 2004 wrote to Gujarat for releasing lions. As Gujarat dragged its toes, the difficulty reached the Supreme Court docket which, in April 2013, set a six-month deadline and constituted an skilled committee for the challenge.
The apex court docket’s order mentioned,“The cardinal difficulty isn’t whether or not the Asiatic lion is a ‘member of the family’ or the pleasure of a State however the preservation of an endangered species for which we now have to use the species greatest curiosity commonplace.”
Gujarat filed a evaluation petition, adopted by a healing petition, which have been dismissed in October 2013 and August 2014, respectively. Then, the state authorities insisted on finishing over 30 research earlier than translocating lions.