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It was a chilly February day. Dangwen and his wildlife monitoring team patrolled along the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. The river was frozen solid, easy for poachers to walk over. That day, they encountered 220 blue sheep, five white-lipped deer, and a line of otter footprints. On the infrared camera traps that they had set up throughout the valley, three snow leopards appeared, a mother and two cubs – and the cubs had grown much bigger than three months earlier. Dangwen comes from Yunta, a village located in Sanjiangyuan, Qinghai Province on the Tibetan Plateau. Sanjiangyuan, is a 400,000 km² area that serves as an important habitat for rich and unique biodiversity and a watershed of the three largest rivers in Asia, the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong, which serve a billion people downstream. Dangwen isn’t officially a researcher or an activist. But he has taken upon himself the task of monitoring local wildlife with a team of other villagers, as part of a conservation proje...

With the adoption of GST, a clear road map is needed to simplify the indirect tax regime In a landmark reform, India today switches to a new indirect tax system, the Goods and Services Tax. The GST subsumes the multiple Central, State and local taxes and cesses levied on goods and services, unifying the country into a single market, thereby making it easier to do business and ensure tax compliance. This will attract investors and more efficiently mop up revenues for the exchequer. The reform has been years in the making, and having shown the political will to finally pull it off, the Central government must work with the States to chart a road map to simplify the tax regime. Currently there are multiple tax rates ranging from 0% to 28%, plus a cess on some products, creating incentives for lobbying and rent-seeking. The level of preparedness for the new tax system too is not optimal, with sections of industry, trade as well as the bureaucracy visibly anxious about several aspects of...

The Maharashtra High Court, today (June 29), quashed and set aside “shoot-at-sight order” for a tiger issued by AK Mishra, the Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (Wildlife), Maharashtra on June 23. The court observed that the order was absolutely illegal and “it was passed without following the due process of law and is in violation of guidelines issued by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA).” The order was challenged in the court by Jerryl Avinash Banait, a wildlife activist. “The forest department did not make sure that the tiger was indeed a man-eater. The two deaths caused by the tiger have occurred in the buffer zone where humans cannot enter normally. Moreover, the tiger did not feed on the victims. Hence, it should not have been labelled as a man-eater,” says Banait. The court also found that identification of the tiger and process contemplated in NTCA guidelines was not followed. The NTCA guidelines say that: Under no circumstances tiger should be ...

A study by researchers from the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom, shows the negative effect of mega hydropower projects located in tropical forests on local biodiversity. The research published in PLOS ONE, a peer-reviewed science journal, reveals the drastic effects of the central Amazonian Balbina Dam on tropical rainforest biodiversity. Researchers have revealed how alteration in landscape structure and habitat quality has led to the loss of mammals, birds and tortoises from the islands formed by the creation of the Balbina Lake. The lake is one of the world’s largest hydroelectric reservoirs. Study lead author Maíra Benchimol, a former PhD student at UEA and now at the Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz, Brazil, was quoted in the UEA press release as saying, “Hydroelectric dams have been thought to be an environmentally-friendly source of renewable power and in recent years they have been built to supply the burgeoning energy demands of emergent tropical countries....

The theme of this year’s World Environment Day was zero tolerance to poaching of wildlife. For many people, showing concern for wildlife is redundant in view of the large number of people living below the poverty line in India. In a deeper analysis, it will appear that protecting wildlife is vital for the present as well as future generations. Life in the wild promotes biological diversity, which in turn, provides materials for food, clothing, medicines, papers, beverages and spices for daily use. From the days of the hunter-gatherer—when hunting animals and gathering fruits, tubers and herbs sustained humans—till the present time, human society, without even being aware of it, always depended on nature. Science helped us to understand the extent of diversity in the wild, study life cycles, domesticate wild species and breed, cultivate and trade them. Technology helped us add value and extract maximum profit from the use of natural resources. Recognising biodiversity Bio...

It is an invader nobody has seen on our borders but it can play havoc with the country’s biodiversity. An alien weed, Ludwigia Peruviana, is posing a threat to biodiversity in parts of Assam, particularly the catchment area of the river Dhansiri and eastern part of river Kopili, scientists have reported while expressing concern that it can spread to other areas in Northeast India. The study, conducted by researchers at Assam Agricultural University and Tinsukia-based action group, Evergreen Earth, covered four distinct landscapes—marshlands, peat-lands, stream beds and bordering uplands spread over an area of 500 square kilometres. It was done in the Karbi Anglong and Nagaon districts of Assam where the catchment area of th Dhansiri and Kopili rivers are located. The weed is spreading rapidly in the region. Popularly called primrose willow, Ludwigia Peruviana, is a native of Central and South America. Its flower is pale yellowish in colour and the plant grows to a height of about ...

One of biggest wildlife seizures, which unfolded during raids in Delhi and Meerut in the last two days, has rekindled the often-discussed issue of wildlife trafficking. At least 117kg of nilgai (blue bull) meat and over 100 illegally imported firearms have been seized by the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), which conducted the raid in the house of a retired army colonel Devendra Kumar Bishnoi at Civil Lines in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh. Leopard skin, ivory, horns of swamp deer and sambar deer, antlers of antelopes and blackbucks, deer skulls and 50,000 live cartridges were also seized from the house. Police suspect Devendra's son Prashant Bishnoi, who is a national-level shooter, is involved in arms smuggling and wildlife crimes. Interestingly, Prashant was part of a team deployed by the Bihar government in 2016 to cull 500 nilgai. Uttar Pradesh was recently in news when Mirzapur forest department caught three suspected poachers transporting rare wild cats. In Assam’s ...

Dogs are generally considered as a friend of humans but they may not be so for other species. A new study by a team of Indian and international researchers has shown that dogs are a major threat to wild species. The study has revealed that dogs have contributed to the extinction of as many as 11 vertebrates. Dogs are a known or potential threat to at least 188 threatened species worldwide, including 96 mammals, 78 bird, 22 reptile and three amphibian species. The list includes 30 critically endangered species, two of which even classified as "possibly extinct". In a paper published in international journal Ambio, researchers noted that these numbers place dogs as the world’s third most damaging invasive mammalian predators, behind rodents and cats. “Besides predation, dogs endanger wildlife through disturbance of habitat, disease transmission, competition and hybridisation. All types of domestic dogs can interact with wildlife and have severe negative impacts on biodiv...