CHANDIGARH: A group of retired IFS officers have shot off a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi urging him to scrap the world's largest "curated" wildlife safari project covering 10,000 acres of Aravalli hills in Gurugram and Nuh districts of Haryana.
Aravallis, the memorandum signed by 37 retired IFS officers points out, are India’s ecological and cultural heritage comprising some of the oldest geological features dating back to almost 1800 million years.
Some scholars have also dated the Aravallis to be 2500 million years old. Destruction of this fragile ecosystem is causing significant irreversible biodiversity losses, land degradation and decline in vegetation cover negatively impacting communities, cattle and wildlife living in the lap of the Aravallis.
"The primary purpose of any intervention in the eco-sensitive Aravalli region must be ‘conservation and restoration’ and not destruction that a zoo safari will bring,” said RP Balwan, retired Conservator of Forest, South Circle Haryana, and others in the memorandum.
"As per a survey conducted by the Haryana Forest Department a few years ago, 180 species of birds, 15 species of mammals, 29 species of aquatic animals, 57 species of butterflies and many reptiles exist in the Aravallis," said Uma Shanker Singh, retired Principal Chief Conservator of Forest from Uttar Pradesh and one of the signatories.
"A zoo or a safari is often considered not essential for wildlife conservation because while they can play a role in breeding endangered species, the practice of keeping animals in captivity in limited spaces can negatively impact their natural behaviours. The most effective conservation efforts focus on protecting natural habitats and addressing threats in the wild, rather than relying on captive breeding programs in zoos”, he added.
"Over the last few decades the Aravalli range has been over exploited for extracting its materials (rocks/stones/gravels) fro the sites by boring blasting, quarrying. Minning and then procressed for crushing. Mining causes destruction of natural ecosystems,’’ the memorandum reads.
Further, the officers pointed out that there was a study carried out on the basis of satellite images between 1975 to 2019 which highlights the conservation between spatial land cover and land use patterns and their conservation between classes in the Aravalli range.
"The results reveal that 3676 km and 776. 8 km (4.86 per cent and 1.02 per cent) converted into barren land and settlement from 1975 to 2019, 5772.7 km (7.63 per cent) of forest land has been decreased in the Aravalis. In 2019 a total of 16360.8 km (21.64 per cent) of forest land is converted to a settlement class."
The copies of this representation have also been sent to the Union Minister and Secretary of Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Director General of Forests and the Chief Secretaries of Haryana, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Delhi.