CHENNAI: The crucial State Board for Wildlife (SBWL) meeting is set to be held on September 26 to discuss various proposals involving forest diversion and other key conservation issues. This will be the second such meeting within a year, and it will be chaired by Forest Minister M. Mathiventhan. The previous meeting was chaired by Chief Minister MK Stalin.
Sources told TNIE that around 20 proposals seeking SBWL clearance will be put forth in the meeting and that apart, the board members were asked to raise issues concerning wildlife conservation. The man-animal conflict and the rapid spread of invasives in core forest habitats are two of the biggest problems. Of late, unnatural deaths of tigers and elephants are on the rise. Only a few days back, a tiger in its prime died due to poisoning in Nilgiris district.
Chief Wildlife Warden Srinivas R Reddy told TNIE the farmer who was arrested in connection with the poisoning of the big cat near Avalanche Dam in Nilgiris confessed to the crime. “It was intentional and retaliatory killing,” he said.
On elephant deaths, a senior official said it was during a previous SBWL meeting that Stalin inaugurated the Elephant Death Audit Framework, and it had been successfully implemented by creating a dashboard that uploaded all postmortem reports online and made public. “A centralised database was created. Now, we know all the details about the cause, circumstance and nature of each elephant’s death, which helps in making management decisions,” he said.
As per the dashboard hosted on the Tamil Nadu Forest Department website, a total of 51 elephants died this year so far, of which 8 were unnatural deaths. From 2010, the state has lost 1,510 elephants of which 160 were unnatural deaths, out of which, 77 elephants died due to electrocution. Dr Dipankar Ghose, senior director, of Biodiversity Conservation, WWF-India, told TNIE that All India Tiger Estimation carried out extensive analysis of invasive species spread in the tiger landscapes, which need to be addressed on the ground.