The ugly reality of India’s wildlife habitats

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Editor's note: Over the past week, the central government marked national wildlife week with a kind of celebratory cheer. Through posts on official social media handles as well as in statements of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and environment minister Bhupender Yadav the self-congratulatory message of conserving wildlife and the environment was hard to miss.  But buried under this official publicity drive, which mostly made the right noises and said all the right things about wildlife conservation, is the ugly reality of diminishing habitats of  wildlife in and around India’s dense network of protected areas such as national parks and sanctuaries. The situation seems to be especially dire in the case of the tiger, since an increasing quantity of land in its habitat has been consistently diverted for activities which may adversely affect efforts towards wildlife conservation.   A review of official data about wildlife clearances compiled by the Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment (LIFE) in analysis reports shows that in the first six months of 2021, more land was diverted from in and around protected areas for projects such as highway construction, …