Chapter 7 — Lesson 2 ବନ୍ୟ ପ୍ରାଣୀ ସମ୍ବଳ

Wildlife means all the non-domesticated animals living in their natural habitats: mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and the countless insects and other invertebrates, together with the wild plants among which they live. It is a biotic resource, renewable but exhaustible, and the most fragile of all resources because a species once extinct can never be recovered.

The importance of wildlife can be set out under four heads.

Ecological importance. Wild animals are links in the food chains and nutrient cycles of every ecosystem. Herbivores keep vegetation in check and spread seeds; predators keep herbivores in check; scavengers such as vultures and jackals clear carcasses; insects, bats and birds pollinate plants, including many crops; earthworms and termites make soil; and fish and prawns keep waters clean. Remove any of them and the ecosystem tilts: when vultures declined in India, carcasses rotted and feral dogs multiplied; where tigers vanish, deer strip the forest. The health of a forest or a wetland can be read from its wildlife, which is why the tiger is called an indicator species.

Economic importance. Wildlife supplies food, as fish, prawns and, in the past, game; products such as honey, wax, lac, silk and pearls come from wild or semi-wild creatures; and tourism to wildlife areas is a large and growing industry. Chilika's birds and dolphins, Bhitarkanika's crocodiles, Similipal's forests and Nandankanan's white tigers draw lakhs of visitors and support boatmen, guides, hotels and craftsmen. Wild relatives of crops and livestock are the genetic reserve on which agriculture draws for resistance to disease and climate.

Scientific and educational importance. Wild species are the material of biology, medicine and ecology. Drugs, from snake venom to the compounds of marine animals, have come from wildlife; the study of animal behaviour, migration and adaptation advances knowledge; and wildlife areas are living laboratories and classrooms.

Cultural and aesthetic importance. Animals are woven into religion, art and folklore: the peacock and the tiger as national symbols, the elephant in the festivals of Jagannath, the crocodile and the turtle in coastal legend, the sacred black buck of Ganjam. The beauty of a herd of deer at dusk or a flight of flamingos over Chilika is a value in itself and a part of the quality of human life.

The loss of wildlife is therefore not a sentimental matter but the loss of a resource on which ecosystems, economies and cultures depend. This lesson studies how that loss is happening and how it can be stopped.

India is one of the twelve mega-diverse countries of the world and holds about 90,000 animal species, nearly 8 per cent of the world's fauna, including more than 400 mammals, about 1,300 birds, over 500 reptiles, about 300 amphibians, about 2,500 fish and some 60,000 insects. It has about 7 per cent of the world's mammals and 12 per cent of its birds. This richness comes from the range of its habitats, from the Himalayan snows to the equatorial islands and from desert to rain forest and coral reef, and from its position between the Palaearctic, Indo-Malayan and Afro-tropical realms.

The famous animals of India are a roll-call of habitats. The tiger, the national animal, lives in the forests from the Sundarbans to the Western Ghats; the Asiatic lion survives only in the Gir forest of Gujarat; the Asian elephant ranges over the forests of the north-east, the east including Odisha, the south and the Himalayan foothills; the one-horned rhinoceros lives in the grasslands of Assam and West Bengal; the snow leopard, Kashmir stag, yak and ibex in the high Himalaya; the wild ass in the Rann of Kutch; the black buck, chinkara and nilgai on the plains; the gaur, sambar, chital, sloth bear, leopard and wild dog in the deciduous forests; the lion-tailed macaque and Nilgiri tahr in the Western Ghats; and the Gangetic dolphin, gharial, mugger and salt-water crocodile in the rivers and estuaries. The birds include the peacock, the national bird, the great Indian bustard, the hornbills, the Himalayan monal and the vast winter flocks of ducks, geese, cranes and flamingos.

Odisha holds a large share of this wealth because it sits at the junction of the Eastern Ghats, the Chota Nagpur plateau, the coastal plain and the sea. The state records about 90 species of mammals, more than 500 species of birds, about 110 reptiles, about 30 amphibians and several hundred fish. It has the largest elephant population in eastern India, about two thousand; tigers in Similipal and Satkosia; leopards, sloth bears, gaur, sambar, chital, barking deer, wild boar, wild dogs, striped hyenas and wolves across the forests; the giant squirrel of Similipal; the black buck of Ganjam and Balukhand; the salt-water crocodile of Bhitarkanika, the largest population in India; the gharial and mugger of the Mahanadi; the olive ridley sea turtle, which nests on its beaches in the largest numbers in the world; the Irrawaddy dolphin of Chilika, the largest population of this species in India; the horseshoe crab of the Balasore coast; and the migratory birds of Chilika, over ten lakh each winter. The white tigers bred at Nandankanan are known across the world.

This wealth is unevenly spread: the highlands of the north and south-west hold the large mammals; the coast holds the crocodiles, turtles, dolphins and waterbirds; and the plains between, densely farmed, hold little. The protected areas described later in this lesson follow this distribution.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies species by the risk of extinction, and the Indian syllabus uses six classes that a student must know with examples.

Normal species have populations adequate for survival: cattle, sal, pine, rodents, spotted deer, wild boar.

Endangered species are in danger of extinction and will not survive if the negative factors continue: the black buck, the crocodile, the Indian wild ass, the Indian rhino, the lion-tailed macaque, the sangai of Manipur; in Odisha the tiger, the olive ridley, the gharial and the Irrawaddy dolphin belong here or close to it.

Vulnerable species have declined to levels from which they are likely to become endangered: the blue sheep, the Asiatic elephant, the Gangetic dolphin, the sloth bear, the gaur.

Rare species have small populations that may become vulnerable or endangered: the Himalayan brown bear, the wild Asiatic buffalo, the desert fox, the hornbill.

Endemic species are confined to a particular area and found nowhere else: the Andaman teal, the Nicobar pigeon, the Andaman wild pig, the Mithun of Arunachal Pradesh, the Nilgiri tahr and the lion-tailed macaque of the Western Ghats.

Extinct species are not found after searches of the areas where they might occur: the Asiatic cheetah, extinct in India since the 1950s and reintroduced from Africa only in 2022; the pink-headed duck; the Himalayan quail; the forest spotted owlet was thought extinct until rediscovered in 1997.

Taken as a whole, about 20 per cent of India's mammals and 10 per cent of its wild flora are on the threatened list, and many are critical. The tiger fell from perhaps 55,000 at the start of the twentieth century to 1,827 in 1973 and about 1,400 in 2006 before recovering to over 3,000 by 2022. The Asiatic lion was down to a few dozen a century ago and now numbers about 700 in and around Gir. The one-horned rhino recovered from fewer than 200 to over 3,000 in Kaziranga and elsewhere. The great Indian bustard is down to about 150 birds. The gharial fell to a few hundred and depends on captive breeding, of which the Tikarpada centre on the Mahanadi in Odisha was one of the first. The vultures of India lost more than 95 per cent of their numbers in a decade.

Odisha's list of threatened animals includes the tiger, elephant, leopard, sloth bear, gaur, wild dog, hyena, wolf, black buck, mouse deer, giant squirrel, pangolin, salt-water crocodile, gharial, mugger, olive ridley and other sea turtles, Irrawaddy dolphin, horseshoe crab, king cobra, Indian python, and birds such as the spot-billed pelican, the lesser adjutant stork, the greater flamingo and several vultures. Each has a particular threat, hunting for the pangolin, fishing nets for the turtle and dolphin, habitat loss for the elephant, and the conservation of each is the subject of the second half of this lesson.

Wildlife is disappearing for reasons that are almost all human, and they act together.

Destruction and fragmentation of habitat. This is the largest cause. The clearing of forests for agriculture, plantations, timber and fuel, the submergence of valleys by dams, the stripping of hills by mines, the draining of wetlands, the conversion of grasslands to farms and of coasts to prawn ponds and ports, and the cutting of forests by roads, railways, canals and power lines all remove or divide the places where animals live. A fragment of forest too small for a tiger's range or an elephant's migration loses those species even if no animal is killed. In Odisha the mining of the Keonjhar-Sundargarh belt has cut the elephant corridors between Similipal, the Bonai hills and Jharkhand; Hirakud and Rengali submerged forest; and railway lines through Sambalpur, Keonjhar and Angul kill elephants every year.

Hunting, poaching and trade. Animals are killed for meat, hides, horns, ivory, scales, bones, shells and feathers, and captured alive for the pet and zoo trade. Hunting for sport by rulers and colonial officers reduced the tiger, lion and cheetah in the past; today organised poaching for the international trade in tiger bone, elephant ivory, rhino horn, pangolin scale and turtle shell is the greater threat, feeding markets in East Asia. In Odisha poaching for meat and for trade continues in Similipal and other forests, and pangolins, leopards, deer and turtle eggs are regularly seized.

Pollution. Industrial effluents, pesticides from fields, mine run-off, oil, plastic and sewage poison rivers, lakes and coasts and the animals in them. Pesticides passed up the food chain thinned the eggshells of birds of prey; diclofenac in cattle carcasses killed the vultures; mine waste has affected the fish of the Brahmani and Baitarani; plastic kills turtles that mistake it for jellyfish.

Fishing and accidental killing. Trawl nets and gill nets drown thousands of olive ridley turtles off the Odisha coast every year and entangle dolphins in Chilika; mechanised boats disturb nesting beaches.

Invasive species such as lantana and parthenium replace the plants that herbivores eat, water hyacinth chokes wetlands, and introduced fish displace native species.

Forest fires, mostly set by people, destroy the ground layer and small animals, as in Similipal in 2021.

Human-wildlife conflict. As habitats shrink, elephants raid crops, leopards take livestock and tigers occasionally kill people; in return animals are shot, poisoned or electrocuted. Odisha loses dozens of elephants and about a hundred people every year to this conflict, one of the worst in India.

Climate change shifts rainfall and temperature, raises the sea over nesting beaches and mangroves, warms the sand that decides the sex of turtle hatchlings, and bleaches coral.

Behind these direct causes lie population growth, poverty that drives people into forests, greed that drives the trade, and development that ignores the animals in its path. Conservation must address all of them.

Until the 1970s wildlife in India was governed by scattered colonial laws on hunting. The rapid decline of the tiger and other animals and the demands of conservationists led to the Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972, which remains the foundation of wildlife conservation in the country.

The Act has several main provisions. It publishes an all-India list of protected species in schedules, from Schedule I, which contains the most endangered animals such as the tiger, elephant, rhino, lion, black buck, crocodiles, sea turtles and dolphins, to the lower schedules; the higher the schedule, the heavier the penalty. It bans hunting of scheduled animals except in narrow circumstances such as self-defence or a scientific purpose with permission. It gives legal protection to habitats by empowering the central and state governments to declare national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, and later conservation reserves and community reserves, and by controlling activities within them. It restricts the trade in wildlife and wildlife products, banning the trade in the animals of the highest schedules and their parts, and it provides for the licensing of dealers and the confiscation of illegal stocks. It creates the machinery of chief wildlife wardens, wildlife advisory boards and, by later amendments, the National Tiger Conservation Authority of 2006 and the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau. Amendments have strengthened penalties, added the protection of specified plants, and in 2022 brought the Act into line with the CITES treaty on international trade.

Around the Act stand other laws. The Forest (Conservation) Act of 1980 protects the forest habitat by requiring central approval for its diversion. The Environment (Protection) Act of 1986 governs pollution and environmental impact assessment and provides for coastal regulation zones that protect nesting beaches and mangroves. The Biological Diversity Act of 2002 protects the diversity of all species and regulates access to them. The Forest Rights Act of 2006 recognises the rights of forest dwellers and requires their consent for relocation from critical wildlife habitats. The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act of 1960 and the fisheries laws of the states, including Odisha's ban on mechanised fishing near the turtle beaches in the breeding season, complete the framework.

Odisha applies the Act through its forest department's wildlife wing under the Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (Wildlife), the field directors of Similipal and Satkosia, the divisional forest officers, the Chilika Development Authority, the Nandankanan Zoological Park, and the state and district wildlife boards. The Act also allows the state to declare its own sanctuaries, which is how most of Odisha's protected areas were created between 1973 and the 1990s.

Law is the necessary first step; the protected areas and species projects described in the next sections are how it has been put to work.

The protection of wildlife depends above all on the protection of the places where it lives, and India has built a network of protected areas of several kinds that a student must be able to distinguish.

A national park is an area declared for the protection of the whole natural ecosystem, its animals, plants, landscape and processes. It has the highest degree of protection: no grazing, cultivation, collection of produce, private rights or human settlement is allowed, and the boundaries can be altered only by the legislature. India has over a hundred, covering about 1.2 per cent of the country; the first was Hailey, now Jim Corbett, in 1936. Kaziranga, Gir, Kanha, Bandhavgarh, Sundarbans, Periyar and Silent Valley are famous examples; in Odisha, Bhitarkanika and Similipal have national parks at their core.

A wildlife sanctuary is declared for the protection of particular species or groups of animals. Its protection is less strict: certain human activities such as grazing, the collection of minor produce, passage and even residence may be permitted by the chief wildlife warden if they do not harm the wildlife, and its boundary can be changed by the state. India has more than five hundred sanctuaries covering about 3.6 per cent of the country. Odisha has nineteen, from Similipal and Satkosia to the tiny Nalabana bird sanctuary in Chilika.

A biosphere reserve is a much larger area designated under the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere programme of 1971 to conserve biodiversity together with the traditional life and culture of the people living there. It is arranged in three zones: a core that is strictly protected, usually a national park or sanctuary; a buffer in which research, education, tourism and limited use are allowed; and a transition zone in which villages, farms and forestry continue under sustainable management. India has eighteen biosphere reserves, of which twelve are in the UNESCO world network; the Nilgiri reserve of 1986 was the first, and Similipal, declared in 1994 and admitted to the world network in 2009, is Odisha's.

Tiger reserves under Project Tiger and elephant reserves under Project Elephant are additional designations over parks and sanctuaries, with core and buffer areas and dedicated funds. Conservation reserves and community reserves, added in 2002, protect areas owned by the government or by communities with the participation of local people. Ramsar sites are wetlands of international importance listed under the Ramsar Convention of 1971; India has over eighty and Odisha six. Marine protected areas such as the Gahirmatha marine sanctuary protect coastal waters. Zoological parks such as Nandankanan hold and breed animals outside the wild for conservation and education, called ex-situ conservation, as against the in-situ conservation of the reserves.

Together the protected areas of India cover about 5 per cent of the country. They are the backbone of conservation but not the whole of it, since most wildlife lives outside them, in the reserved and community forests, on the coasts and in the farmlands, and corridors between reserves are as important as the reserves themselves.

Besides protecting areas, India has run projects for particular animals whose survival was in doubt, and their history is a set piece of the examination.

Project Tiger. The tiger is one of the key wildlife species in the faunal web. In 1973 the authorities realised that the tiger population had dwindled to 1,827 from an estimated 55,000 at the turn of the century. The major threats were poaching for trade, shrinking habitat, depletion of prey base species, growing human population, and the trade in tiger skins and in bones for traditional medicine in Asia. Since India and Nepal provide habitat to about two-thirds of the surviving tigers of the world, these two nations became prime targets for poaching. Project Tiger, one of the well-publicised wildlife campaigns in the world, was launched in 1973 with nine reserves; there are now more than fifty covering over 75,000 square kilometres, managed by the National Tiger Conservation Authority. Corbett in Uttarakhand, Sundarbans in West Bengal, Bandhavgarh in Madhya Pradesh, Sariska in Rajasthan, Manas in Assam and Periyar in Kerala are famous examples; Odisha has Similipal, declared in 1973 among the first, and Satkosia, added in 2007. The tiger count of 2022 was over 3,600, but Odisha's own population, about thirty in Similipal and none established in Satkosia, remains small.

Project Elephant was launched in 1992 to protect elephants, their habitat and corridors, to reduce human-elephant conflict and to care for captive elephants. India has over thirty elephant reserves; Odisha has three, Mayurbhanj, Mahanadi and Sambalpur, and about two thousand elephants, the largest number in eastern India.

Crocodile Conservation Project. Launched in 1975 with United Nations support, this project began in Odisha, at Tikarpada on the Mahanadi for the gharial and mugger and at Dangamal in Bhitarkanika for the salt-water crocodile. Eggs were collected, hatched and the young reared and released. The salt-water crocodile population of Bhitarkanika grew from a few dozen to about 1,800, the largest in India, and the project's methods were adopted across the country.

Rhino and other projects. The one-horned rhinoceros was saved in Kaziranga and Manas, rising from under 200 to over 3,000. Projects exist for the Kashmir stag or hangul, the great Indian bustard, the snow leopard, the Gangetic dolphin and the vultures, whose breeding centres and the ban on diclofenac in 2006 have begun a recovery. Project Cheetah reintroduced the animal from Africa to Kuno in 2022.

Sea turtle conservation. The olive ridley programme on the Odisha coast, with the Gahirmatha marine sanctuary of 1997, the seasonal fishing ban, the protection of the Rushikulya and Devi rookeries, the tagging of turtles and the involvement of coastal villages, protects the largest nesting population of the species in the world.

The lesson of these projects is that a species can be brought back when its habitat is secured, poaching is stopped and its prey and breeding are protected, and that the same measures protect everything else that shares its home.

The two great forest reserves of Odisha are its tiger reserves, and each is a lesson in conservation.

Similipal, in Mayurbhanj district in the north, is a massif of the Eastern Ghats rising to over 1,100 metres at Meghasani, clothed in sal forest with semi-evergreen patches on the wet upper slopes, grasslands, and the waterfalls of Barehipani, about 400 metres, and Joranda. Its streams feed the Budhabalanga, Salandi and Khairi rivers. Similipal was a hunting preserve of the Mayurbhanj rulers, became a sanctuary in 1979, a tiger reserve among the first in 1973, a biosphere reserve in 1994, an elephant reserve as the core of the Mayurbhanj reserve, and joined the UNESCO world network in 2009. The biosphere reserve covers about 5,570 square kilometres, with a core of about 1,195 and a national park proposed within it. Its animals include the tiger, of which the reserve holds about thirty and, uniquely, a population of pseudo-melanistic or black-striped tigers found nowhere else; the elephant; the leopard; the gaur; the sambar, chital, barking deer and mouse deer; the wild dog, sloth bear and giant squirrel; the mugger crocodile reintroduced in the Khairi; and about three hundred species of birds including the hill myna and the hornbills. Its people are the Kolha, Santhal, Bhumija, Bathudi and the Khadia and Mankidia forest-dwellers of the interior villages. Its threats are poaching, fire, encroachment, the mining pressure on its fringes and the relocation of villages from the core; its response has been strengthened patrolling, village relocation with consent, eco-development committees and fire management after the great fire of 2021.

Satkosia, on the Mahanadi where the river cuts a gorge 22 kilometres long through the Eastern Ghats between Angul, Boudh, Nayagarh and Cuttack districts, is a sanctuary of about 964 square kilometres of dry and moist deciduous forest declared in 1976 and a tiger reserve since 2007, combining the Satkosia gorge and Baisipalli sanctuaries. The gorge is a gharial sanctuary, the site of the Tikarpada crocodile breeding centre of 1975 that saved the gharial and mugger, and a Ramsar site since 2021. Its animals include the elephant, leopard, gaur, sambar, chital, wild dog, sloth bear, the gharial and mugger, and freshwater turtles. Satkosia's tigers were lost to poaching; an attempt in 2018 to bring tigers from Madhya Pradesh failed when one was killed by villagers and the other died, showing that reintroduction needs the consent and involvement of the people who share the forest.

The other forest sanctuaries of the state are Debrigarh on the shore of the Hirakud reservoir in Bargarh, with gaur, leopard, sambar and winter waterbirds; Sunabeda in Nuapada, a plateau of grasslands and forest proposed as a tiger reserve, with the wolf, hyena and gaur; Karlapat in Kalahandi; Kuldiha in Balasore, joined to Similipal by a corridor; Hadgarh in Keonjhar; Badrama in Sambalpur; Lakhari valley in Gajapati; Kotgarh in Kandhamal; and Chandaka-Dampara at the edge of Bhubaneswar, an elephant sanctuary where the animals live within sight of the capital.

The coast of Odisha holds wildlife of a kind found in few other places, concentrated in one district, Kendrapara, and along the beaches to its south.

Bhitarkanika is the estuarine region at the mouths of the Brahmani, Baitarani and Dhamra rivers, a maze of tidal creeks, mudflats and islands under mangrove forest. The sanctuary of about 672 square kilometres was declared in 1975, the national park of 145 square kilometres in its heart in 1998, and the site was listed under the Ramsar Convention in 2002. Its mangroves, about 60 species, are the most diverse in India, and its animals are famous. The salt-water or estuarine crocodile, the largest living reptile, has here its largest Indian population, about 1,800, including some of the largest crocodiles ever measured, over six metres; the crocodile project of 1975 at Dangamal rebuilt the population from a few dozen. The king cobra, the Indian python, the water monitor, eight species of kingfisher, the spotted deer, wild boar, fishing cat, otter, jackal and hyena live in the forest, and the Bagagahana heronry holds thousands of nesting storks, egrets, herons and ibises every monsoon. In winter the mudflats receive lakhs of migratory waders and ducks. The people of the surrounding villages fish the creeks and farm the reclaimed land, and the conflict between them and the crocodiles, which take livestock and occasionally people, is managed by fencing bathing places.

Gahirmatha is the beach on the seaward side of Bhitarkanika, between the Dhamra and Maipura river mouths, and the world's largest nesting ground of the olive ridley sea turtle. In the arribada, Spanish for arrival, several lakh females come ashore over a few nights in February or March to lay their eggs in the sand, an event found at only a handful of beaches on earth. The Rushikulya river mouth in Ganjam and the Devi river mouth in Puri are the other two mass nesting beaches of the state. The turtles migrate across the Bay of Bengal and mate offshore from November, and their threats are drowning in trawl and gill nets, the lights and disturbance of the Dhamra port and fishing harbours, erosion of the nesting beach by storms and the Dhamra jetty, and predation of eggs by dogs, jackals and people. The Gahirmatha marine sanctuary of 1997, covering about 1,435 square kilometres of sea, the ban on mechanised fishing within 20 kilometres of the three rookeries from November to May, the use of turtle excluder devices on trawl nets, patrolling by the forest department and coast guard, and the guarding of nests by village volunteers are the measures of protection. Odisha's turtle programme is one of the largest sea turtle conservation efforts in the world.

Elsewhere on the coast, the horseshoe crab, a living fossil older than the dinosaurs, breeds on the Balasore beaches; the Balukhand-Konark sanctuary in Puri, a strip of casuarina and cashew along the shore, holds black buck and spotted deer; and the estuaries hold Irrawaddy and humpback dolphins. The Chilika lagoon, with its birds and dolphins, is treated in the next section.

Chilika, lying across Puri, Khordha and Ganjam districts, is the largest brackish-water lagoon in Asia and the most important wetland of the state. Its area swells from about 900 square kilometres in summer to about 1,100 in the monsoon, and it is separated from the Bay of Bengal by a sand spit and joined to it by a mouth through which the tide brings salt water and the rivers, chiefly the Daya and Bhargavi from the Mahanadi delta, bring fresh water and silt. The mixture of fresh and salt water in changing proportions across the northern, central, southern and outer sectors gives the lagoon a great range of habitats and an extraordinary richness of life.

Birds. Chilika is the largest wintering ground of migratory birds in the Indian subcontinent. Every winter more than ten lakh birds of about two hundred species arrive from Siberia, the Caspian, Central Asia, Ladakh and the Himalaya: greater and lesser flamingos, bar-headed geese, pintails, shovellers, gadwalls, pochards, coots, pelicans, spoonbills, herons, waders, gulls, terns and birds of prey. They concentrate on the Nalabana island, a bird sanctuary of about 16 square kilometres declared in 1987 that is submerged in the monsoon and emerges as marsh in winter, and around Mangalajodi on the northern shore, where the fishing village that once hunted the birds now guards and guides them.

Dolphins and fish. The lagoon holds the largest population in India of the Irrawaddy dolphin, a little over a hundred, in the outer channel near Satapada, and about 225 species of fish, prawns and crabs that support about two lakh fisherfolk of the surrounding villages, one of the largest inland fisheries in the country.

Decline and recovery. Chilika was one of the first two Ramsar sites of India in 1981. In the following decades siltation from the deforested catchment, the choking of the sea mouth as it drifted north, the spread of weeds as the water freshened, and the seizure of the lagoon by illegal prawn farms reduced the fish catch to a fraction, drove away the birds, and set the fishermen against the prawn mafia. In 1993 the site was placed on the Montreux record of threatened wetlands. The Chilika Development Authority, created in 1991, opened a new mouth to the sea at Sipakuda in 2000, dredged the channels, removed encroachments, treated the catchment and regulated fishing. The salinity was restored, the weeds retreated, the fish catch rose several-fold, the birds returned in record numbers and the dolphins increased. Chilika was removed from the Montreux record in 2002 and received the Ramsar Wetland Conservation Award, and it is now cited across the world as a model of wetland restoration.

Continuing threats are the return of illegal prawn enclosures, the disturbance of dolphins by tourist boats, siltation, the pressure of fishing, pollution from the towns and fields of the catchment, and the effects of climate change on the sea mouth and the water balance. The lagoon's future depends on the same partnership of authority and community that saved it.

The hardest wildlife problem of Odisha is not the loss of a species but the collision between people and elephants, and it deserves a section of its own.

Odisha has about two thousand wild elephants, the largest population in eastern India, living mainly in the forests of Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar, Sundargarh, Deogarh, Angul, Dhenkanal, Sambalpur, Cuttack and the Chandaka hills beside Bhubaneswar, and ranging seasonally into Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal. Elephants need large areas and move along traditional routes, called corridors, between forests in search of food and water. Odisha has identified about fourteen such corridors.

The conflict has grown because the elephants' home has been cut to pieces. The iron ore and chromite mines of Keonjhar, Sundargarh and Jajpur have removed forest and blocked corridors; the coal fields, power stations and industries of Angul, Dhenkanal, Jharsuguda and Sambalpur have done the same; the Hirakud, Rengali and Samal reservoirs and their canals cut the ranges; railway lines through Keonjhar, Sambalpur, Angul and Sundargarh cross the routes; highways, power lines and villages fill the gaps; and encroachment and fires have degraded what remains. Elephants squeezed out of the forest enter fields of paddy, sugarcane and vegetables, break houses and granaries, and kill people who confront them. Odisha loses about a hundred human lives a year to elephants, more than almost any other state, and crop damage runs into crores of rupees.

The elephants pay heavily too. Every year dozens die: hit by trains, electrocuted by illegal fences and sagging power lines, poisoned, shot by poachers for ivory, drowned in canals and wells, or killed in fights with villagers. Odisha recorded well over a hundred elephant deaths in some recent years, among the highest in India, and tuskers have been targeted so heavily that the proportion of adult males is dangerously low in some ranges.

The measures adopted include: the three elephant reserves, Mayurbhanj, Mahanadi and Sambalpur, under Project Elephant; the protection and restoration of corridors, with the diversion of mining and road proposals away from them; speed limits and warning systems for trains on elephant crossings; the raising and insulation of power lines and action against illegal fences; solar-powered electric fences, trenches and bio-fences of chilli and bee-hives around villages and fields; early warning by trackers and mobile messages when herds approach; compensation for crop loss, house damage, injury and death; the relocation of problem herds; eco-development committees that give villages a stake in the forest; and the planting of fodder and water sources inside forests so that elephants need not leave them.

The conflict is a warning that applies to all wildlife. A species can survive in a reserve, but it cannot survive in a landscape that gives it no room to move. Conservation in a crowded state means planning the whole landscape, mines, roads, railways, fields and forests together, with the animals as one of the users to be provided for.

Wildlife cannot be saved by law and forest guards alone. Two further partners are essential: the people who live with the animals, and the world beyond the border.

Community participation. Conservation strategies now recognise that local communities are the first line of protection. The Bishnois of Rajasthan have protected the black buck, chinkara, nilgai and peacock for centuries as a religious duty. In Odisha the villagers of Bhetnoi and neighbouring villages in Ganjam have protected the black buck as sacred for generations, and the population has grown from a few hundred to several thousand, roaming freely among the fields. The fishermen of Mangalajodi on Chilika gave up hunting waterfowl in the 2000s, formed a protection society and now earn as guides and guards for lakhs of birds. Coastal villages at Rushikulya guard turtle nests and release hatchlings. Villages around Similipal and Chandaka form eco-development committees that receive livelihood support in return for protecting the forest, and the Vana Samrakshyana Samitis of joint forest management protect the habitat of most of the state's wildlife outside the reserves. The sacred groves of tribal Odisha shelter species that have vanished elsewhere. The Forest Rights Act and the community and conservation reserves of the Wildlife Act give these efforts legal standing, and the relocation of villages from the core of reserves is now done only with consent and proper resettlement. The failure of the Satkosia tiger reintroduction in 2018, and the success of the Bhetnoi black buck, both teach the same lesson: where the community is a partner, wildlife thrives; where it is ignored, it dies.

Awareness and education. Nature camps, school programmes, wildlife weeks, the Nandankanan zoo and the interpretation centres at Chilika, Bhitarkanika and Similipal build the public support without which no law works.

International cooperation. Many of Odisha's animals cross borders. The olive ridley turtles migrate across the Bay of Bengal; the birds of Chilika come from Siberia and Central Asia; the elephants of Similipal move into Jharkhand; and the trade in pangolin scales, ivory and turtle shell runs through international networks. The instruments of cooperation are the IUCN Red List; the Ramsar Convention of 1971, under which Chilika, Bhitarkanika, Ansupa, Satkosia, Tampara and Hirakud are listed; CITES of 1973, which bans the trade in listed species and is enforced at ports and airports; the Convention on Migratory Species, which protects the turtles and birds along their routes; the Convention on Biological Diversity of 1992; the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere programme, which lists Similipal; and the funding and expertise of bodies such as the WWF and the UNDP, which supported the crocodile project and the turtle programme. Cooperation with neighbouring states on elephant corridors and with Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the countries of the Indian Ocean on turtles and fisheries is part of the same effort.

The wildlife of Odisha is a resource held in trust for the whole world as well as for the state, and its protection is a shared responsibility of the village, the state, the nation and the international community.

The examination on this lesson asks for locations, dates, species and reasons, and this section gathers what to prepare.

Map of India. Locate the famous protected areas and their animals: Corbett in Uttarakhand, tiger; Kaziranga and Manas in Assam, rhino and elephant; Gir in Gujarat, Asiatic lion; Kanha, Bandhavgarh and Pench in Madhya Pradesh, tiger; Sariska and Ranthambore in Rajasthan, tiger; Sundarbans in West Bengal, tiger and mangroves; Periyar in Kerala, elephant; Silent Valley in Kerala, lion-tailed macaque; Dachigam in Kashmir, hangul; Keoladeo in Rajasthan, birds; and the Rann of Kutch, wild ass. Mark the biosphere reserves, Nilgiri, Nanda Devi, Sundarbans, Gulf of Mannar, Similipal and the rest.

Map of Odisha. Locate Similipal in Mayurbhanj, Satkosia on the Mahanadi gorge, Bhitarkanika and Gahirmatha in Kendrapara, Chilika across Puri, Khordha and Ganjam with Nalabana and Mangalajodi, Rushikulya mouth in Ganjam, Devi mouth in Puri, Debrigarh by Hirakud in Bargarh, Sunabeda in Nuapada, Karlapat in Kalahandi, Kuldiha in Balasore, Hadgarh in Keonjhar, Chandaka-Dampara beside Bhubaneswar, Balukhand-Konark in Puri, Bhetnoi in Ganjam and Nandankanan near Bhubaneswar.

Species and status. Be able to name for each site its flagship species and status: tiger and pseudo-melanistic tigers at Similipal, gharial at Satkosia, salt-water crocodile at Bhitarkanika, olive ridley at Gahirmatha and Rushikulya, Irrawaddy dolphin and migratory birds at Chilika, black buck at Bhetnoi and Balukhand, elephants across the north and centre, white tigers at Nandankanan.

Dates and figures. Wildlife Act 1972; Project Tiger 1973; crocodile project 1975; Bhitarkanika sanctuary 1975, national park 1998, Ramsar 2002; Satkosia sanctuary 1976, tiger reserve 2007; Similipal sanctuary 1979, biosphere reserve 1994, UNESCO 2009; Chilika Ramsar 1981, CDA 1991, new mouth 2000; Nalabana 1987; Project Elephant 1992; Gahirmatha marine sanctuary 1997; Biodiversity Act 2002; Forest Rights Act 2006. Figures: 90,000 animal species in India; about 20 per cent of mammals threatened; tigers 1,827 in 1973, over 3,600 in 2022; Odisha about 2,000 elephants, about 30 tigers, about 1,800 crocodiles, over 10 lakh birds at Chilika.

Reasoning. Why is wildlife important: four heads with examples. Why is it declining: habitat loss, poaching, pollution, conflict, with an Odisha example each. What has the government done: the Act, protected areas, projects. Distinguish national park, sanctuary and biosphere reserve. Why is Chilika important and how was it saved. What is the elephant problem and how is it addressed. What is the role of communities: Bhetnoi, Mangalajodi, Bishnois, JFM.

Short notes. Project Tiger; Similipal; Bhitarkanika; olive ridley; Chilika; Nandankanan; endemic species; IUCN; Ramsar; human-wildlife conflict.

Answer with a definition, the location, the species, the threat and the conservation measure, in that order, and give at least one Odisha example in every answer. Wildlife is the part of this course that the Odisha Board examines most concretely, because the state's own wealth is the best material for it.