The newly constituted National Board For Wildlife, which will hold its first meeting on August 12, will look into 140 proposals concerning 80 Protected Areas. It will take a call on proposals for reducing areas of some wildlife sanctuaries.
According to sources, the various state governments have send more than 100 new proposals to the Environment Ministry which will be discussed in the coming Standing Committee meet of NBWl. To add to them, there is a backlog of about 35 proposals pending since the last meetings of the previous committee.
The 12- member standing committee meeting will be chaired by the Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar. The committee has one forest official from GEER Foundation (a Gujarat based organisation), a retired Gujarat forest official, H S Singh, besides one non-government wildlife expert, R Sukumar, besides senior forest officials. The last standing committee meeting of NBWl was held on September 4 last year.
According to sources, the proposals include large infrastructure projects such as the 520-Mw Teesta-IV dam in Sikkim. The project had been on hold after the previous standing committee members had unanimously objected to it. Others in the list are projects related to oil exploration, thermal power projects, highways, power lines, limestone and other mining, irrigation and water supply projects, oil pipelines, limestone mining, border fencing and other defence projects.
According to sources, some of these projects either intersect or lie in close vicinity of tiger reserves as Dampa (Mizoram), Pench (Madhya Pradesh) and Periyar (Kerala) etc. According to sources, the highest number of 23 projects are from Rajasthan, followed by 16 from Punjab. At least 15 projects have been lined up from Uttar Pradesh and 14, fourteen from Madhya Pradesh amongst others.
The Standing Committee of NBWl will meet in the wake of Supreme Court order which empowered it to approve all projects that fall within these national parks, sanctuaries and tiger reserves or within a 10-kilometre radius of such areas. The committee is also mandated to set up rules and regulations that govern such clearances besides other policy matters on the subject.