The
Englishmen who came to rule India in the early days of the Raj found a veritable
Garden of Eden
here. One of them wrote home: “Wild pig, porcupine, wild fowl, game fowl and
other animals,
dear to the sportsman, are to be met with in incredible numbers.” The
Englishman and the Maharaja, riding on elephants,
sitting in machans, driving automobiles and in fact using every means of
relative safety for themselves, blasted off.
Dr Salim Ali, our most renowned
ornithologist whose voice is heard with respect and reverence, recalls a
conversation he had with the Maharaja of Surguja one day in 1953. The Maharaja,
an old man with palsy, bracing his rifle on a stick, was exultantly happy on
that day. When asked why, the Maharaja said, “Because I have shot my 1,100th
tiger.” Eventually, 1,157 tigers
fell at the hands of this Maharaja.
Independence
and in its wake improved healthcare, ballooned India’s population to the
present 700 million from a mere 80 million at the turn of the century. The
hunger for land, a place to live in and upon, became insatiable. Forests shrank
incredibly and with them the numbers of wild
life dwindled close to near extinction. In the unequal competition between
man and beast, the Indian fauna suffered what had been a death blow to some
species but thanks to the age-old tradition of concern for the wild
life, a new awareness regarding the need to preserve our heritage surfaced
and many threatened species got a new chance to survive.
The
cheetah that roamed through our scrub jungles and the great Indian bustard that
once made Rajasthan
proud, are almost extinct. Highly depleted in numbers, this animal
and this bird
have little chance of survival: they are doomed species. Now comes the welcome
news: The Government of India cordoned off a little more than 3,000 sq km in the
heart of Thar as part of an effort to save the bustard. Whether we will save the
species, only time will tell. The tiger,
the lion,
the single -horned rhinoceros, the lion-tailed macaque (a monkey) and the wild
ass of the Rann of Kutch have earned a reprieve, thanks to the timely efforts of
a handful of wild life enthusiasts.
1969
was the year when the International Union for Conservation of Nature held its
triennial convocation in New Delhi. More than 100 nations were represented on it
and luckily for all concerned, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi inaugurated it. One
Indian participant remembers: “From being a catch phrase, wild
life became a serious commitment of the government. The ministers got
involved; all those who hindered now began to help.” Action followed. Shooting
tigers was banned. The Wild
Life Protection Act of 1972 was passed and in 1973, with help from World
Wild Life Fund, India inaugurated Project Tiger.
New
wild
life sanctuaries and bird
sanctuaries dot the Indian continent now. This new effort has been tersely
termed as “too little and too late” by an inveterate pessimist but then even
the most optimistic foresee wild life in India confined only to its sanctuaries
and no more. However, Dr Karan Singh, who was in charge of the operation, thinks
that all is not lost. We may yet win, if the growth of our population is
checked. But will it happen?
In the hope that we are as yet
not too late, let us embark upon a massive programme of telling our people the
importance of and what is more, the need for preserving, the environment in all
its manifestations. We must train teams of biologists who would take into
account the totality of living objects in an area and devise ways and means that
would yield the desired result, without affecting the natural inter specific
balance.
For instance, the role of mosquitoes
in spreading malaria
is very well-known. Most of us remember that the National Malaria Eradication
Programme (NMEP) of the Government of India has achieved signal success, and
even as we were trumpeting about the successful eradication of malaria,
the disease struck again. In the chemical warfare that the NMEP authorities
waged against mosquitoes,
I am afraid the insects scored a stunning victory.
For
a time the mosquitoes
died in such numbers that the spread of the malarial parasite was halted and
lulled the Government of India into a false sense of security. In the meantime,
the few mosquitoes
that had a. built-in resistance to DDT and other chemicals that were used
against them multiplied and a new race of Anopheles mosquitoes emerged and with
it malaria
reappeared.
In the process, the large-scale
DDT spraying poisoned our crop plants and God knows what unlisted diseases broke
out in the population during the active days of DDT warfare against the malarial
mosquitoes! Unexpected dangers lurk in dark corners when programmes of this kind
are launched.
However, this is not to
advocate that the war against mosquitoes be given up. It is to be tempered with
a much deeper study of the problem. Mosquito
is a common noun denoting a group of insects comprising several species. Many
other mosquito-borne diseases are known: dengue,
yellow
fever, filaria, etc.
Now biologists have discovered
a giant African mosquito, Toxorhynchites brevipalpis, which feeds on the larvae
of other species. If we could use this mosquito against the known
disease-spreading mosquito species, we will be able to eliminate the diseases
without introducing into the environment chemicals that might prove inimical to
other forms of life, albeit along with the mosquito. This approach of biological
control of the spread of disease keeps a biome as near to a natural state as
possible, without introducing extraneous elements. New manmade dangers do not
arise.
This brings me on to the
ecosystems in which Nature functions. The physicochemical components together
with the many forms of living objects that inhabit an area form an ecosystem.
Within an ecosystem, a balance is struck between primary producers and the
consumers, primary, secondary and tertiary. Predators and prey coexist in
correct numbers; neither is too many, The constituent populations within an
ecosystem tend to remain constant. It is this constancy of the populations
that comprise it which gives the ecosystem a quality of timelessness. Forests,
grasslands, deserts, ponds, inter-tidal zones, the sea, all these represent
different ecosystems. Within an ecosystem, the constituent members exhibit a
high degree of mutalism. In the long run, what affects one component affects the
others too. There are many reasons for this.
Primarily,
all the living objects are sustained by the Sun.
All of them interact with the same kind of edaphic environment.
They feed upon one another, supplementing and complementing each other’s needs
for, all of them have basically identical metabolic pathways.
Earlier, I said that a kind of
timelessness characterises an ecosystem and that this is achieved by balancing
the interactions within its heterogeneous populations. Human interference
changed all this. The heterogeneity of population within an ecosystem has been
displaced by an imposed homogeneity. Monoculture has become the order of several
biological communities with the advent of agriculture.
Situations that reflected
balance achieved through hundreds of years of Nature at work changed drastically
and all the resources of the environment were sought to be harnessed in favour
of a single species. The relevance of the species to human needs was the only
criterion examined while man moved along his path to greater comfort, an attempt
that earned for itself the sobriquet of civilisation.
The civilised man indulged in
unchecked ecocide, cutting down forests, damming rivers, blasting mountainsides,
letting lose animals that grazed away the last blade of grass, killing animals
that predated upon animals which he tended and thus he eroded into the
timelessness of the ecosystem around him.
As
a result, many animal and plant species that once dotted the surface of the
earth have disappeared altogether. In America, the bison that once moved in
herds so large that a horse-rider who started his journey with daybreak could
not reach its front end by dusk time, is now confined to the protective custody
of a few sanctuaries. The tiger in India has been saved in the nick of time.
When I first joined in the profession way back in 1947, the sidewalks of Madras
were full of a plant called Rauwolfia canescens: now it is so rare. How did it
happen? In the mid-fifties a drug called serpalin, good to control high BP, had
been extracted from Rauwolfia serpentina, a denizen of the forests. Finding it
not so easy to collect the Sarpagandhi as R. serpentina is
called, they turned to R. canescens and finding it almost as good as R.
serpentina drove it out of Madras.
This is the kind of unthinking
approach to problems that afflict human welfare, that is at the bottom of the
disappearance of several species of plants and animals. If we remember that each
species represents a gene pool that may come in handy to serve some human need
one time or another, we cannot be so callous. In his preoccupation with his own
survival, man is destroying the tropical rain forest at the rate of 50 acres
every minute of the day.
The
tropical rain forest is an ecosystem that emerged as a result of thousands of
years of interactions between a large horde of biological species and
environment. It is the home of hundreds of species, When we seek to destroy it,
we do not know what species we destroy and in the bargain we will not even be
aware of what gene pool that one day might prove immensely beneficial to man we
stand to lose for ever.
In a thousand years, we will
not get back a patch of tropical rain forest, for the changes that lead to its
formation occur with extraordinary slowness. It is for this reason that the
ecologists and the environmentalists raised a hue and cry when in a fit of
shortsightedness, the authorities that be sought to destroy the Silent Valley
forests.
The civilised man must become a
cultured man. He needs to know that. there is some use or the other for the
lowliest of the low organisms. Wholesale displacement of an environment will in
the long run prove catastrophic, whole gene pools disappearing forever. He
survives only by letting other organisms survive, for no organism lives alone.
(A radio talk broadcast on 10th
November 1981 in the Series ‘For the Universities’ AIR, Madras)
Reproduced from a collection of articles called 'Flowers and Showers'.
The
Englishmen who came to rule India in the early days of the Raj found a veritable
The
cheetah that roamed through our scrub jungles and the great Indian bustard that
once made 
1969
was the year when the International Union for Conservation of Nature held its
triennial convocation in New Delhi. More than 100 nations were represented on it
and luckily for all concerned, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi inaugurated it. One
Indian participant remembers: “From being a catch phrase, 
New
For
a time the 
Primarily,
all the living objects are sustained by the 
As
a result, many animal and plant species that once dotted the surface of the
earth have disappeared altogether. In America, the bison that once moved in
herds so large that a horse-rider who started his journey with daybreak could
not reach its front end by dusk time, is now confined to the protective custody
of a few sanctuaries. The tiger in India has been saved in the nick of time.
When I first joined in the profession way back in 1947, the sidewalks of Madras
were full of a plant called Rauwolfia canescens: now it is so rare. How did it
happen? In the mid-fifties a drug called serpalin, good to control high BP, had
been extracted from Rauwolfia serpentina, a denizen of the forests. Finding it
not so easy to collect the Sarpagandhi as R. serpentina is
called, they turned to R. canescens and finding it almost as good as R.
serpentina drove it out of Madras.
