Interview: Conservationist MK Ranjitsinh on the need to conserve grasslands and their biodiversity

The death of one tiger death makes news in India, he points out, but the extinction of an entire grass-dependent species doesn’t.

Mar 30, 2023 - 23:30
Interview: Conservationist MK Ranjitsinh on the need to conserve grasslands and their biodiversity

Cautioning against the “weakening” of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, India’s first and foremost legislation to protect the country’s wildlife, MK Ranjitsinh Jhala, one of the architects of the legislation, called for shifting conservation focus to neglected grassland species such as the caracal and the desert cat.

“The Wildlife Protection Act should be strengthened and not weakened. Period. The conversion of the emphasis from conservation in the wild to conservation in captivity (not as a complement to conservation in wild but as an end in itself) to divert attention is happening now. I believe in in-situ conservation; and ex-situ conservation should be subservient to in-situ conservation, not the other way around,” Ranjitsinh told Mongabay-India at the Central India Landscape Symposium.

Mongabay-India caught up with Ranjitsinh at the symposium in Kanha National Park’s buffer just days before his 85th birthday. At home in the region, where he helped save the central Indian Barasingha (swamp deer) from extinction in the 1960s-1970s, Ranjitsinh adds that one of his regrets with the legislation is the inclusion of the word ‘vermin’. Ranjitsinh, a former bureaucrat, said that the term is now being ‘misused.’ “Vermin was used in those days for certain species that needed to be controlled,” he explained.

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