January , 2008
Killer disease wipes out ghariyals
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There's a mysterious disease stalking the gharial (the Indian crocodile). Even as I write this, dead bodies of the gharial are being dragged out from the river Chambal. Females, males and sub-adults - the death toll continues to rise day after day. It's a mass slaughter and it's not due to poaching - it's an epidemic, which has already wiped out a massive chunk of the gharial population. Almost a hundred gharials have died at the National Chambal wildlife sanctuary alone, the only one in the country that extends into three states, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. The MP government has been swift to react. But Rajasthan still refuses to acknowledge the problem (even though the Environment Minister at the Centre is from Rajasthan). The UP government, too, is foxed. But other than sending the dead bodies for a routine post-mortem, everyone is clueless. Renowned wildlife....
More about Bahar Dutt
Bahar Dutt is a wildlife conservationist by training. She has worked for the last ten years on crucial wildlife conservation projects in India and abroad. In England she worked at the world famous Jersey Zoo set up by naturalist Gerald Durrell and was involved in assessing the conditions for release of endangered primate in the Amazon forests. . She has over 10 awards to her credit including the Ramnath Goenka Award in 2006 and the Wildscreen Award , UK and the Young Environment Journalist Award 2007. As an environment editor at CNN-IBN she has done a range of stories travelling to far and forgotten corners of this country to expose the nexus between the mining mafia, politicians and corporates. She has posed as a furniture maker to expose the illegal trade in banned timber in the Western Ghats, and the nexus between the police and a mining company in the Niyamgiri hills of Orissa. One of her most dramatic exposés involved a cement company of global dimensions that had been operating illegally in the forests of Meghalaya on the India-Bangladesh border. More recently, she and the CNN-IBN team exposed the operations of a miner in Goa who had illegally devastated forest lands. Their story led to the shut down of the mine.
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