Pride and Prejudice

Mains Paper: 3 | Environment   
Prelims level: Asiatic lions 
Mains level: Environmental impact assessment and conservation

Context 

• The death of 21 Asiatic lions in Gujarat’s Gir National Park in less than a month invites serious questions.
• They initially blamed the deaths on infighting between lion prides.
• Male lions are known to maul each other to death but they never harm females.
• The park managers have now found evidence of a “viral infection” in some blood and tissue samples of the dead animals.

Claims vs reality

• They have isolated 31 lions from the areas.
• More than 180 lions have died in Gir in the past two years.
• This is worrying given that lion deaths averaged around 60 between 2010 and 2015.
• Most scientific studies reckon that Gir can host about 300 lions, about half the current population.
• More than 50 per cent of the national park’s lions have spilled out of the protected area.
• In 2013, the Supreme Court directed the translocation of “some” lions from Gir to Kuno in Madhya Pradesh.
• The Gujarat government has, however, refused that MP has not gone by the IUCN’s guidelines for translocation.
• MP’s forest officials retort that Kuno satisfies all the conditions laid down by the Wildlife Institute of India.

Way forward 

• Gir has lived under the shadow of an epidemic since 2012, when scientists from the Indian Veterinary Research Institute identified the Goat Plague (Peste Des Petits Ruminants) virus in a lion carcass.
• The wildlife authorities in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh should not forget that an epidemic caused by a virus wiped out more than a third of the lion population in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park in the 1990s.

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General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

UPSC Prelims Questions: 

Q.1) Which of the following are Keystone Species?
1. Sea otters
2. Red Mangroves
3. Elephants
4. Hummingbirds
5. Sharks
Select the correct answer using the code given below.
(a) 1, 2 and 4 only
(b) 2, 3 and 4 only
(c) 1, 3, 4 and 5 only
(d) 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5
Answer:  D

UPSC Mains Questions:
Q.1) Then recent news about the death of lions felt massive impacts on environments. How we can rebuild the environmental infrastructure and resolve the problem?