The Supreme Court asked the Centre on Monday if it can launch efforts to save leopards on the lines of its successful animal conservation programme Project Tiger. The issue of the big cats was raised by a public interest litigation.
India lost 886 leopards in the past two years and this year too, within a span of 60 days, 106 leopards were either hunted down by poachers or killed in man-animal conflicts, said the PIL filed by animal rights activist Anupam Tripathi. There is no authoritative figure on the leopard population in the country. The last leopard census of 2015 presented a shocking truth. From 45,000 leopards two decades ago, the census counted only 7910 leopards in the wild.
Tripathi told the court that ground realities have remained unchanged despite the dwindling the number of the leopards. As on date, the petitioner said, the leopard count in the country would be nearly 6,500. "India would lose this beautiful carnivore that is an important member of the food chain, a Schedule I protected animal under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972 and listed as "vulnerable" on the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list," said the PIL, stressing the need for a "Project Leopard" action plan.
A bench of Justices Madan B Lokur, AM Khanwilkar and R Subhash Reddy sought a response from the Centre on whether it was open to launching a "Project Leopard".
The difference can be spotted by the success of Project Tiger, which was launched in 1973. From 1994 to 2016, massive efforts were made to protect tigers in their natural habitat and this meant crackdown on poaching. In 1995, the tiger population in India stood at over 1,300 and by 2015, the numbers jumped to 2,226.
The growing demand for leopard skin is the major cause of their disappearance. The average total forest area available for a leopard is only 5.20 kilometre as against the recommended area of 25 kilometres. Where the density of leopards is higher, leopards venture into neighbouring villages in search of cattle, livestock, dogs and rodents. This leads to frequent man-leopard conflicts.
There is another reason for this trend. In a forest where leopards and tigers coexist, dietary overlap is almost 94 per cent. This perhaps too pushes them to move to out of the wild for food.
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