Losing the Environment - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 88

ally for what look like, but often are not, sound initiatives. What the government should be
doing is revamping its grossly understaffed and unmotivated forest protection service - the
state forest departments - and strengthening enforcement and prosecution of poachers and
traders.
The problem however will never be solved just by tackling the supply in India's wildlife
parks because this is a demand-driven trade. The only really effective way to protect tigers
and other wildlife is to persuade China - the largest consumer of wildlife parts, such as tiger
skin and bones, elephant ivory, bear bile and pangolin scales - to improve and implement
their own wildlife protection laws, including a 1993 ban on the use of tiger bones in tradi-
tional Chinese medicine. 'If India wants to secure a future for wild tigers, it not only has to
improve enforcement but stem the demand by talking forcefully to China to persuade it to
ban all trade in tiger parts from all sources,' says Wright. India, however, seems scared of
tackling China on this issue, as on so much else. Tiger farms in China have 7,000 or more
captive breeding tigers which supply bone for traditional medicine, some allegedly with
permits, despite the ban. The sad twist to the tale is that Chinese consumers want bones
from wild, not captive, tigers.
The 'J Factor'
Much of the debate in recent years has centred on Jairam Ramesh, a highly intelligent,
hard-working and extrovert economic-policy-adviser-turned-politician, who enjoys contro-
versy and was a high- profile minister for environment and forests from May 2009 to July
2011. He then became minister of rural development. Though he has more critics than sup-
porters stemming from his time handling the environment ministry, his ministerial journey
illustrates the pressures and vested interests in the environment-versus-growth debate.
Ramesh, who qualified as a mechanical engineer and then studied public policy, has
been at or near the centre of the government's economic policy-making since the 1980s. (I
first met him around 1985-86 at the Planning Commission, then being run by Manmohan
Singh). He has always been a committed reformer, and was India's first non-corrupt,
policy-oriented and knowledgeable environment minister for at least a decade. When he
was appointed, I wrote on my blog 7 that he was determined to clean up a ministry that had
been allowing India's environment and wildlife to be plundered and to decay during the ten
years that it had been headed by ministerial nominees from a regional Tamil Nadu-based
party, the Dravida Munnettra Kazhagam (DMK). Ramesh was backed by Sonia Gandhi and
Manmohan Singh and he said then that Singh had also asked him to moderate India's negat-
ive stance on climate change, saying, 'India has not caused the problem of global warming.
But try and make sure that India is part of the solution. Be constructive; be proactive.' 8