Wild boar meat is being sold in Nagpur for Rs80 a kilo. Sambhar meat is available in Bhubaneswar for Rs100 a kilo.

Meat of rare birds, including egrets, moor hen and a variety of wild water birds, is being sold openly in the streets of Puducherry while the meat of the Indian bullfrog is up for sale in the markets of Dimapur. Across India, the sale of the meat of wild animals, including jungle cats, jackal, porcupine and other endangered animals, has reached mammoth proportions and if the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) does not take steps to counter this trade,

With heatwave conditions having intensified across India, the entire country is in the throes of a major power deficit.

States including UP, Uttarakhand, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka are facing power outages running up to 16 hours in a day. Rural parts of Punjab and Haryana and also facing the brunt of lengthy power cuts. Even a power surplus state like J&K is reeling under load-shedding forcing its chief minister Omar Abdullah to tweet that the public should start paying market price for the electricity they consume.

Has the absence of the world leaders, including US President Barrack Obama, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, undermined the Rio+Earth Summit kick starting at Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday?

The UN under secretary-general for economic and social affairs Sha Zukang, who is responsible for the summit, has issued a statement that the absence of these leaders will not affect the meet, especially since the points of view of these nations will be represented in the political document currently under negotiation

Corbett National Park (Uttarakhand) Security in the Corbett Tiger Reserve (CTR) was recently breached by gangs of poachers belonging to five different communities.

“This is unprecedented,” said S.K. Datta, chief conservator of forest, wildlife and intelligence in Uttarakhand. “The local Sapera, Kanjar and Bawariya communities joined hands with members of the Bagdi community which hails from Rajasthan, Haryana and Punjab, with the members of the Bagariya tribe which hails from districts in Rajasthan and Ratlam in Madhya Pradesh, to enter the CTR with the intention of poaching.”

India is going to the Rio+Earth Summit determined to ensure the conference does not result in restrictive trade practices in the name of the green economy.

In a hurriedly convened media briefing on the eve of the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s departure to Mexico and the Earth Summit, India’s chief negotiator at Rio, environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan pointed out that the G 77 nations and China, along with India, are expected to negotiate together to ensure that sustainable development goals (SDGs) remain voluntary and not binding as is being insisted upon by the industrialised countries.

Corbett Tiger Reserve may boast of the world’s highest density of tigers but it is beset by a host of problems that may soon see it lose its premier status.
CTR’s director Rajan Mishra admits that CTR has witnessed an intensification of man-animal conflict with as many as eight humans being killed by a man-eater in 2010.

One of the main reasons for this conflict is the massive construction of hotels and luxury villas blocking of the entire eastern boundary with only two passages available for wildlife to approach the Kosi river.

India’s tiger fatalities are rising steadily. The country has lost 48 tigers in the last 22 weeks. The largest number of tigers have been killed in the premier Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand and in the Tadoba Tiger Reserve in Maharashtra.

The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) has confirmed that 19 of these deaths are clear-cut cases of poaching but wildlife experts claim poaching deaths could be much higher.

Not only is the mackerel size getting smaller but trawlers are catching mackerel with eggs which means there is no chance for them to reproduce. Rejuvenation of fish is not happening as trawlers fish even during the breeding season.”

In the southern states, large quantities of juveniles fishes are being caught and discarded since they have no commercial value. The economic loss of the juvenile fish by a single trawler in Kerala coast has been estimated at `28 lakhs.

More than 130 world leaders, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Chinese Premier Jiabao, will be attending the Rio+ Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro later this month.

Both the Indian and Chinese leaders know only too well this will be a crucial meeting to put the south — south point of view across to fight climate change.
The US President Barack Obama has not yet confirmed his attendance at the 20th anniversary of the world’s first Earth Summit, which gave birth to three major environmental treaties on climate change biodiversity and land degradation and desertification.

Is India’s thirst for fresh water causing ocean levels to rise? Experts warn that the backwaters of Kerala and the deltas of the Ganga, Krishna, Godavari, Cauvery and Mahanadi on the east coast are being threatened by rising ocean levels.

A recent Nasa study had confirmed that water tables in north India were declining at the rate of one foot per year across the northern states of India with even the ministry of water resources admitting that 109 cubic kilometres of water was lost from the aquifers along the Indus river alone.

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