The Wildlife (Protection) Amendment Bill 2002 (the Bill) has come 30 years after the Wild Life (Protection) Act 1972. Have these three decades been used to integrate the critical lessons learnt from wildlife management across India and the world?

Yes and no. The Bill has several undoubtedly progressive provisions. It increases protection of wildlife habitats from the onslaught of developmental and commercial forces, e.g. by prohibiting new commercial tourism infrastructure, or changes of protected area boundaries without clearance from a national wildlife board. It provides coverage to all kinds of animals (the previous Act missed out fish, invertebrates, and most marine creatures). The Bill also increases the scope for people's participation in conservation, e.g. by setting up sanctuary advisory committees and by creating two new forms of protected areas, conservation reserves and community reserves.

Unfortunately, these gains are clouded by a number of regressive provisions, as also the neglect of measures activists have sought for years. Given that the greatest threat wildlife habitats face is from commercial and developmental processes, the Bill misses the one concrete opportunity to counter these.

The expert committee, set up by the ministry of environment and forests to draft the Bill in the mid-1990s, had recommended that in a five-kilometre (km) belt around all protected areas,