COMMENTARY september 20, 2014 vol xlIX no 38 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 10 Sidestepping Science India’s ‘Notional’ Board for Wildlife Nandini Velho, Meghna Krishnadas, Umesh Srinivasan, Sachin Sridhara The Narendra Modi government’s initial reconstitution of the National Board for Wildlife, which the Supreme Court questioned as contravening the provisions of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, is in line with the current ethos of development at all costs. The decision to keep out domain experts in ecology suggests a refusal to acknowledge the complexities underlying conservation. O n 22 July 2014, India’s Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change issued a notifi- cation nominating members to a new National Board for Wildlife (NBWL ). The NBWL is a statutory organisation consti- tuted under the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972 ( WPA; amended 2002) and is a body that plays an advisory role in framing policy and streamlining measures for wildlife conservation in the country. It is headed by the prime minister and the standing committee headed by the Union Minister for Environment and Forests examines projects put before it for environment clearance. Under Section 5(A) of the WPA, the NBWL must include in its ranks five persons representing non-governmental organisations ( NGOs ) and 10 eminent conservationists, ecologists or environ- mentalists nominated by the central government. In a controversial notifica- tion that violates the provisions of the WPA, the government approved the NBWL with only two experts in ecology or conser- vation, and the Gujarat Ecological Edu- cation and Research Foundation ( GEER) as the sole representative of NGOs (Sethi and Jha 2014). The new committee met on 11-12 August under the chairmanship of the Minister for Environment and Forests, Prakash Javadekar and cleared more than 100 projects on the agenda. The Supreme Court then issued a notice to the government and put on hold the clearance of projects by the standing panel of the new NBWL on grounds of it being in contravention of the requirements mandated by the WPA. The government has now reconstituted the board by add- ing four more representatives of NGOs and a number of retired forest service officials. This sequence of events has revealed some crucial fault lines in this govern- ment’s approach to wildlife conservation. Most importantly, these events underscore that there are vast improvements to be made in implementing a law in the spirit it was intended, versus merely adhering to technicalities. Direction and Dominion The Indian Board of Wildlife ( IBWL), now known in its new avatar as the NBWL, was constituted in 1952. Its man- date was to actively involve non-govern- ment scientists and conservation experts on a common platform with the govern- ment, to debate vital wildlife issues and project clearances, and implement con- servation measures. The WPA amend- ment creating NBWL carried this man- date forward, and made explicit provi- sions to incorporate a wide set of inde- pendent experts, representing the mul- tiple disciplines that comprise conserva- tion in practice. In addition, the stand- ing committee of the NBWL, formed of a subset of its members, also advises the Supreme Court on environmental clear- ances of development projects. Ecologically sound practices, their un-derpinning legal frameworks, and finally their implementation, are essen- tial to good environmental governance. But of late, the practice seems to run contrary to the provisions on paper. In past governments, environmental checks and balances have often been given cur- sory attention at best – there are cases where almost 60 development projects have been reviewed by the NBWL in a mere two hours (Bhargav and Dattatri 2011). Further, non-official members were often not provided enough time to review the data and literature on con- tentious environmental projects and clearances. To make matters worse, data- based inferences on project impacts and opposition to deleterious projects were frequently overridden by government officials (Bhargav and Dattatri 2011). Despite these functional shortcomings, members of civil society and environ- mental experts were always part of the structure of the NBWL as envisioned in the WPA, and there was at least an official record of dissenting voices and contrary evaluations. This, we Nandini Velho (nandinivelho@gmail.com) is at the Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science and College of Marine and Environmental Sciences, both in Cairns, Queensland, Australia; Meghna Krishnadas (srishti.meghna@gmail.com) is at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, New Haven, the US; Umesh Srinivasan (umesh. srinivasan@gmail.com) is at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore; and Sachin Sridhara (sachin.sridhara@gmail.com) is at the Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science and College of Marine and Environmental Sciences, both in Cairns, Queensland, Australia.