Live
- Hailstorm-hit Vistara flight returns to Bhubaneswar airport
- PM Modi-led govt saved people during pandemic: Union Minister Anurag Thakur
- Heat wave grips Telangana, mercury crosses 46 degrees Celsius in few places
- New India believes in giving a dose, not dossiers, to terror masterminds: PM Modi
- Nagarkurnool MLA Kuchukulla Rajesh Reddy should send Malluravi to Parliament for the third time
- Awareness conference on Mayday under the auspices of Legal Service Authority
- Adani Power logs 37 per cent revenue growth in FY24, consolidated PBT more than doubled
- Rohit said 'just show us what you can do', recalls Shivam Dube post T20 WC selection
- Resignations of Lovely, Naseeb and Basoya indicate Congress high command's disconnect with ground reality
- Hamas standing in way of ceasefire, Blinken says during meeting with Israeli PM Netanyahu
PTR launches plan for turtle conservation, identification
The Pilibhit Tiger Reserve (PTR) in Uttar Pradesh has launched a 'five-year-plan' to safeguard turtles, conduct species identification and estimate their populations, both within and outside the reserve.
Pilibhit: The Pilibhit Tiger Reserve (PTR) in Uttar Pradesh has launched a 'five-year-plan' to safeguard turtles, conduct species identification and estimate their populations, both within and outside the reserve.
The initiative will be executed in collaboration with the Turtle Survival Alliance (TSA), an international institution headquartered in the US and dedicated to the conservation of turtles and tortoises.
PTR's divisional forest officer, Naveen Khandelwal, has sent a letter to TSA seeking its active participation in the programme.
“The decision is motivated by a recent step of the MoEFCC (ministry of environment, forest and climate change) towards the inclusion of 25 species of freshwater turtles in Schedule I of the Wildlife Protection Act out of a total of 29 found across the country. The proposed conservation plan also envisaged setting up a turtle research centre in the buffer forest area of PTR," he said.
According to the programme director of TSA in India, Shailendra Singh, the number of Schedule I turtle species in the country was confined to 20 before April this year.
"Uttar Pradesh, which had as many as seven turtle species under Schedule I out of a total of 15 identified ones so far, has stepped up now with 11 Schedule I species. Of the remaining four species, two have been placed in Schedule II and another two categorised as unprotected", he said.
Remarkably, out of the 13 turtle species, that had been identified in Pilibhit in a survey conducted by TSA in 2005, 11 are included as Schedule I species as specified in the recently revised Wildlife Protection Act, he added.
"Of the 29 freshwater species of turtles found in the country, 25 have been enlisted in the red list of the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) due to their reckless poaching and illegal trading. The launching of an integrated conservation plan becomes an inevitable necessity, especially when Gonda-Bahraich-Pilibhit have already been identified as sensitive zones for illegal trading of turtles by the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau."
