Let us stop burning down the forests !

Wanted to share with you about a recently conducted awareness campaign for Rural School students in the dense forest region of Karnataka; Biligiri Rangana Forest Range which I was lucky to be part of. Ashwin who heads the “Growing Wild” organization came down to Injoos and spoke to us regarding this awareness campaign and the Injoos team members got kicked and decided to join hands for this noble cause.

Belive me, those 3 days that I spent at the the awareness camp among the rural school students was one of the best days in my life. We split up into 2 teams 4 in each to cover wider area. Talking about the response from the students, it was unexpected. We had a plan to cover over 50 schools that was in and around the Biligiri Rangana Forest range and spend around 15 minutes at each school to convey our thoughts but, seeing the response from the students and their willingness to save our forests we could not stop ourselves from spending more time with the students interacting and answering their questions and queries. We were amazed to see and hear from students the amount of information that they knew about the forests and the animals living within those forests and not to mention their willingness to save the forests.

“We have got a strong response from various other school children around other sanctuaries like Nagarahole Forest Range, Bandipur Forest Range etc to which the information is being conveyed in the same way from past few years.. “This was the 1st strong and successful effort to convey information on the conservation of forest around the Biligiri Rangana forest range..” shared one of the ‘Growing Wild’ member enthusiastically.

As per the latest state of forests report by the Forest Survey of India the actual forest cover of India is 19.27% of the geographic area, corresponding to 63.3 million hectors. In the absolute term, out of the 63 million hectors of forests an area of around 3.73 million can be presumed to be affected by fires annually. This figures are alarming as 3.73 million hectors of forest cannot be regrown in few years.

Early this year a strong roar across the country was sounded to save the national animal of our country, for the lovers of the wild and the creatures living within it, this news was a bolt of fire that had hit their life as if a huge forest fire had burst out. Until 1970 poaching was legal across India and Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 was enforced to ban hunting. Until a century back there were more than 40,000 odd tigers roaming across India alone which was around 60% of the complete world’s tiger population and now the count is less that 1400. Alarming isn’t it.?