The world is pursuing a path of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation, keys to human development. India is walking the same track, targeting a five trillion economy in the near future.
We expect higher GDP, better economic status and a high standard of living like other developed countries. However, linear infrastructure does not always propel growth and holds negative implications. Often development comes at an ecological cost.
Indian Railway’s expansion into the hinterlands
In the current scenario, the Indian government is focusing on linear infrastructure development across the nation. The commissioning of new railway lines is also being done at a faster pace.
Railways connect India rapidly, with a 59 per cent increase in the average pace of commissioning new lines from 4.1 (2009-14) to 6.53 km per day (2014-18). In addition to our current railway network, the Indian government in 2006 established a new subsidiary, the Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India Limited (DFCCIL) that upholds a motto of sincerity, speed and success.
At present, the Indian Railways run a mixed corridor where mail/express/passenger trains and freight trains share the same track. While freight traffic is the bread and butter for the Indian Railways, mail/express/passenger trains invariably take precedence over freight (Corporate Plan, DFCCIL 2020).
With this in view, the Railway Ministry proposed a dedicated freight corridor that will run separately on a dedicated track. Accordingly, the DFCCIL claims that freight trains would now be able to move at a speed of 100 km per hour.
By 2024, DFCCIL proposes to lay a 3365 km track connecting north to south and west to east (Corporate Plan, DFCCIL 2020). However, the downside is that such sanctioned and proposed corridors will pass through different forest patches of different states and compromise animal safety.
As per a 2019 RTI report received from the Ministry of Railways, railway lines currently pass through 19 protected areas, including national parks, sanctuaries, elephant reserves, and tiger reserves. The details are given below:-
| Railway Lines Running Through Protected Areas | |
| Railway Line | Forests/Parks/Tiger Reserves/Sanctuaries |
| Alipurduar – Siliguri | Jaldapara, Gorumara, Mahananda WLS |
| East Central Railway (Bihar-UP line) | Valmiki Tiger Reserve |
| Kansiya nes – Sasan Gir metre gauge | Gir sanctuary |
| Alipurduar – Siliguri | Jaldapara, Gorumara, Mahananda WLS |
| Raiwala-Dehradun | Rajaji National park |
| Dhanbad division | Betla national park |
| Nagpur division | Reserve forest, malewada |
| Junagadh-Bilkha | Gir sanctuary |
| Madukarai-Kanjikode section | Walayar range, palakkad forest |
| Gondia-Chanda fort | Nagzira, Navegaon and Tadoba |
| Balaghat – Jabalpur | Kanha range |
| Nagpur – Chhindwara | Pench range, sillewani forest |
| Nagpur – Durg | Nagzira RF, Dandakara RF, Dakshin bortalao range |
| Nainpur – Chhindwara | Pench range |
| Joranda – Dhenkanal | Dhenakanal forest |
| Sitabinj – Harichandanpur | Harichandanpur reserve forest |
| Rouli – Tikiri | The Eastern Ghats, Rayagda hills |
| Kakrigumma – Koraput | The Eastern Ghats, Rayagda hills |
| Titlagarh-Singapuram road | Kotgarh elephant reserve, Niyamgiri |
The newly proposed tracks by DFCCIL will have a doubled Hospet-Tinaighat-Vasco line passing through Goa’s Bhagwan Mahaveer Sanctuary.
Karnataka’s Dandeli sanctuary, Lucknow-Pilibhit gauge conversion will increase construction and consequently traffic inside the Pilibhit tiger reserve in Uttar Pradesh.
Similarly, a dedicated freight corridor passes through Gautam Buddha WLS of Bihar and Koderma WLS of Jharkhand.
India’s environment ministry recently exempted 13 pending railway projects worth INR 19,400 crore (2.8 billion USD) and spread over 800 hectares of land from seeking forest permits. These clearances could adversely impact the national park, tiger reserve, tiger corridor, and wildlife sanctuaries across Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, and Goa. It is expected that more protected areas are likely to see railway lines in and around them soon.
The repercussion of Railway expansion on wildlife
The Indian railways’ ministry claims that as many as 35,732 animals were killed on the railway tracks in the last four years. All in all, every day, 31 animals die on the tracks.
In many states, railway lines passing through elephant habitats have led to accidents and the death of 249 elephants during 1987 and 2018.
Since 1987, 18 elephants have been killed in train accidents only in Rajaji National Park. Recent statistics show that elephant mortality due to train hit is ranked third, after electrocution and poaching.
In overall elephant deaths due to anthropogenic causes, rail contributes to almost 12 per cent of India’s total elephant mortality.
According to the official data, the number has been continuously increasing year after year.
The judicious amalgamation of development and conservation
The web of railway tracks will cross through more protected areas and undoubtedly cause more mortality in the coming days. We cannot limit expansion because it would jeopardise the nation’s welfare, but we cannot sacrifice the lives of protected and endangered species to increase the nation’s GDP.
Such a critical situation demands a better strategy in which both development and conservation can go hand in hand. Some key measures have been proposed to balance conservation and development. It is perhaps time to reflect upon them and promise their inclusion at totality.
A. Passage through dense forest should be avoided if an alternative route is available
On several occasions, railway agencies choose the alignment that passes through the protected area to reduce the railway track’s length, thereby lowering the project cost. They do this despite knowing that another alternative route is available. However, such an alternative would cost more.
While deciding on the selection of route, agencies must keep in mind that the cost of an animal’s life is far greater than the project’s cost. The right decision might save species’ lives and subsequently help them maintain ecological balance. Economic non-viability should not be cited as a reason for non-ecological viability.
B. Imposing restriction on the speed of the trains passing through the dense forest areas
Speed kills both humans and wildlife in different ways. Unfortunately, there are no prescriptions in any rule/act/policy/guidelines on the exact speed limit to be followed by the Indian railways while passing through dense forests/protected areas/critical wildlife habitats.
This is the most contentious and critical point in terms of wildlife conservation. As per a 2016 report, 1200 trains run through India’s protected area, which poses a grave danger to its sensitive wildlife. Evidence from research suggests that a restricted speed limit for trains in dense forests is an effective mitigation strategy to avoid incidental mortalities.
It has been shown that an increase in the speed limit of the train caused more elephant fatalities due to the elephant–train collision. Different committees constituted on mitigation measures also suggest a speed limit of 20 km within the protected area.
Other studies reveal that the frequency of wild animal fatalities is much higher during the night than during the day and hence suggested the restriction on railway movement on the tracks that is passing through the forested area in between 7 pm to 6 am.
The concerned authorities have proposed no pre-defined speed limit applied throughout Indian PAs regardless of their protection status (whether it is a Sanctuary, National Park, or Tiger Reserve).
A Uttarakhand HC order of 2016 states that trains need to run at 30 km per hour while passing through national parks. The 34th meeting of the National Board for Wildlife (NBWL) in 2015 also mandated that trains passing through a tiger reserve must travel at a maximum speed of 35 kmph at night and 40 kmph during the day.
In 2013, public interest litigation (Shakti Prasad Nayak Vs Union of India) was filed in the honorable Supreme Court regarding the train’s speed restriction. The Supreme Court passed a Judgement in 2014 on this writ petition, ordering speed restrictions to be strictly followed by trains of Indian Railways passing through dense forests and is applicable across India.
In this crucial verdict, the order pertaining to the speed limit was generic, and no range was defined, and hence there was no clarity on the speed limit.
Such a policy gap attracts a slew of unwanted incidents, the cost of which is borne solely by ‘protected’ species. Several new railway projects will increase the traffic within various protected areas in the coming days, but there are no speed limit mandates in order.
Several times, forest officials report that the railways have not adhered to the prescribed speed limit. The railway officials are fully aware of the flaw in policy and are confident that no one will penalise them despite casualties on the track. It would perhaps be prudent at this stage to define the speed limit for the country’s entire protected area and draft strict penalty provisions for the railways.
C.Need for a monitoring committee on the efficacy of mitigation structures
Any development project necessitates an environment impact assessment (EIA), and in such a study, various mitigation measures such as culverts, overpasses, bridges, and tunnels are proposed to facilitate safe passage to animals from one side to the other so that the rail tracks do not pose a risk or a barrier. Such mitigations fulfil the concept of sustainability and ensure animal permeability.
The concern is that mitigation measures proposed by EIA agencies should not be limited to paper only, required for clearance from the relevant authorities. Project personnel should abide by the suggestions made by the EIA organisations. Several accredited agencies do the EIA and propose well-designed mitigation structures by keeping in mind the habitat use of animals, water flow regime, movement pattern and several other ecological parameters.
For such environmental projects, a monitoring committee should be established to oversee the technical recommendations made by authorised agencies for the mitigation structure to be designed correctly and in the best interest of the endemic species. This committee will also monitor the effectiveness of the constructed design in terms of animal use.
Way Forward
In the past two decades, several projects were cleared with mitigation structures. However, it is time to assess the efficacy of those mitigation structures, and a detailed study has to be conducted. The results of this study can strengthen our policies relating to EIAs and implementation and mitigation strategies in linear infrastructure developments.
A guideline prepared by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) titled “Eco-friendly measures to mitigate impacts of linear infrastructure on wildlife” in 2016 (WII, 2016) is being largely suggested by various apex agencies like the National Board of Wildlife (NBWL) during clearance of project for implementing mitigation measures.
In the last five years, there has been a tremendous increase in the linear infrastructures in and around protected forest areas. Also, there have been scientific advancements and knowledge generated in the past few years pertaining to mitigation strategies. It is high time to review and update the existing WII guidelines and make them more scientifically robust by improvising them with recent knowledge and experience.
There is growing recognition that people and wildlife can coexist in human-dominated landscapes with appropriate tools and management, public policies, and societal support.
An ancient Sanskrit verse expresses “Ati Sarvatra Varjayet “, meaning anything in excess is harmful. This verse shares the key to sustainable consumption. Human conflict with wildlife has contributed to the decline and extinction of many species, terrestrial carnivores and herbivores.
The loss of a species as a result of train collision had a cascading effect on the ecosystem. This skewed growth-oriented approach will continue to put more pressure on forest lands. Nature has already defined the line between animals and humans, and it is our responsibility to keep it as straightforward as possible. It is time to make sustainable consumption and instil one’s ethical and social responsibility for nature conservation.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.