For targeted efforts to manage wildlife crime and act in opposition to poachers, the Uttarakhand authorities has created two seven-member Wildlife Crime Control Units for its administrative divisions of Garhwal and Kumaun. Each may have jurisdiction — spanning over a complete area — to take motion in opposition to poachers, register circumstances and pursue them in court docket, and preserve information of criminals and their wildlife crime historical past.
According to an order issued by Chief Wildlife Warden J S Suhag asserting the formation of the 2 models, these may also act as a consultancy for the federal government on wildlife crimes.
They may also function nodal our bodies sharing data and coordinating with the Union authorities’s Wildlife Crime Control Bureau .
According to an official, jurisdiction stays a problem in prosecution in such circumstances as they’re usually dismissed in court docket when the defending celebration cites a jurisdiction difficulty.
“Now the state government has expanded the jurisdiction by creating two separate dedicated Wildlife Crime Control Units for the entire Garhwal and Kumaun regions… Each unit can now move in all the forest divisions of the region concerned. They can conduct raids in any division on information of wildlife crime, register cases, and pursue the matter in the court,” an official stated.
These models can develop an intelligence community in any of the forest divisions of their jurisdiction space.
Assistant Conservator of Forest (Kalsi division) Rangnath Pandey, who heads the Garhwal unit, stated, “If a criminal commits the same offence under Wildlife Protection Act for a second time, punishment increases three times. But as forest divisions were not sharing the information of criminals and were maintaining records of local divisional jurisdiction areas only, they remained clueless about the crime committed by the accused in other forest divisions, and hence they could not pursue a case for rigorous punishment…”
“But now,” he stated, “information of criminals and their crimes will be collected and maintained centrally at regional level and will be shared with all the divisional units concerned when required.”
While the Garhwal unit has members from Rajaji Tiger Reserve and Kedarnath wildlife division, the Kumaun unit has members from Corbett Tiger Reserve and Bageshwar forest division.
