Hyderabad: The costs of including mitigation measures for wildlife for executing various projects in Telangana, especially small projects, has become a cause for concern as these, in some instances, are costing more than the projects themselves, and significantly increasing the cost for the user agencies, mostly government owned.
Forced with this reality, the Telangana government has sought relief from the Centre seeking a reduction in the number of wildlife mitigation measures (WMMs) and is hoping that its plea will bear some fruit soon.
On Thursday, the state government presented Union minister for environment and forests Bhupendra Yadav with a list of such projects that include cellphone transmission towers, and roads that are to come up in some of the forested areas in Telangana.
Among the requests for relaxing the prescribed WMMs are works related to 18 roads, mostly in the former unified Adilabad district, which, if accepted by the National Board for Wildlife (NBWL), could see special underpasses to be built for wild animals to cross the roads, cut by half in number.
Linear projects such as roads that pass through forests with wildlife, require two underpasses for every kilometre to be provided for safe passage for wild animals and the cost of these measures are to be borne by the user agencies.
Since each underpass is not just a small tunnel under the road but must be built to specifications laid down by the Wildlife Institute of India, along with funnel-like ‘guiding’ structures to corral wild animals towards the underpasses, the costs add up, a forest department official explained.
These 18 roads, some in identified wildlife corridor areas, are to be laid by the panchayat raj department, or come under the PM Gramin Sadak Yojana, vary in length ranging from around 5 km to 10 km each.
“For such small projects, providing two underpasses for every km is adding significant cost,” another senior forest department official said.
Typically, a minimum of 2.5 per cent of cost of any project that requires forest land with wildlife presence is mandated towards WMMs, but in most cases, this figure is much more than the minimum mandated amount in the present case, an official said.
For instance, in the case of 10 BSNL towers, the cost would be up to Rs 3 lakh each for some. The WMMs in these instances, as recommended by field officials, are working out to be much more and hence, this request is seen as a genuine one, the official said.
Incidentally, since the government has decided to seek relief for the BSNL towers, in the spirit of dealing with the issue with an equal hand, officials said they have also sought similar relief two such towers that a private cellphone service provider wants to set up in forest areas.
The officials said that all these project proposals – 18 roads, 12 cell phone towers including some other projects, 38 in all — taken to Yadav’s notice in Delhi by the state government, were previously approved by the State Board for Wildlife, which subsequently agreed to seek relief from WMMs.
“But unless the NBWL approves the requests for the relief, such changes cannot be made. A team of experts will be sent by NBWL in February and it will visit each project site for a fresh evaluation and then submit its report to NBWL. We hope for a favourable outcome as all these works fill gaps in facilities that are sorely lacking,” the senior official said.
