India in Twenty First Century: Human Wildlife Conflicts Still Unsolved

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although India’s succeeded in creation of 868 Protected Areas (PA) covering its 5.02 percent of the total geographical area; it comes with a social cost. With high population pressure and livelihood based on nature and natural resources, India is yet to find a pragmatic win-win solution for solving the problem of Human-Wildlife Conflict (HWC) in the twenty-first century. In the present paper, the authors discuss the nature of HWCs occurring in the country and major challenges in mitigation measures by analyzing the research trend, available literature sources, reports and with a special focus on two case studies from India, that is, Manas landscape and Indian Sundarbans based on field observations. The paper identifies there is a severe requirement of proper and authentic databases and standard methodology to evaluate the ‘ecosystem (dis)-services’ in the academic discourse. The authors also highlight their reservations about the effectiveness of ‘compensation’ as a mitigation measure.