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Out of the wilderness?

Young filmmakers prepare to bring the truth about wildlife crimes to the screen

BEYOND BIG CATS The winners of the British Environment Film Fellowships with the British High Commissioner

Giving a boost to the emerging talent in wildlife filmmaking in India, the United Kingdom has announced the Environment Film Fellowships for 2006.

Announcing the names of seven winners, British High Commissioner to India, Sir Michael Arthur said, "Through this collaborative endeavour between the U.K. and Indian filmmakers we hope to address the larger issues of conservation of some of the rarest species."

Worth Rs.6 lakhs, the fellowship requires the filmmakers to complete the films by December 2006. The films will be aired on Discovery Channel and would also be screened at the Wildscreen Festival in India, scheduled to be held in January 2007.

Going beyond the glamour of big cats and species that naturally look good on camera, the winners have chosen subjects that generally don't make it to the front pages and the exclusives in the media.

Each winner has collaborated with an expert in the respective field and with the theme being `wildlife crime', the brief includes bringing out how and why these rare species, all of which figure in Schedule I of the Wildlife Protection Act, are being poached.

For instance, Sonya V. Kapoor is working on the poaching of butterflies. "Few people know that butterflies are being used as pendants and in key chains. Then some people are using butterflies in paintings. Research shows for each butterfly that suits the artwork, a thousand are killed."

She says awareness levels are high in countries like the U.S. and the U.K. , but India has yet to come to terms with the reality.

"The butterfly is the second best pollinator after the honeybee, and the decrease in their numbers can have adverse effects on agriculture. The problem is really bad in Uttaranchal, the North East and Karnataka. I have come to know in Uttaranchal kids are being offered Rs.150 a day to capture butterflies. In the North East some foreigners were caught with some 50,000 butterflies."

For Delhi-based Kalpana Subramanium, the challenge is to bring turtles into focus through her film "Turtles in a Soup".

"People, these days, think kachua to phaltu hai, but it is one of the best scavengers in the ecosystem. In early times people used to introduce turtles in the neighbourhood ponds to cleanse them. For the same reason, turtles were introduced in the Ganga river when the Ganga Action Plan was launched. Now the Ganga river basin has become a centre for turtle poaching." Kalpana says while marine turtles (Olive Ridleys on the Orissa coast) have been in the media focus, hardly anybody worked on the freshwater turtles. "I am also trying to explore the link between the rise in the Chinese currency and the increase in the animal trade."

Bear trade

Similarly, Ashima Narain is working on how the Indian sloth bear, which enjoys the same rank as the tiger under the law, is being blatantly poached and traded.

The others include Gurmeet Sapal on leopards, Himanshu Malhotra on corals, Jay Mazumdar on tiger poaching issues and Balan on the wildlife crimes inflicted upon the domestic and wild elephants of Kerala.

ANUJ KUMAR

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