The Supreme Court today refused to immediately stop the hunting or culling of monkeys, nilgais and wild boars in Himachal Pradesh, Bihar and Uttarakhand, respectively, following an assurance by the Centre that such activities were allowed only outside forests in order to protect people.
A vacation Bench comprising Justices AK Goel and AM Khanwilkar, however, allowed three PIL petitioners to submit representations to the Centre for putting an end to such killings. The apex court directed the government to decide on such pleas within two weeks.
The Bench also clarified that it would hear the PIL cases on July 15 by when the government would have taken a stand on the pleas of the three petitioners — animal rights activist Gauri Maulekhi, the Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre and Federation of Animal Protection Organisations.
Appearing for the Centre, Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar questioned the validity of the PILs, contending that the petitioners had approached the apex court after a delay of seven months and that too during the summer vacation. The Centre had permitted Bihar in November 2015 to hunt nilgais for a year, of which only five months were left.
The Animal Welfare Board of India, a statutory body, also supported the PILs, arguing that the Wildlife Protection Act 1972 was meant for protecting animals, not to declare them as “vermin” to facilitate their killing. The SG said the Board should challenge the validity of the government’s three notifications granting permission to Bihar, HP and Uttarakhand, instead of joining the petitioners. Acknowledging the Board’s contention, the Bench remarked that this did not mean that the Act could be held against people and let them suffer.
The petitioners pleaded that wild animals under the Act could be taken off the protected category and placed on the “vermin” list to facilitate their killing only on the basis of scientific studies confirming the need for such a move to resolve man-animal conflicts. But this was not done before the Centre issued the three notifications.
Further, a number of the animals ran back into the forest after being hit by bullets and lived in pain which was against the permission to kill them, the petitioners’ senior counsel Sidharth Luthra, Anand Grover and Vijay Hansaria pleaded.
Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi publicly criticised her cabinet colleague Prakash Javadekar for the approval given by his ministry for hunting the animals.
In her PIL, Maulekhi has challenged the validity of Section 62 of the Wildlife Protection Act 1972 that empowered the Centre to remove animals from the protected list and let their culling to curtail their population. Under the legal provision, there was no mechanism to monitor the slaughter or assess the need on a scientific basis after taking into account the destruction of natural habitats of the animals, the petitioner pleaded. “The indiscriminate killing of these animals will have a detrimental effect on the food chain and in turn lead to an ecological imbalance,” the PIL said pleading for declaring Section 62 of the Act as unconstitutional and illegal.
