The seizures of wild animal derivatives over the turn of the year have not elicited the kind of outcry they should have. In all, the raids in two centres in Uttar Pradesh in December 1999 and January of the new year have brought in a haul of big cat skins and claws that are the largest ever not merely in India but in the world. Add up the numbers and they result in the remains of an astonishing 37 tigers and over 1,100 leopards. What we are witnessing is the tip of the iceberg of a fresh assault not only on endangered species but, equally significant, on their habitats. The unravelling of a web of life, the sustenance of which has been a major achievement of independent India, is no secret. So acute are the pressures that even members of the bureaucracy are being outspoken. The director of Project Tiger, P. K. Sen, went so far as to tell a conference at the India International Centre, New Delhi, 'The tiger is dying.' This despite the fact that over 30,000 square kilometres of prime tiger habitat is protected in reserves under the scheme he heads. This is perhaps the largest slice of tiger habitat in the world that is intact. Yet the drive to open up such lands for industry has gathered momentum and is being facilitated by the government's preoccupation with other, more pressing matters. One point of view is that all this hardly matters. Development does have a way of making short work of wildlife. The wolf and the brown bear had vanished from the British Isles even before the Industrial Revolution gathered force. All that the United States supports are hardly a few hundred grizzlies while wolves only exist in a couple of states. In much of western Europe the large carnivores only survive, sometimes barely so, in mountains and hill ranges that are in relatively remote tracts. Such a viewpoint, alluring as it is, may also be misleading in the extreme. India's wildlife has survived in the main owing to a conscious decision to preserve it in at least a fraction of the landscape. There were and are sound ethical reasons for doing so. Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister and C. Rajagopalachari, the first head of state of independent India, were the first men in high office in centuries not to go out on shoots. Every British viceroy down to Louis Mountbatten had gone and 'got' his tiger. Nehru personally intervened to stop a scramble amongst the maharajahs to shoot lions in the Gir Forest, Saurashtra after their protector, the Nawab of Junagadh, fled to Pakistan. Rajaji waived the shooting rights that were a perquisite of his office in the forests of the Shivalik hills, which became a sanctuary of wildlife. The idea was a simple one. India would set out a new ethic of peace, which would also extend to nature. By the end of the Sixties, the limitations of this approach were evident. In any case, it was never thought through with any seriousness. The drive to fetch foreign exchange led ex-rulers like Vidya Chandra Shukla to run shikar companies. Anyone who paid Rs 30,000 was 'guaranteed a tiger'. Indians with means were not far behind. A visitor to the palace of the maharajah of Vizianagram or Vizzy, the cricketer-prince, was aghast to be told of a stuffed tigress that she had marked yet another 'century'. The trade in tiger and leopard skins was still legitimate in 1968 when an enterprising forester with no love for the gun helped uncover the extent of the trade. The price of a tiger pelt had gone up from $ 50 to ten times that price in less than a decade. Kailash Sankhala would later write of a godown he visited: 'I counted 22 tiger heads and all seemed to be laughing at us; probably they were mocking at our mission. There were hundreds of tiger rugs and I pulled out four and spread them on the floor'. A year later the government banned the export of tiger and leopard skins. By 1973, a new act had been promulgated to help protect wildlife and new federally funded programmes were in place to safeguard at least a few select tracts. The next major scare was in the early Nineties with the rise of the tiger bone trade in China. By July 1997, 118 tiger skins and over 363 kilograms of tiger bone had been recovered. It also became quickly evident that the killing in itself was not the only problem. Most wild carnivores - and the leopard and tiger are no exception - can indeed recover rapidly provided they have enough habitat and prey. Many of today's protected sites such as Sariska in Rajasthan and Chitwan in Nepal have been the scenes of huge hunts in the past. But the entire context has changed. Prodded by concern from both within and outside India, the official machinery became a little more open and transparent. Volunteers were involved in tiger censuses. Many major states set up consultative mechanisms. Mainly because of the ring of protection around key habitats, the crisis passed. But, as is now evident, the relief was shortlived. For one, the underlying drive to open up the habitats never really slackened. Many state governments are bankrupt. One of the first victims of a freeze in hiring is the wildlife wing of the forest department. An estimated four of every 10 posts are empty. Unlike in the Seventies, the Union government cannot browbeat the states, each of which wants to maximize revenues. Right now there is a concerted drive in Karnataka to harvest fallen trees from the national parks. The timber lobby, not content with hacking trees in the rest of the state, is eyeing the rich stands in the two tiger reserves, Bandipur and Nagarahole. Protection of the entire ecosystem in toto is today being applied to a fraction of the landmass, barely one per cent of the country. It matters, not because tigers or panthers do, but because these lands are a repository of natural wealth. Imagine the outcry if parts of the Konarak temple or Fatehpur Sikri were being hacked off and sold to the highest bidder. A better analogy is that of the library of ancient Alexandria, a repository of learning across the ages, burnt to cinders in a matter of hours. This is what the destruction of the natural landscape in India amounts to. After all, the forests, inclusive of their wild denizens and plants, their soils and waters, are as much a part of this country's heritage as the monuments of yore. In the past, even in times when there were other, pressing demands on the purse, conservation was given its due. This is as it should be. Given the country's size and its diverse and multilayered environmental movement, it is possible to work out ingenious answers to the current crisis. But there has to be a deeper sense of urgency. It would be a pity if short term interests left the best of our heritage a wasteland. The author is an independent researcher and analyst on ecology and political affairs and former fellow, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi