Though I am in the Project Tiger committee, no campaign had been initiated by Union minister of forests and environment Jairam Ramesh to protect tigers, Gandhi said.
Noted animal rights activist and former Union minister Maneka Gandhi today slammed the Centre's proposed amendments to the Wildlife Protection Act 1972, saying "it is the worst (wildlife) act in India".
Though I am in the Project Tiger committee, no campaign had been initiated by Union minister of forests and environment Jairam Ramesh to protect tigers, Gandhi said.
"It is the worst act in India. It will allow everything to be killed, it is removing the schedules. Not one suggestion from anybody working in the field has been taken," she said while responding to reporters' queries on tiger conservation, on the sidelines of a book release function here.
Any right thinking person who wanted to save the tiger should "get involved in opposing the act," Gandhi, a former environment and forest minister, said.
The proposed amendments would "almost make the act non-existent," Gandhi said, adding that it was a "total crime" against the animals of the country. "If you say there are 1,411 tigers, they will be reduced to 200 the minute this act comes," she alleged.
Ramesh had recently said comprehensive amendments would be brought in to the 1972 Act to make punishment for poaching far more strict.
Earlier, releasing the book, 'Sacred Animals of India,' authored by Dr Nanditha Krishna, Gandhi stressed on the importance of animals in daily life, but added that many species would be extinct before "we realised" that they are a vital cog of the machine running the world.
Krishna's book traces the A-Z of animals and how and for what reasons they are venerated in the Indian culture through the ages.
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