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Business News/ Opinion / Online-views/  In Manipal, take a Frog Walk
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In Manipal, take a Frog Walk

Ramit Singal has decided to create a unique model of incentive-based conservation and applied it to urban landscapes.

Ramit Singal, an alumnus of the Manipal Institute of Technology.Premium
Ramit Singal, an alumnus of the Manipal Institute of Technology.

As the urban sprawl of the National Capital Region spreads its tentacles, green spaces have paid a heavy price. Gone are the idyllic homes with a front garden with chirping house sparrows, squirrels and bright yellow bees. You will be lucky now if you find an apartment with a balcony for potted plants. The new order of the day is to pave the front lawn, build a house on stilts so that the five cars that each family owns can be parked inside. It makes sense, given that the city is exploding with cars and most residents are at each other’s throats over parking.

The problem is when cities like Delhi create more space for cars they do away with space for biodiversity. City gardens and parks are vestiges for a host of flora and fauna—from the house lizards to frogs, squirrels, dragonflies and bees. On the street I live, there is perhaps just one bungalow left with a garden providing some relief from concrete cookie cutter apartments.

Vanishing urban biodiversity is so complex a problem that it seems difficult to address. But one young man has developed an idea that is simple and yet so effective. Ramit Singal, an alumnus of the Manipal Institute of Technology, decided to create a unique model of incentive-based conservation and applied it to urban landscapes. He organizes, every weekend in Manipal, a Frog Walk in which he takes students and teachers for a nature walk to biodiversity-rich backyards. He charges a small fee from participants; the money is shared with the households participating in the programme.

It’s a model that has been used with farmers across the world. Provide incentives so that landowners conserve a part of their land as habitats for wild animals in return for financial incentives through tourism and other allied activities. But Singal admits candidly that he wasn’t trying to solve any world problems. “Most of the urban diversity in places like Manipal is located within private land, which have the right habitat, and I wanted to share this with other people," he says. “For the past six years, I have been quietly trespassing through all these trails and trying to come up with a model where what I do doesn’t lead me to trouble and becomes more inclusive."

On his walks he has been able to show people species like the Indian Rock Python, birds like the Malabar Pied Hornbill and the Grey-headed Bulbul as well as the bright green Malabar Gliding Frog, a species that’s endemic to the Western Ghats. He’s organized a series of such walks and the participants include students, teachers and ordinary people interested in learning about biodiversity.

Singal has tied up with homeowners like Sowmya Nayak—the house has a natural pond with a small green patch. In these small patches, Singal has recorded about 10 species of snakes, 15 species of frogs and over 50 species of birds along with evidence of pangolins and leopards.

Can this be a financially viable model, given the real estate prices in other cities? “We are not trying to convince them that this is financially more beneficial. Instead we hope that the increase in awareness, steady inflow of some amount of money to them and students will invoke some pride in being hosts to such wonderful biodiversity in their backyards," Singal argues. “About 50% of the proceeds from these walks will go to the houseowners who maintain this habitat and the remaining will go to fund libraries of local schools with books about wildlife in India."

Pride is a powerful emotion and has worked well in conservation campaigns across the world. It helped the Nagas stop hunting the Amur Falcon and saved the Spatuletail Hummingbird’s habitat in Peru. “I imagine a model where one can get breakfast and sight plenty of birds and animals in one of the many backyards here (in Manipal), while the owner of the house benefits monetarily and culturally from this interaction," says Singal.

Can this model be replicated in other cities? Could the Delhi government, for instance, incentivize those houseowners who haven’t succumbed to high-rise apartments and implement Singal’s model here? Maybe the revenue generated from these nature walks will never add up to the profits generated from high-rise real estate, but look at the advantages—students and children in the city could have some access to biodiversity in the backyard. And as they say, you can’t put a price on such experiences.

Bahar Dutt is a conservation biologist and author of the book Green Wars: Dispatches From A Vanishing World.

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Published: 07 Aug 2015, 12:13 AM IST
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