Private Protected Areas of India - Non-profit Ownership

Non-profit Ownership

The biggest non-profit private organization which acquires wilderness tracts for development into private protected areas, the Nature Conservancy - does not operate in India, but has shown interest in expanding its operations to the country.

The World Land Trust, another non-profit organization, in partnership with the Wildlife Trust of India has funded two significant privately owned protected land holdings in India. The purpose of the holdings are to provide migration corridors to herds of Indian elephants,and the corresponding project is called the Wild Lands Corridor. The two corridors are:

• The Siju-Rewak corridor in the Garo Hills in the state of Meghalaya, for connection between the Siju Wildlife Sanctuary and the Rewak Reserved Forest. This is one of only four forded corridors across the Simsang River, which bisects the Garo Hills. This region also contains large omnivores and carnivores like the Bengal Tiger, Clouded Leopard and the Himalayan Black Bear.
• The Tirunelli-Kudrakote corridor in the state of Kerala between the Tirunelli Reserved Forest and the Kudrakote Reserved Forest acts as a migration corridor for India's largest extant elephant population. The region is part of the Western Ghats, a biodiversity hotspot which is home to the Nilgiri Tahr, Salim Ali's fruit bat and 13 endemic bird species including the Malabar Parakeet. The trust is in the process of reallocation of villages in the corridor, and is planning to register the corridor as a reserved forest once reallocation is complete, so that standard government protection is obtained.

The introduction of the protected area category community reserves under the Wildlife (Protection) Amendment Act of 2002 has introduced legislation for providing government protection to community held lands, which could be used for obtaining state protection in non-profit privately held lands of ecological value. (See Conservation reserves and community reserves of India)