What is Poonam Avlokan? – Burning Issues – Free PDF Download

• Conducted once every five years, the Lion Census was due on June 5- 6 this year.

WHY WAS THE LION CENSUS NOT CONDUCTED THIS YEAR?

• Conducted once every five years, the Lion Census was due on June 5- 6 this year, but was postponed after the lockdown was announced on March 24.
• Over 1,500 forest guards, foresters and range forest officers were deputed on policing duty to enforce the lockdown.

• The Forest Department invites NGOs, experts and wildlife enthusiasts to join the Census for transparency and augmenting manpower, but this time, Forest Minister Ganpat Vasava said on June 3, it was not advisable to send so many people inside the forest as the Bronx Zoo in New York had reported a case of transmission of novel coronavirus from a human to a tigress.

• On Wednesday (09-June), the Gujarat Forest Department announced the population of Asiatic lions in the state — 674, up from 523.
• Unlike in previous years, this count was estimated not from a Census, but from a population “observation” exercise called Poonam Avlokan.

SO, HOW WERE THE NUMBERS ESTIMATED?

• Through Poonam Avlokan, which is a monthly in-house exercise carried out every full moon.
• Field staff and officers spend 24 hours assessing the number of lions and their locations in their respective jurisdictions.
• It was a mechanism developed by the Forest Department in 2014 as part of preparations for the 2015 Lion Census.
• This time, the exercise was undertaken from 2 pm Friday to 2 pm Saturday.
• It covered 10 districts where lion movements have been recorded in recent years, and 13 forest divisions.
• All these divisions, save Surendranagar and Morbi, were part of the 2015 Lion Census too.

HAS THE LION CENSUS EVER BEEN POSTPONED BEFORE?

• The first Lion Census was conducted by the Nawab of Junagadh in 1936; since 1965, the Forest Department has been regularly conducting the Lion Census every five years. The 6th, 8th and 11th Censuses were each delayed by a year, for various reasons.

PARTICULAR IMPORTANCE OF 2020 EXERCISE

• The 2020 count is particularly important. The 2015 Census had counted 523 lions, up from 411 in 2010.
• Ninety-two Asiatic lions have died in Gujarat’s Asiatic Lion Landscape since January 2020, according to a Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) committee report.
• 60 have died in just April and May.

• “Some lions have died of in-fighting and many have died of the canine distemper virus (CDV). At the Jasadhar rescue centre, the two lions shown to the committee were suffering from CDV,”

• Canine distemper is a viral disease that affects a wide variety of animal families, including domestic and wild species of dogs, coyotes, foxes, pandas, wolves, ferrets, skunks, raccoons, and large cats, as well as pinnipeds, some primates, and a variety of other species.
• “For many years now, the Gujarat government has been giving excuses for not enabling the translocation of lions to the KunoPalpur Wildlife Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh. CDV has been established in the population and we are sitting on a ticking timebomb,”.
• Why are we endangering the world’s only population of wild Asiatic lions?”

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