Ecology or People: Analyzing Conservation and Its Ambiguous Nature

Conservation policies in India have been perceived as an enterprise for channelling environmental concerns as a part of the national debate as well as allowing cognizance of the fact that environmental preservation and justice need to be prioritized with utmost diligence. However, the process of Conservation has allowed the geographical topography to be fraught with the heuristic approach of the conservationists whose concerns have been limited to bio-diversity only and have seldom extended to the social world. So, the protection of nature and bio-diversity has involved an entire gamut of diverse, often conflicting relationship with the human society. To put an example, in West Bengal–India, the protectionist tendency of the environmental programs, mainly the ones implemented during the phase of recurrent environmental movements, has led to brutal extirpation of the community members from apparent ‘protected areas’ in the tide country of the Sundarbans. It is within this context that the paper has tried to understand the intersection of the ardency of ecological conservation and the visible reluctance of extending support towards the lower caste refugees by the contemporary ruling Government.