Environment Minister of India recently released Management Effectiveness Evaluation (MEE) of 146 National Parks and Wildlife Sanctuaries.
Management Effectiveness Evaluation (MEE) is an effective and flexible tool that can directly help protected area managers, and other conservation professionals at a variety of levels, to strengthen their management skills and enhance conservation efforts.
MEE is increasingly being used by governments and international bodies to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the protected area management systems.
It is defined as the assessment of how well National Parks and Wildlife Sanctuaries are being managed—primarily, whether they are protecting their values and achieving the goals and objectives agreed upon.
There are 30 “Headline Indicators” developed under six elements of Management Effectiveness Evaluation (MEE) framework suitable in Indian context for evaluation. The ratings are assigned in four categories, as Poor – upto 40%; Fair – 41 to 59%; Good – 60 to 74%; Very Good – 75% and above.
At present, India has a network of 903 protected areas covering about five percent of the total geographic area of the country. India also has 70% of the global tiger population, 70% of Asiatic lions, and more than 60% of leopards' global population. Hence, in order to assess the efficacy of protected areas, evaluation of management effectiveness is required. Such an evaluation raises two questions: 1) what indicators are important for evaluating management effectiveness; and 2) how can these indicators be applied to the data available at hand?
The results of present assessment are encouraging with overall mean MEE score of 62.01% which is higher than the global mean of 56%. With this round of evaluation, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) successfully completed one full cycle of evaluating all terrestrial National Parks and Wildlife Sanctuaries of the country from 2006 to 2019.
Jaldapara national park (West Bengal), Raiganj wildlife sanctuary (West Bengal), Sainj Wildlife Sanctuary (Himachal Pradesh), Tirthan wildlife sanctuary(Himachal Pradesh) and Great Himalayan national park (Himachal Pradesh) have been declared as top five national parks and wildlife sanctuaries in India.
Turtle Wildlife Sanctuary in Uttar Pradesh was the worst performer in the survey.
