Kerala’s decision to amend the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972 marks a turning point in the federal discourse on environmental governance. The Wild Life Protection (Kerala Amendment) Bill 2025 seeks to arm the State with powers thus far reserved for the Union government. While the ambition is rooted in a painful lived crisis, the attempt to sidestep Centre-State dissonance exposes tensions between ecological prudence and federal autonomy. The Bill asserts that the State may decide when a Schedule II animal has become ‘vermin’, and thus liable to lose protections under that Schedule for specific areas and periods. It also vests the Chief Wildlife Warden with the power to order any animal that has severely injured a person to be killed, tranquillised, captured or translocated. There have been violent confrontations with wild boars in the State’s dense mosaic of farms, settlements and forests. Assembly resolutions and ministerial trips to New Delhi to have the wild boar declared as ‘vermin’ under the Central Act have proved fruitless. Read against the ongoing expansion of human settlements into erstwhile buffer zones, the change risks normalising lethal outcomes produced by human advance rather than by animal behaviour. This said, the Centre’s power to declare vermin has too often been exercised as a veto without transparent criteria or timely engagement with States that face distinct ecologies and pressures. Kerala’s frustration is thus a federal critique.
Shifting the same blunt power to the State does not by itself cure the vice of opacity, however. A jurisprudence that ties need to circumstance must interrogate how the circumstance was produced and whether non-lethal options were credibly exhausted. Section 62 of the Central Act exists to keep indiscriminate culling from eroding conservation baselines. Wildlife lies in the Concurrent List and any State law repugnant to the Central Act requires Presidential assent. If that test can be framed as Centre versus State, it is also about whether Kerala’s recourse recreates the national safeguards in devolved form. A defensible settlement would preserve the floors, i.e., no dilution of baseline protections and international commitments; building State-level ceilings in the form of clearer, faster procedures; devolving non-lethal toolkits and accountable, data-driven thresholds; and tuning incentives to reward coexistence. Until then, declaring the wild boar to be ‘vermin’ or downgrading the bonnet macaque from Schedule I to Schedule II of the Central Act, while buying political time, may risk deepening a cycle in which governance failure begets lethal shortcuts. If the urgency is real, so too is the obligation to ensure that speed does not substitute reason and federal devolution does not become federal abdication.
Published – October 10, 2025 12:20 am IST
