The findings of environmental review of activities in all seven PAs have justified most investments and actions as the proposed activities conform to the overall objectives of ensuring environmental sustainability and offer long term solutions to challenges of biodiversity conservation both within and outside the bounds of the PA sites. A wide range of activities are likely to have desired positive impacts with some negative influences on PA values and the dependent local communities. Mitigation of these negative impacts through appropriate ameliorative and preventive strategies is feasible. The process has also identified specific actions that portend some environmental and social implications and therefore should be taken up after careful and detailed analysis of associated impacts and their tangible solutions. Examples of such actions include review of the area to be included under Gir National Park, continued right of fishing in Totladoh Reservoir in Pench Tiger Reserve and construction of large sized structures for water conservation in most PAs.

The most important lessons learnt from the experience of conducting the environmental review of the GEF India Ecodevelopment Project is that the implementation of the project progressed along a ‘learning by doing’ trajectory and this had pitfalls and success in varying proportions in different sites. Several factors that contributed in this.

Identification of threats

The basic identification of perceived threats to biodiversity in all sites varied because of the availability of approved management plans and the revised microplans at the time of project implementation.

The assumption that was implicit in the IEP operation was that local people and their resource management approaches are underlying causes of biodiversity threats. Based on this assumption a very definitive approach was adopted to identify the PA threats and develop strategies to counter them through village ecodevelopment initiatives in each site. The external threats which are real and have more serious implications were not considered in developing threat profiles of the PAs. With the external and internal threats together considered at each site, the threat profiles for all sites are far more complex (Box 2) to be addressed by the present scope of the IEP Project.

Box 2. External and Internal Threats Impacting Conservation Prospects in Different PAs.

Factors affecting sustainability

The review process and the experience gathered from seeing some activities in operation amply demonstrate the need for exercising caution in the analysis of the sustainability of activities in future and the level of conservation success linked to the sustainability of the project activities. The inherent inertia of the system driven by existing levels of motivation, commitment and attitude towards the support of the project will have its ups and downs based on how best the economic securities and cultural integrity is assured. The technical, operational and economic feasibility analysis will have to be based on some basic considerations such as: (i) how experienced are local people in marketing? (ii) how stable are the markets likely to be? (iii) what institutional relations are required for success?

Evaluation and monitoring

The success of the project implementation lies in adopting environmental review more seriously as an environmental planning tool and not just as a proforma based exercise. This would require evaluation and monitoring to be essential steps in different phases of the project implementation. A set of indicators that are not substitutes for monitoring but “tested” products of monitoring should be evolved as a part of the environmental review process. An indicative list of such indicators is given in box 4.

This is only a generic list. A more exhaustive set of indicators is available from the outputs of other consultancies awarded for developing the guidelines for project, performance review. Additionally, the environmental and social indicators developed by the Doe (1993) and World bank (1999) provide a good guide to develop sector specific performance indicators for evaluating IEP.

More effective learning from success and failures of IEP should aid in building location specific, evaluation and monitoring criteria for monitoring performance of IEP initiating in its subsequent phases.