THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 LOCKDOWN PERIOD ON MAN AND WILDLIFE CONFLICT IN INDIA

The outbreak of Covid-19 is ongoing a serious threat for human being and it spreads sharply from its origin country of China to rest of the world except Antarctica. Considerably, the situation is more disruptive in the case of developing countries like India which is the second largest populous country in the world. Therefore, its fragile health infrastructure along with huge biotic pressure will not be able to cope with such pandemic outbreak. So, the government of India declared a nationwide lockdown for three weeks in the entire region to break the infection chain since 24 march, 2020. Thereby, reduced level of traffic and vehicle helped in freely movement of wild animals without any human interferences in protected areas or nearby animal corridors, but the situation is quite alarming in the case of urban areas. Whereas sudden decrease of noise level and silence in the adjoining areas has given mistaken sense of expanded territory to the wild animals and they started to venture out their surrounding territories, resulted in roaming of wild animal into the human habitats and raised the increased possibility of human- animal conflict while the situation go back to normal. In order to the present study made an appraisal to access the impact of Covid-19 lockdown on man and wildlife conflict in various parts of India. Hence the study in mainly based on secondary information collected from various government sources like newspaper articles and journals.