Sunday, November 17, 2002		Books

Climbing on to biodiversity bandwagon
Jayanti Dutta Roy

Biodiversity: Strategies for Conservation
Edited by L.K. Dadhich and A.P. Sharma. APH Publishing Corporation. New Delhi. Pages 356. Rs 700.

THE wide variety of physical features and climatic situations in India has given rise to diverse ecological habitats like forests, grasslands, wetlands as also coastal, marine and desert ecosystems harbouring immense biodiversity. Due to this richness in biological diversity, India figures among the 12 mega-biodiverse countries in the world. Surveys of 65 per cent of the total area of the country by the Botanical and Zoological Surveys of India show that there are over 46,000 plant species and 81,000 animal species. The list is being constantly upgraded.

Given this backdrop, the relevance of the volume cannot be denied. As environmental degradation increasingly becomes a threat to all types of life forms, a spurt in the studies on biodiversity of different regions is also clearly observed. This volume, too, is an effort in that direction with a thrust on recording the local floral diversity of a specific region.

The book is in commemoration of Dr S. K. Agarwal, former head, PG Dept of Botany, Government College, Kota. The editors, also working in the same college, have compiled this volume by inviting research papers and articles from contributors, mostly college and university teachers and researchers. The volume includes 11 research papers, five articles and one public lecture on the topic delivered way back in 1987.

Eight out of the 11 papers deal with studies and records of local plant diversity, mainly of Rajasthan area. There is information on the plant species diversity of Jhalawar, Hadoti plateau, Kota-Udaipur, Ramganj Mandi and protected areas of Rajasthan. One paper records the plant species of wetlands of Birbhum, West Bengal. Two research papers — on ‘Indoor environment’ and ‘Effects of seasonal variation in photosynthetic pigments of few planted tree species of Bhopal’ — not even remotely related to biodiversity also find their way into the volume. The articles provide general information on biodiversity. They have a naive and all-embracing approach, which compromises the focused, in-depth and serious writing style necessary for scientific writing.

Biodiversity includes all forms of biological entities, including micro-organisms, plants, animals and genetic materials like seeds and germ plasm. However, the absence of a single contribution dealing with life forms other than plants, detracts from the book’s comprehensiveness. The sweeping title of the volume suggests an emphasis on strategies of conservation of biodiversity, which are touched upon, but only in one or two of the contributions.

Putting the myriad contributions into an orderly sequence, from general articles to specific papers and maintaining a uniform format for all of them would have rendered the volume more user-friendly. The volume, according to editors, aims at helping the students, teachers and researchers in their pursuits. Discrepancies in references could become a hindrance in achieving this objective. Capital letters creeping up at wrong places and several grammatical, spelling and printing errors throughout the book cause much irritation to the reader. The universal convention of using italics while writing scientific names of plants is maintained sporadically. The index is replete with several mistakes and is not exhaustive.

The highly priced volume seems to be a hasty attempt at cashing in on the international focus on biodiversity. Though it cannot be denied that with 35 per cent of our country’s geographical regions still unexplored for biodiversity, more such region-specific studies are required. However, in order to find their rightful place in the international scenario, it is also essential that these publications are truly scientific in their approach, report quality research and are highly professional in their presentation. Sadly, the present volume misses much on this score.