BUCEROS: A time to review the BNHS ENVIS newsletter

I glance at the two volumes of BUCEROS that arrived a few days back (Vol 22 No. 2 (2017). The least problematic is the fact that I received them in 2019!

ENVIS, short for Environmental Information System is a programme to bring together information on various aspects of our environment in one place and engage a wide range of actors from researchers, policymakers etc “ENVISioned” by the Ministry of Environment & Forests several years back. BNHS is one of the ENVIS centres for Avian Ecology and the BNHS-ENVIS programme lists a rather ambitious set of objectives, and possibly receives public/donor funding to achieve them. While the printing and production content of the newsletter that they produce (BUCEROS) is of high quality, the content is rather poor; the most recent issue I received was entirely made of bird-related articles from Times of India and the rest borrowed from other Internet sources (duly cited but…). In this day and age does it make sense to produce, print and disseminate such high quality printed magazines under public funding with limited content beyond what is publicly available?

This brings up a fundamental problem with many publicly funded programmes: they are rarely reviewed openly and external oversight (either technical expertise or lay oversight) is limited. A letter to ENVIS@BNHS follows….

Local language bird material across the country through a network of ENVIS centres

Given that a lot of what BUCEROS currently does is attainable at much lesser cost using social media dissemination of articles instead of high-quality production and dissemination of English magazine, perhaps BNHS ENVIS could think of decentralising local language material in various Indian languages produced through local partners based at other states and districts across the country. Imagine localised material on birds produced in Kannada or in Assamese or Gujarati by government colleges or educational institutions that can be easily disseminated within the state rather than an expensive English language magazine set-up operated from BNHS.