Jayati Godhawat
JWB Blogger
E-Commerce Sites To Strictly Ban Sale Of Endangered Animals
- JWB Post
- July 20, 2016
The Indian Government is claiming that the consumer platforms of the e-commerce sites are being used to trade banned animals and their parts which are illegal in the country.
On Monday, Anil Madhav Dave, the Union Environment Minister revealed that over 100 sites including the most popular ones like Amazon, Snapdeal, OLX, etc., are being used by their consumers to smuggle the endangered and rare species of banned animals and their body parts. The list has been composed by the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB) with the help of cyber crime specialists and has been submitted as written reply in Rajya Sabha.
“Several websites are seen advertising the sale of rare animals and their parts,” Dave said.
The sites have taken the matter seriously and cooperated with the Government and took down posts and is formulating strict monitoring measures to detect such ads and sale of rare animals.
A Snapdeal spokesperson reportedly stated, “We work closely with WCCB, which has provided an updated list of banned products in June 2016 to facilitate detection of any attempts by sellers to list such products on online marketplaces.”
An Amazon India spokesperson told,
“In May this year, Amazon India took down 296 items in the ‘animal specimen’ category and 104 items under the ‘snares or traps’ category that were listed by third-party sellers, after Wildlife SOS drew our attention to them,” the spokesperson said. “We have since engaged with the government and provided our utmost support to help monitor the situation. We have also provided information as and when required by various government bodies and will continue to do so.”
EBay has also released a statement saying that it has zero tolerance for wrongdoing and has strict policies to stop the sale of products from endangered animals on its website.
COO of Quikr, Atul Tewari, responded, “the company uses a combination of human effort, technology, and phone verification to moderate our listings and has a team of over 100 people who work around the clock to manually review them.”
Dave also said that during the training and sensitisation programmes conducted by WCCB for these online portals, in May, “the issue of illegal online wildlife trade is being highlighted so that officials involved in the enforcement are abreast of such trends.”
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