Wildlife Conservation Plan: the costed mitigation programme a wildlife clearance is conditioned on.

It is a site-specific plan setting out how a project will avoid, reduce and offset its effects on wildlife and habitat along its footprint, with named measures, locations, responsibilities and a budget. It is prepared for the specific project and the specific species affected, not adopted from a standard document.

The Chief Wildlife Warden of the State approves it. That approval, and the proponent's commitment to fund it, is what the clearance authorities rely on when they impose the plan as a condition, so the plan has to satisfy the wildlife administration on its technical content before it can support anything else.

Commonly where a project falls within or near a protected area or eco-sensitive zone, where Schedule I species are recorded in the study area, or where an alignment crosses an identified wildlife corridor. It appears as a condition of wildlife clearance, and often of forest clearance or Environment Clearance as well.

The EMP covers a project's environmental management across air, water, waste, noise and land and is appraised with the EIA. The conservation plan is narrower and deeper: it addresses identified species and habitat, is approved by the wildlife administration, and usually carries a budget deposited with or spent through the Forest Department.

Depending on the State and the plan, the user agency deposits the amount with the Forest Department, which executes the works, or spends against the plan under departmental supervision. Either way the proponent funds it and the record of expenditure becomes part of the project's compliance file.

That finding is reported honestly with its evidence and its limitations, including season. The authority may still require a plan proportionate to the habitat and the corridor position, since the protection attaches to the area as much as to a sighting. What should not happen is a plan padded with species that are not there, which invites exactly the scrutiny it was meant to avoid.

Typically across construction and into a defined operational period, with monitoring obligations that continue while the identified risk continues. The period is set in the approved plan and in the conditions of the clearance, and both should be read together when the project's long-term commitments are budgeted.

It requires field ecology capability and familiarity with the State's wildlife administration, because the plan is judged by the Chief Wildlife Warden on its species-level and site-level content. A plan written without a survey is usually identifiable as such on a first reading, which is why this is not a documentation exercise.