Season of Conflict
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Season of Conflict
February 2007
The Pioneer
The recently-passed Forest Rights Bill, writes Prerna Singh Bindra, will prove catastrophic for the conservation of wildlife in India, and will only serve to accentuate man-animal conflict.
It is the most serious challenge facing wildlife not just in India, but in the world. As the news items below would tell you, the problem of man-animal conflict is today acquiring grave dimensions, and leading to one horror story after another.
Man-animal conflict is a difficult - if not impossible - problem to resolve, a very sensitive issue and overwhelming in its magnitude and complexity. However, if one were to look at it in a simplistic manner and focus on the root cause, one would zero in on the degradation and fragmentation of wildlife habitats and the encroachment of humans into wilderness.
When does man-animal conflict occur? When animals inflict damage on agricultural crops and property, kill livestock or, worse, attack people. You can imagine the devastation a farmer feels when his entire crop, his livelihood, is destroyed over the course of one night by a herd of marauding elephants, or the agony of a mother whose child is killed by a leopard, or the terror of a woman attacked by a tiger while cutting grass in the jungle.
Why has man-animal conflict reached such catastrophic proportions, with loss to crop and property running into lakhs of rupees, and more tragically, fatalities as a consequence of this conflict being on the rise? Because forests have been severely destroyed, degraded, decimated, fragmented to make space for agriculture, industry, mines, dams, cities. The Forest Survey of India estimates a loss of 1,889 sq km of forest land between 1991 and 1999. And even this is far removed from the real picture, for, it reflects only the absolute loss and not diminishing density, which too is ecologically catastrophic.
A case study of the Sonitpur district in Assam would be in order. Once a dense semi-evergreen and moist deciduous forest, it is now a picture of devastation. A remote sensing study noted an alarming rate of "conversion of well-stocked forests into cultivated land", recording an overall loss of 235 sq km between 1994 to 2001. WWF-India estimates that 29 per cent of the lowland forests in Sonitpur has been lost or degraded between 1991 to 2001. And the carnage continues. Illegal settlers have taken over the land, insurgents and poachers have invaded forests, and all this despite the land being protected as sanctuaries or as reserve forests.
It's not just about the rapidly disappearing forests. Fragmentation of habitat has also meant that the ancient migratory paths which elephants used to get to diverse food and water sources have vanished. When you encroach upon forests and migratory corridors, conflicts are bound to occur. Robbed of their food sources, the elephants have taken to raiding villages for sustenance. They enter villages, raids crops, destroy houses and in some cases, kill people. In turn, the elephants are harassed, stoned, poisoned, electrocuted, burnt or shot. There are no winners in this war between man and elephants in Sonitpur. More than a hundred people, and over 90 elephants, have lost their lives in the past decade in the area. In Assam on the whole, more than 40 people lose their lives to elephants every year.
There is yet another side to this story. India's ancient reverence for this beast is dying. Elephants are worshipped as Lord Ganesha among Hindus in the country. Ganesha is the god of good fortune, and no significant deed, and no major work, begins before the name of the deity is invoked. But now, it is the same elephant which is feared, and hated rather than venerated.
Not just elephants
Nor is the elephant the only animal caught in this dreadful battle between man and beast. The leopard, such an incredible, beautiful big cat, is another victim of conflict. Essentially, the leopard is a shy, solitary animal, a rare sight in the wild. Not being the top predator (unlike the tiger or the lion), the leopard lives in the fringes of the forest, surviving on small game like cheetal, barking deer, wild boar, langur and in difficult times, on frogs and hare. A burgeoning human population, expanding agriculture, and development projects have destroyed and severely degraded its habitat and its prey base has been severely depleted. Pressed for space and food, the leopard has been forced to adapt. The Panthera pardus is a survivor, a cat that adapts to the toughest conditions. Homeless and starving, it's now straying into villages - which were all once forests - and attacking dogs, chicken, goats and if everything fails, man.
When a leopard mauls a man, people understandably bay for its blood. They stone the beast to death, hack it to pieces, burn it to ashes. Sometimes in revenge; at other times for making the mistake of wandering into human habitation. A colleague of mine had filmed a horrifying sequence of a leopard being set on fire after it had strayed into a village in Uttar Pradesh. This area had no history of man-eating or even cattle kills: it was possibly fear that led to the gruesome incident. In two separate incidents last month, a leopard was burnt alive near Dehra Dun, while another was beaten to death in Nashik. In Junnar in Maharashtra the conflict is acute: the scrub forests and woods of the region have given way to sugarcane fields, which leopards now use as their nurseries (sugarcane is harvested after six months, just about the time when cubs start coming out of their lair). Such close proximity has taken its toll both on humans and the animal. Another problem area is Pauri-Garwal, where 62 people were killed between 1990 to 2001, and about an equal number of leopards lost their lives. And as the city of Mumbai closes in on the only national park - Borivli - in a metropolis, the big cat, forced out of its lair, is stalking man.
Similar is the case with tigers. As we eat into its habitat, taking over its forests, the tiger ventures out. Two recent cases highlight the tragedy. A tiger which killed two people on the fringes of Bandipur was shot dead by the field director. And in another incident, a tiger that attacked people was killed by the Forest Department in Kote taluk in Karnataka.
In my travels across India, I have lost count of the number of places I have seen plagued by the same issue. I have seen the result of elephants raiding and destroying villages within and on the fringes of Dalma Sanctuary in Jharkhand. I remember consoling an old man whose house had been flattened by a herd. "This did not happen before, they would stay away from us, but now that we are living in their forests what can they do? Where will they go? Where will I go? We go?" he cried, encapsulating in his rustic wisdom the crux of the problem. The Little Rann of Kutch was once an excellent place to sight wolves and jackals. Not one remains today. "We have killed them all, and if there are more, we will kill them too," say the locals. Why? Because the locals are herders, and depend on rearing sheep and goat for their livelihood, and their domesticated animals are preyed upon by the predators. The adult wolves and jackals were poisoned, the young were smoked in their dens till none remained. But the problem the locals face now, in the absence of a predator, is an upsurge in the ungulate population. Nilgai and Asiatic wild ass raid their fields often.
In Kadi, just an hour's drive from Ahmedabad, about 5,000 blackbuck live in fields that were once grassland. In the absence of predators, the blackbuck population is flourishing and cause great damage to crops. The villagers were tolerant of the loss to their crops initially and even protected the animals, but now they turn a blind eye when poachers steal into the night for a kill.
Man-animal conflict has given birth to a whole set of complex issues. People's reverence for and tolerance of wildlife is vanishing, and often they seek to kill animals, either in revenge or for money. Lions which live on the fringes of or outside Gir - and survive by feeding on livestock - habitually become victims of poisoning. It was villagers living inside Sariska who killed the reserve's last tiger: they set a trap, speared the animal and sold its body parts for a profit.
Signing away the forest
Already a severe problem, the issue of man-animal conflict has now turned even more serious with the introduction of the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006. It is a dangerous piece of legislation, destroying at one stroke all wild habitats. With this act of folly, we have driven the final nail in the coffin of India's wildlife. For, in a nutshell, the Act seeks to hand over land of upto four hectares to traditional forest dwellers occupying forest lands as on December 13, 2005. They have ownership rights and free access to minor forest produce. And the regions where the dwellers live will now be developed. This means that the forests - or whatever remains of them - will now have to make way for roads, schools, hospitals, shops, power, telecommunication, etc. All overriding that one piece of legislation which has till now saved India's forests - and therefore its water sources - the Forest Conservation Act. Protected areas - barely covering four per cent of the country's total land mass - have not been spared: the last scraps of wilderness, where live India's tigers and elephants, will be doled out in this latest scheme in return for votes.
The duplicity of the present government is, at the very least, scary. For, while on the one hand Prime Minister Manmohan Singh promises to save tigers, on the other his government hands out tiger land in order to ensure votes for the party. Of course, that the present government is at the mercy of the Left is a major reason for the passage of the bill. It is the Left that has been the driving force behind the Act, and it is now busy calling it a victory.
In this quest for power, what suffers is our wildlife heritage, tigers included.
Perhaps the Prime Minister needs to know that tigers - or any other species for that matter - need space to survive: to hunt, breed, mate and raise cubs. That doesn't happen when you hand over protected forests to private owners. The forest dweller will not be guided by the benign motive of conservation - why should he when we, the educated elite who have the power to effect change, do not? He will kill the tiger that kills his cattle and earn a neat packet in the bargain. He will poison the elephant that steps into his land (which was formerly a forest). He will cut trees to make way for agriculture.
Forests don't remain forests if you build roads in them, and schools, vocational centres, irrigation canals and shops. They become ugly little towns where no wild animal can dwell.
Moreover, carnivores and people cannot cohabit. Robbed of its forest and its prey base, the tiger will then turn to cattle and man for food and survival, and will be slaughtered in revenge.
The examples cited below hint at what will then happen. There will be death and destruction till the animals - and forests - die out. Forever. What will the forest dweller live on then?
Give the forest dweller his due, but don't wipe the forest out in the bargain.
Newspaper reports randomly selected from the last two months
- Tusker killed, its body chopped to pieces and buried to avoid detection in a field in Majri village near Rajaji park.
- A leopard, trapped in a cage, is burnt alive by angry villagers following the killing of two young girls in Uttarakhand. The villagers sprinkled kerosene on the cage and torched the leopard, though it is not known if this was really the man-eater.
- Bear burnt to death in Jammu and Kashmir.
- A 100 elephants lay siege, two people injured, houses damaged. In another incident, an elephant and calf die of poisoning.
- The carcass of a tiger is discovered in Katval village on the outskirts of the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve. The carcass was found tied to large boulders and hidden in an abandoned well about two km from the reserve. Tigers attacking cattle is the likely cause of this killing.
- Two villagers are trampled to death by an elephant in Banjarawala on the outskirts of Rajaji National Park.
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