Conservation with a human face….Sunita Narain
If we want more land to safeguard more tigers we must pay people quickly and generously for the crops destroyed or the cattle killed. Currently this doesn’t happen
Tigers or people? This apparent dilemma of Indias wildlife policy is the reason we are losing our wildlife bit by bit. Today, our tiger reserves and our wildlife sanctuaries are lands under virtual siege. There is a war out there, to safeguard animals against poachers, against development projects and now against the pressure of tourism. Let us be clear, we are losing this war, bit by bit. We are failing because we have not understood the need for conservation, which involves and benefits local communities.
It was in 2005, after the scandal of Sariskas loss of its tigers shocked the country, I was asked to chair a task force to suggest how future conservation strategy would work. Over three months the specialists I met believed that it was important to reserve areas for wildlife. These would need to be inviolate areas, exclusively earmarked for animals where human interference would have to be kept at its minimum. Otherwise, they said, the tiger would not survive.
I approached the issue from different perspectives. I had for long understood that the future of people and forests is entwined. I also knew from experience that regeneration of forests is not possible unless local people benefit.
But I was willing to listen to the experience of those who believed in the tiger. If co-existence was not possible, we needed to find strategies to relocate people who lived in the tigers territory.
The issue seemed simple, but the replies shocked me. After 30 years of wildlife conservation efforts, fronted by the countrys most powerful, we had forgotten people. In these 30 years we had managed to relocate 80-odd villages from protected reserves. We estimated that another 1,500 villages existed in just 28 tiger reserves. Worse, relocation was done in the most ham-handed and inhuman manner. We met families who had decided to return to the harassment and poverty of their homes within the sanctuary as their resettled parcel of land was full of stones.
The authorities had done just about everything to make people trespassers in their own land; everything to turn them against the tiger we want to protect. This would not work, we concluded.
The answer was two-pronged. One, that inviolate space was important for wild animals. But the people who were making space for the tiger needed to be given a good deal ? not marginal forestland, which would make them more destitute.
Two, in the remaining…
villages, which would have to live in the reserves, we suggested a new bargain? sharing benefits of conservation with local communities ? from preferential shares in tourism to collaborative management of our reserves. This led to some developments.
The government agreed to enhance the package for relocated families from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 10 lakh; it agreed to conduct a census of tigers in the country, which would pinpoint their presence in different habitats. The tiger census is the first step to identify the critical habitats that need to be protected and to list the human settlements that need to be relocated.
But with this done, we are still not learning the big lesson of conservation the practice of the art of coexistence, between the tigers who need to roam and poor people who need benefits from conservation.
This is not to say poaching isnt a problem, or the sheer lack of protection because the guards are so few. These are crucial, as the task force report Joining the Dots showed. But the crisis of numbers will not go away unless we practise conservation differently. Till now, policy has ensured people outside the reserve get nothing from protection.
Over the years, with little investment and even less understanding of how to plant trees that survive cattle and goats, the lands outside the reserves stand denuded. People have no option but to use the protected areas to send their cattle for grazing. At the same time, as the ruminants move into forests, the herbivoresdeer and other animalsmove out to farmers fields to forage and destroy. It is also an inconvenient fact that the tiger often survives on easier and slow moving prey, the cattle, buffalo and goat of the farmer.
The conflict is simply growing. In villages adjoining Bandhavgarh tiger reserve people told me their lives were worse than birds. Why? Because at least birds could sleep for some hours at night. For them, the vigil to protect crops from wild animals was unending and fruitless. What an indictment of conservation.
So, if we want more land to safeguard more tigers we must learn this reality. The answer is in, first and foremost, paying people quickly and generously for the crops destroyed or the cattle killed. Currently this doesnt happen.
Second, we need to ensure there is huge and disproportionate development investment in the lands that adjoin a tiger reserve. People should be benefited…
to live in the buffer of the reserve. They must want to secure the tiger. Third, people must get direct gains from conservation. They must be preferred in jobs to protect. They must be partners, owners and indeed earners from tourism the tiger brings.
This is the agenda for conservation. It is not tigers versus tribals. It is tigers and people and everyone against them.
Sunita Narain is director, Centre for Science and Environment & was head of PMs Tiger Task Force…