People don't drive tigers away, intolerance does

By Janaki Lenin It is astonishing that tigers continue to survive in a country with more than a billion people. In comparison, by the year 1900, a sparsely populated United States had extirpated its large cat, the cougar, from most of the country leaving only small numbers west of the Rocky Mountains and Florida. To put that in perspective, a country three times the size of India with a mere 76 million people wiped out a leopard sized animal. Tolerance plays a big role in the survival of any large predator but is largely ignored by conservationists and biologists. It is time to relocate this debate. The people vs space debate The conservation model of establishing reserves for the sole use of wildlife, has been struggling to gain a toehold in India for several decades. People live, farm, and herd livestock in most of our parks, as they always did. Whether it is poaching of tigers or their prey, degrading habitat by grazing cattle, or collecting firewood and other forest produce, these humans are said to be the root of the problem. A renewed sense of urgency erupted into the free-the-parks-of-people movement after the Sariska tiger debacle in 2004. [caption id=“attachment_27843” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“An Indian Royal Bengal tiger walks inside its enclosure at the South Khairbari nature park near Siliguri in north eastern India. Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters”]  [/caption] The Wildlife Protection Act was amended in 2006 to specifically ensure exclusive tigers-only zones. Draft guidelines for the relocation of people from such areas were recently issued by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) to implement this mandate. While it does seem logical that if the people are removed from reserves, pressures on tigers and forests would disappear, do we know for sure? In 1900s America, it wasn’t the lack of separation between cougars and humans, it was intolerance that killed the cat. Even as recently as 1996, the Dutta Committee, chaired by a former Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, said that although removing villages situated within protected areas would be ideal, it was not critical. Instead, it recommended that more efforts be made to establish and manage corridors outside reserves; it is more essential to prevent tigers from being boxed into small pockets. Then came the crisis when Rajasthan’s Sariska National Park was left bereft of tigers and the Government of India responded by appointing the Tiger Task Force. Several conservationists, tiger biologists and forest officials made impassioned pleas for keeping parks free of people. So, how many humans have to be relocated? Cost of relocation Since the time Project Tiger was created nearly forty years ago, government officials haven’t been able to provide figures. When you don’t know numbers, how do you determine the quantum of damage these forest dwellers supposedly wreak? If you don’t know the extent of the damage they cause, then how do you assess how big a threat they are to tigers? In 2005, the Task Force, for the first time ever, enumerated 273 villages in 16 tiger reserves in which it estimated 19,215 families (at about 70 families per village) lived while 12 other reserves were “inviolate.” According to the draft relocation guidelines, 10 lakh rupees is budgeted for moving each family. That works out to 1921 crore rupees (a cool $427 million), not including the 11 new reserves notified since the Task Force report was published. However, two years later the MoEF more than doubled the estimate to 150 families per village, which means 40,950 families have to be moved at a cost of 4095 crore rupees (a whopping $910 million)! At this cost will tiger survival really be guaranteed if their habitats are freed of resident people? People’s impact Ghazala Shahabuddin of Ambedkar University who researches the interface of human society and biodiversity says that although villagers living within Sariska had degraded the forest by cutting firewood, grazing their cattle and lopping trees for fodder, their impact on the ecosystem is not irreversible. On the Park’s doorstep, however, marble and kota stone mines were allowed to proliferate and devastate the landscape. The mining pumps enormous quantities of water from ground aquifers which may suck dry the perennial springs in the reserve. Droves of people from urban areas 20 km away graze their livestock in the forest. After the tiger crisis erupted, the external pressures were ignored and blame was pinned on the soft targets, forest dwellers. M.D. Madhusudan of the Nature Conservation Foundation highlights the case of Bandipur, Karnataka. Despite being devoid of residents since the 1970s, people from beyond the border are now taking an unsustainably enormous toll of a forest that also boasts of high tiger densities. In the four years following the resettlement of nomadic pastoral Gujjars from parts of Rajaji National Park, Uttarakhand, the density of tigers and their prey has increased. Better protection, immigration of tigers from nearby Corbett National Park and the reduced human pressures have contributed to this recovery. However, there appears to be little relationship between the number of human residents and tiger densities. For example, Kanha National Park, Madhya Pradesh has about 1200 families living in the core area and the same high density of tigers as Bandipur. So are people really bad for tigers? As Madhusudan points out, “It’s not the mere presence of people that is harmful to wildlife, it is what they do in the forests that matters. In Nagarhole Tiger Reserve, Karnataka, the Kuruba tribals living within work for the Forest Department and coffee estates, and have a softer impact on the ecosystem than, say, the fringe villagers around Kabini who graze thousands of heads of cattle in the forest every day.” If the policy is to make these core tiger zones no-go for humans, shouldn’t the pressures from mining and other industrial enterprises as well as the numerous people entering from across the boundary be addressed with the same level of muscle? There is even a case to contain the Forest Department’s own impact. Roads are cut, clearings made, waterholes excavated, soak pits and trenches dug, walls and fences erected and stream courses check-dammed even in core areas. As Madhusudan points out, these engineering feats can pose serious ecological threats. Compared to the extraction of timber and minerals, the effects of surreptitious hunting, firewood collection and livestock grazing by forest residents may be relatively light on the ecosystem. Even this can be reduced to a minimum if facilitated with incentives and alternatives, says Ashish Kothari of Kalpavriksh. If achieving this balance is impossible, people can then be relocated as mandated by the Wildlife Act. However, the draft guidelines are adamant that all critical tiger habitats will be people-free. Whether residents cause “irreversible damage” or not, can coexist with tigers or not, they are to be moved. While we need to alleviate the lesser problems posed by forest residents, we do need to focus more on the bigger dangers facing the tiger: organized poaching, degradation and loss of habitat to infrastructure projects and the hostility of people who live around the fringe. We should also be aware of the hidden costs of separating humans from tigers: if there are recognized tigers-only spaces then people living outside reserves may determine that theirs is a humans-only landscape where predators have no place. Such an attitude would dramatically reduce the space available to tigers and deal a big blow to their conservation. Instead of encouraging tiger-tolerant practices, we appear to be punishing people for merely residing at the wrong address; instead of building on a culture of acceptance, we are promoting a narrow view of conservation that will come back to haunt us. Janaki Lenin is fascinated by the intermingled destinies of people and wildlife. She lives with her Dude, dogs, geese and a pig on a farm on the edge of a jungle.