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1,411 Tigers, and Unanswered Questions

Sunita Narain
Down to Earth
March 31, 2010

1411 tigers left. So says the latest advertisement campaign of a new telecom company and the WWF. It is powerful. It plays to our emotions. But it does not tell us what is being done, or should be done. It does not tell us how we, the consuming classes, can be part of the solution to safeguard the tiger.

The reason is simple. One must gloss over the bitter, inconvenient truth that India cannot have more than 1,411 tigers—this figure is the mid-range of the last census—unless we re-imagine conservation differently, very differently. In fact, if there are these many tigers, that’s amazing. Forget more.

Let me explain what I have learnt from some remarkable wildlifers in the country. Tigers are territorial. They literally need land to roam. With the birth of a male tiger, this search starts. Either the old tiger gives way or the male has to look for new ground. But where is that ground? All around our parks, forests are destroyed. People who live close to tiger reserves resent this animal, which kills their cattle. They have no use for the reserve forest, which protects the herbivores and wild boars that eat the growing crop. They get nothing in return for living around tiger land. They want no tigers in their land.

In Kanha tiger reserve, for instance, I learnt how field managers keep a count of tiger cubs. They know there should be an increase of 10 tigers each year to maintain a viable and healthy population. They do much to protect the tigers inside the park. But the numbers do not increase. The young tiger in search of territory moves beyond the protected—and now increasingly guarded—area. When the outside world was forested, the tiger could expand its space. But now the forests are degraded. The people who live there are poor and angry. So what usually happens is a tragedy, as happened in Ranthambore, where two young tigers were poisoned just this week.

Nobody wins in this bloody battle. This is why we have to make peace—between the tigers who need to roam and poor people who need benefits from conservation. This is why we must practise coexistence.

The numbers are stark. Irrefutable. Over the past many years the tiger census revealed many more tigers lived outside reserves. The 2001 census put the number at about 1,500 tigers inside and as many as 2,000 outside. But nobody quite believed these numbers. In 2005, the task force I chaired to look into tiger conservation suggested the method of counting be changed to be more accurate. This was done. The next census found the number of tigers in reserves was about the same, between 1,165 and 1,657. But between the two censuses, the tigers outside (if they ever existed) just disappeared. This is why numbers fell. This is why we cry for the beloved tiger. Paper tiger.

Look at it another way. The total area of what is called the ‘core’—a national park mostly—is some 17,000 sq km. Tiger conservationists will tell you the animal needs a minimum 10 sq km territory to roam, mate and live. Add it up and you will see that’s roughly why we have so many or so few tigers.

This is not to say poaching is not a problem, or to deny 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 tracts of land 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 herbivores—deer and other animals—move 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 growing. In villages adjoining Bandhavgarh people told me they were worse off than birds. At least birds could sleep a few hours at night. For them the vigil to protect crops from wild animals is 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 does not happen.

Second, we need to ensure there is substantial and disproportionate development investment in areas 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 tiger conservation: for 1,411 and many more. Otherwise, the media campaign will be nothing more than noise, drumming up support with more frantic chest thumping that leads nowhere.

Source article here.

Hunger strikes forest’s exiles

Shriya Mohan
Down to Earth
March 17, 2010

Once called lords of the jungle, Baiga groups in Madhya Pradesh are starving on the margins of Kanha National Park. Shriya Mohan chronicles their struggle.

For Samarin seeing a tiger is as casual as her monthly sightings of the ration store supplier. “They come sometimes but as long as we mind our own business, they don’t do any harm,” she says, working in her small farm in the middle of the forest, her baby slung around her back in a cloth sack. Which is why she felt absurd when the 150 families of her village Jami were moved out of the forest to save the tigers. The village is inside the 940 sq km core zone of Kanha National Park, 200 km from Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh. It is one of India’s critical tiger habitats, and in the past 30 years Jami is the 28th village displaced from the core to give the tiger more room.

The majority in Jami, including Samarin’s family, are Baigas, a “primitive” tribe in Madhya Pradesh’s Dindori, Mandla and Balaghat districts.Extensively documented in the 1930s by anthropologist Verrier Elwin, the Baigas were once known as lords of the jungle, hunters and gatherers who were inseparable from the wild.

It is a Sunday afternoon and Jami feels abandoned, with the moan of the wind thrusting against the loosely bolted doors. Samarin’s husband Dilip left before sunrise and would not be back before dark. “We have been on the lookout for months for cultivable land where we can farm and build a small house,” she says, the tattooed skin of her forehead knotting into a frown.

Although the forest department is giving Rs 10 lakh per family, for a nuclear family like Samarin’s this will barely make ends meet. Land prices just outside the core zone have become exorbitant. “There is nothing for less than Rs 1.5 an acre (0.4 hectares). To harvest enough grains to last the year and to build a small house we need at least five acres,” she says. Simple math tells you that Samarin cannot put aside any of the lump sum for a rainy day.

Samarin has seen more than her share of rainy days. Three-and-half years ago, she gave birth to a girl, Radha. By the time Radha was two months old Samarin was pregnant again. Radha was suckling at her breast and there was a foetus in her womb. In six months the milk was not enough and Radha grew thin. Samarin was becoming anaemic by the day. By the time Radha was 11 months old, Samarin gave birth to her sister, Saguni.

Samarin is struggling to keep her second child alive. Her first-born died at three

Priorities shifted. Radha was replaced by Saguni for breastmilk, and given a dry roti as substitute. “That’s when she started becoming malnourished,” says Sumitra, the village anganwadi worker, who periodically weighs the children at Jami. By the time Radha turned two, when babies run and play, she could not walk. She was just bones with loose wasted skin, throbbing with constant fever. “I told Samarin several times to get Radha admitted at the nutritional rehabilitation centre (nrc) in Balaghat but she did not listen,” Sumitra says.

nrc is a hospital for acutely malnourished children, where the government treats the mother and the child for 14 days with a monitored nutritious diet. The state pays the parents Rs 65 per day, and Rs 300 for the travel up and down to encourage admittance. While the offer is attractive, the nearest such centre is 120 km away, a distance Samarin has not travelled in her life. Last September, Samarin found her daughter’s fragile body lying on the cot, cold and unmoving. She was three years old then.

Samarin has accepted her fate. Saguni is now two years and five months old but looks half her age. She has not been able to walk yet. She barely crawls when left on the floor. We lift her to put her on the weighing scale. She wails even louder, kicking to get out of the nylon seat.

Just over a year old, Niranjan weighs 6.6 kg. In the anganwadi register in Balaghat his weight is recorded at 8.5 kg

It is all too familiar for her, the weighing, the checking of the circumference of her arm to assess her thinness, the touching of her belly to see how big its bulge is. The scale jumps nervously and settles on 7.1 kg. As per the new who growth chart, Saguni is “severely acutely malnourished”. A child her age should weigh above 9.75 kg. If she is not treated at this stage, Saguni is likely to spiral down the way her sister did.

Samarin does not have the answers to questions like what she will do about Saguni. There are more pressing concerns. Last year the monsoon was bad and her paddy crop failed. This year she has sown masoor (red lentil) on leased land. At Jami the ration shop owner gives only 25 kg rice each month, instead of their due 35 kg. The empty pages of the nregs job cards are pressed tightly shut, locked inside almirahs. The scheme stopped since mid-2008. The food is never enough to last more than a week.

Samarin and her family eat twice a day. The menu is frugal: a weak, watery corn soup, rice and sometimes vegetables or dal. Tea is dessert, for milk and sugar are unaffordable to most. Saguni is now served the same fare. There has never been enough time or money to prepare separate baby food. Samarin leaves questions unanswered and walks away to cut masoor half the produce will go to the land owner.

Outside Kanha, 150 km west in neighbouring Mandla district, a cluster of 170 houses form Bhanpur Kheda, a village that was resettled in the 1970s when the forest department removed families from Kanha’s tiger habitat. The village constitutes Baigas and Gonds. But in this village, the Baigas are different. The women wear colourful sarees and blouses unlike the traditional red and white khadi cloth they usually drape over their bare tattooed bodies, exposing their inked legs. One can’t tell a Gond from a Baiga unless one squints hard to see a faded tattoo on the women’s foreheads. The jewellery is toned down from the striking havel —large silver coins strung together on colourful threads—to plain beaded necklaces. The men wear jeans and shirts and keep their hair short, unlike the typical long-haired, thin-moustached Baiga with kohled eyes. “Here a Baiga dances only when a government official or a tourist asks him to display his culture for a fee,” says Vivek Pawar, the founder of Vikalp, an ngo working on tribal rights in Mandla and Balaghat and a partner of the Right to Food Campaign fighting malnutrition in the state.

Phaggan Sinh is one such Baiga. When we catch him, he is on his mobile. The call is from his “contact” in Raipur, Chhattisgarh’s capital, 200 km away. There is a spot to fill in a steel factory. “I may be back next week or maybe after three months. As long as work lasts,” he says, smiling. In Chhattisgarh, they pay well at the factories, Rs 150 a day. Not like the forest department work in Bhanpur where they toil a whole day making barricades and talaabs (large pits to store water) for Rs 91.

Phaggan Sinh has nine mouths to feed, including his parents, brothers, sisters, wife and a seven-month-old baby boy, Shiv Kumar. Together they farm paddy, wheat and millets kodo and kutki on 2.4 hectares. None of the produce is sold in the market because it is not enough to feed the family. There is only one ration card in his father’s name. “What is 35 kg of rice for a family of nine?” he shrugs.

A look at his son Shiv Kumar betrays the poverty in which he is being raised. Shiv is frail and his palms and feet are pale. Weighing 5.75 kg, he is severely malnourished. Gambhir kam vajan, reads the who growth chart. A baby his age should weigh 6.75 kg. His mother Omvati is anaemic. “I’ve lost so much weight since I got pregnant and even now I have not recovered. I cannot work for more than 10 minutes at a stretch,” she says, cooking dal for lunch.

Ideally, Omvati should take Shiv to the anganwadi for lunch every day and take home a supplementary packet of khichdi and halwa every Tuesday. But the anganwadi at Bhanpur is locked most of the time. The columns in the anganwadi register meant to have records of children’s weights, vaccine schedules and food distribution are blank. The children were weighed last in July 2008.

A man travels 60 km to bring his child to a centre for the acutely malnourished

Health records in Dindori district, which has the largest Baiga population, is not any better. Shanti Bele is the district coordinator at Dindori for the state’s Integrated Child Development Scheme. She is solely responsible for the functioning of anganwadis. She has never heard of Kandha Tolla village, which has the highest malnutrition rate in Dindori. “About 40 per cent children in this district are malnourished. Anganwadi supervisors are unable to monitor the centres closely because these areas are difficult to access. How does the government expect them to go there with no transport?” she asks.

Balwant Rahangdale, a Right to Food campaigner in Dindori, says the forest department’s takeover of the jungles has affected the tribals the most. “The Baigas depended heavily on the forests for food and medicinal herbs, but today, with the department turning the forests into timber factories, the shrubs and roots are being wiped out,” he says.

But the old still cherish the memories of the good life they once lived. “There was always enough for all of us,” says Ramkali, an elderly resident of Bhanpur, remembering the days before displacement. Today she and her children walk miles and sneak into protected forest to collect firewood. One cannot help but feel that soon enough Jami will become a Bhanpur.

For the time being there is something to celebrate. One of the Baiga women has got elected a ward member in the panchayat elections. In the distant fields, Baigas are bringing out the maandal, traditional drums. The roll fills their limbs with life.

Shriya Mohan is the 2010 Media Fellow of the National Foundation for India