Mitigating human-wildlife conflict must factor in incentives for local communities

India is a unique country with respect to wildlife conservation. Despite a billion people we still have most of our large wildlife species.

Any human-wildlife conflict affects both the sides often in tragic ways, like the death of four tigers in Mhadei, Goa, and the reported arrest of the locals who poisoned the animals after their complaints were not attended to in a way it should have been. Pramod Sawant, the chief minister of Goa, reportedly said that, “we will demarcate and fence the borders of the wildlife sanctuaries” in order to end 80 per cent of the problem. Although the intentions are good, this isn’t a solution. Tigers do not understand boundaries made for administrative purposes. What happens when a tiger goes “outside” and kills cattle?

India is a unique country with respect to wildlife conservation. Despite a billion people we still have most of our large wildlife species. Compared to relatively lower human density countries in south-east Asia, India today has the largest population of the tiger, Asian elephant, leopard, sloth bear, gaur and many others: These animals cannot be restricted to inside a few hundred kilometres of protected areas. Had that been done, they would have all died due to inbreeding and lack of connectivity. Tigers need large spaces because they are large animals. Because we cannot create large spaces without humans in India, wildlife does not have a choice but to also use human-use landscapes. This rationale is as old as tigers and humans are in India. People have accepted this, and incorporated it in our culture. All our deities have animals associated with them; it shows the inclusion of these animals in our mind space. The Velip community in Goa worship the tigers and this practice is done even today, although it was started at a time when tigers were still present all over Goa. When my parents had taken me to the Verne temple in 1968, on the top — near a spring — there was a tiger. My frightened family ran down and when they told the temple priests about the animal, the response was acknowledgment: Yes, he comes to drink water.

People have always shared space with wildlife in India. No doubt, the repercussions are sometimes very serious like it happened in Mhadei. However, the solutions lie elsewhere, not in fencing the land which neither people nor tigers will adhere to. A tiger can get over the fence just as much as a human can. The best way forward is to ensure that the locals view an engagement with tigers as a path towards development: This is something the administration can definitely do as has been shown in many other tiger reserves, including in Maharashtra. The health minister, Vishwajit Rane, in whose constituency the tiger carcasses were found, called the creation of the tiger reserve as a measure against development. But that is because we have not seen the money that the tigers can bring in. Unlike activities such as mining, tigers are a renewable resource. They are always going to be there, and so will the rivers and the forests, giving the local people income and development — as long as there are tigers.

But this model has to be one which ensures that the benefits of tourism go directly to the communities in that landscape. Many other states have adopted this model where the money that comes in from tourism goes into the Tiger Conservation Fund, which in turn is used for the development of the local villages — as has been done in Tadoba tiger reserve, Maharashtra. Crores of rupees that come in yearly are also used to provide training to the local youth, to better the services in the villages around the tiger reserve. The tiger reserve staff facilitate these development activities for the locals. There is no way the locals will then grudge their tigers, if the benefits are there for all to see.

In the short term, compensation procedures need to be improved. The communication and interaction between the forest department and the locals has to be improved. In Maharashtra, a decade ago, the compensation amount was poor, and the process was cumbersome as well as time consuming. Today, a helpline has been established, compensation rates have increased vastly, and the process is under the Right to Services Act, so it has to be dispensed with in a few weeks time directly into their bank account. When I met farmers a decade ago, they used to complain that it took a year or so, and they would complain about corruption. Now, the system is online, which has increased transparency. If the process gets delayed, the secretary of forests can question such delay. The field officials on the ground in Maharashtra where I used to work, tell me that even though livestock is still being killed these days by large cats, due to the quickness of response and transparency in the service process, the people don’t complain much: Because they know they are getting their services/compensation in a proper time-bound manner.

The solutions are simple: Inclusive development with a long-term vision that cares for the environment. It is about better public services in terms of transparency, accountability and genuine assistance. After all, we are talking about communities who need to be custodians of the tigers and tigers who can, in turn, provide the communities much-needed development in remote areas.

Source: Indian Express, 25/02/2020

Not Burning Bright

India’s national animal has fallen prey to human-tiger conflict

The tiger is in the news, and yet again for the wrong reasons. We have lost two of our national animals to targeted killings in two rich landscapes — Yavatmal (Maharashtra) and Dudhwa (Uttar Pradesh). The big cats were victims of human-tiger interface conflict.

India is in a leadership position on the tiger front with almost 70 per cent of the global tiger population. We pioneered tiger conservation with Project Tiger and by conserving 2.4 per cent of our geographical area as tiger reserves. Why, then, do we find ourselves in such conflict situations repeatedly? The answer is not far to seek. Our tiger reserves, national parks and sanctuaries exist only as islets in a vast sea of human, cattle and unsustainable land use. The stakeholders are many in this heterogeneous mosaic, from primary (local people) to secondary (government departments) and tertiary (business groups, semi-urbanscape). Urbanisation and growth agendas alter landscape dynamics, which has a cascading effect on the ecological dynamics of wildlife. This results in ecological dislocation of sorts, wherein endangered wild animals like tigers either cause distress or land themselves in trouble.

Consider the statistics: India’s 3.28 million sq km land area amounts to 2.4 per cent of the planet’s geographical area. But we have almost 17 per cent of the world’s human population and 16 per cent of global livestock. Our per capita forest is just 0.064 ha compared to the global average of 0.64 ha, which partly explains the forest resource dependency of a large number of rural people. India’s 668 protected areas add up to 14 per cent of her forest area and 4.9 per cent of her geographical area. Of these, 50 protected areas are tiger reserves. Against this backdrop, we hold two-thirds of the global tiger population, the largest population of Asiatic elephants and so on. Barring protected areas, our forests are not very rich. And the concessions in our forests have caused overuse and abuse of resources. Loss of forest productivity in terms of forage for wild herbivores has meant that the bulk of our forests cannot sustain medium-sized wild herbivores like deer, megaherbivores like elephants or big cats like tigers.

In fact, successive assessments have revealed that tigers are largely confined to their source areas (core areas of tiger reserves) and their fringes (buffers). The bulk of other forests in most of India’s tiger states have practically lost their habitat value owing to excessive biotic pressure. Consequently, agriculture and cash crops beyond protected areas readily lure wild pigs and other preys, which in turn lure big cats. The inevitable outcome is “conflict of interface” between wildlife and humans, which cause distress to people. And once wild animals earn a pest value, they get trapped in snares or succumb to revenge or avoidance killings, more often than not through a silent method of poisoning using pesticides. This “interface” is further influenced by urbanisation, rail and road transport infrastructure and intensive operations like mining or special economic zones — part of the growth agenda in any developing country.

The truth is, human-wildlife interface is here to stay. While there can be no “co-existence” with tigers or elephants, a “co-occurrence” agenda with a proactive management control is available. The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) has brought out several Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to deal with various challenges of the human-tiger interface. An incapacitated tiger or leopard has to be captured on priority. A prime animal straying close to human settlements requires active monitoring and translocation to suitable habitat. For example, tigers were shifted from the fringes of Bandhavgarh to Satpura. All this requires 24×7 monitoring using technology, management of corridors, building up the frontline capacity, creating village teams for reporting wild animal presence, and, an intersectoral portfolio at the landscape level akin to the “master plan” envisaged for an eco-sensitive zone.

Human-tiger interface management demands proactive measures. One cannot allow a big cat to get habituated and then brutally eliminate it. It is a tragic end for our national animal, and a complete travesty of the responsibility reposed on foresters and wildlife experts.

The writer is secretary general of the Global Tiger Forum and former chief of NTCA

Source: Indian Express, 14/11/2018

No winners in the man-animal conflict

With about 3,900 tigers remaining in the wild, they need us now more than ever

A six-year-old tigress suspected of having killed 13 people over the past two years in the hills of central India was shot dead by hunters under controversial circumstances last week. While the killing of the mother of two nine-month-old cubs triggered celebrations by villagers in the area stalked by the big cat, wildlife activists were furious – and with good reason. The latest incident in the man-animal conflict, which comes just days after another tigress (Sundari in Odisha) was blamed for killing a woman whose post-mortem report was inconclusive, shows that we need to get better at dealing with such cases.

The hunter who fired the bullet that killed tigress Avni said he did so in self-defence after a tranquiliser dart failed to stop her from charging at him. A question being asked is: Should the wildlife officials not have foreseen such a circumstance? Experts feel a well-planned operation would have taken the possibility into account, ensuring safety structures to guard against this. While there is little doubt in Avni’s case that the tigress was responsible for human killings, we need to consider the larger debate surrounding the intensifying conflict between humans and wild animals.

Animal rights activists argue such big cats should not be called ‘man-eaters’ because they don’t trespass into human habitats to kill people — it’s the other way around. The World Wildlife Fund says tigers are mostly solitary and have large territories. The wild animal, however, is facing dogged pressures from retaliatory killings and poaching amid habitat loss to humans. Killing is the easy option. The world has lost 95% of its wild tigers since the 20th century began. With only about 3,900 tigers remaining in the wild, they need us now more than ever.

Source: Hindustan Times, 4/11/2018

State’s apathy towards natural heritage fuelling the man-animal conflict

Imagine this: You are caught in an enclosed space and unknown people are on your tail. Would you stand still and give up, or try to exit the scene as quickly as possible? Most of us would opt for the latter. The same survival instinct pushes wild animals to behave in the same way when they are cornered. But humans don’t seem to realise or appreciate that and more often than not end up terrifying wild animals that stray into human habitats like what happened when a leopard entered a school in Bengaluru last week. Instead of allowing specialists to tranquilise it safely, several hundred people gathered around the school to watch the tamasha; their irresponsible action not only frightened the animal but also made it difficult for the forest officials to trap it quickly. In fact, three forest officials were injured during the day-long operation.

On their part, forest department officials should have asked the local police to clear the area because wildlife protocols state that “wild carnivores may attack in self-defence and, therefore, it is advisable to avoid provoking them” and that the area should be “cordoned off with barricades and all attempts should be made to keep the crowd and local people from approaching the animal”. There has been an alarming rise in such man-animal conflicts in the last few years and fatalities often involve elephants, leopards, bears, boars and tigers. Only a day after the Bengaluru incident, an elephant went on the rampage in a town in West Bengal. The main reason for such conflicts is the politics that thrives on the build-build-build development motto. So we build rail tracks, roads, housing colonies and industries cutting through natural habitats or wildlife corridors, with little thought about the animals that live or use these forested areas.

A little attention can make life easier for animals and also for people who live in areas that are hotbeds of man-animal conflicts. Forest officials in Upper Assam’s Holongapar Reserve Forest have built a bridge across a railway track passing through the forest for hillock gibbons to pass from one side of the forest to the other. No matter how many laws we pass to save wild animals, it will finally be our resolve which can make a difference. As of now, the will to save the country’s natural heritage seems to be woefully weak.

Source: Hindustan Times, 1502-2016