Each man-animal face-off has its own complexities and dimensions, and calls for site-specific approach and action. The inescapable solution remains in mending the fragmentation of our forest landscapes across the nation
Moving away from the heated election scenario, I would like to draw your attention to an escalating battle taking place in the forests of India — a battle for turf between humans and the wildlife. Tigers, leopards, elephants, bears, estuarine crocodiles — our largest, most charismatic animals, icons of our conservation movement — are locked in the conflict with people.
The first half of 2014 has seen an intensification of human-tiger conflict. At least 20 cases of human fatality have been witnessed from tiger attacks between November 2013 and April 2014, mostly in landscapes that are seeing stable tiger breeding and reviving populations — Corbett-Ramnagar, Dudhwa-lakhimpur Kheri-Pilibhit, Bandipur-Nagarahole-Mudumalai-Wyanaad, Tadoba and Kaziranga. In almost all cases, these tragic incidents occurred accidentally when people were either out at dawn or dusk in the vicinity of, or inside forests.
let us take the sugarcane belt of the Terai which has been a highly conflict-prone area. This conflict is rooted in the conversion of the extensive natural belts of elephant grass in these Himalayan foothills into agriculture — mostly sugarcane — when refugees were settled here post-partition. The thick sugarcane crop is indistinguishable from natural grasslands to tigers (and leopards) who look for secluded nursery and excellent cover to raise cubs. Besides, sugarcane crops are untended for nearly half the year; and conflict largely peaks during harvest time, when humans and carnivores surprise each other.
The landscape of the central Western Ghats, largely comprising forests in Karnataka, parts of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, is believed to have the largest tiger population globally with about 400 tigers. Most of these tigers are restricted to reserves which account for less than 10 per cent of the total area. Tiger population in some of well-protected reserves such as Bandipur and Nagarahole rebounded over the years and has currently reached ‘saturation’ densities of an estimated 10-15 tigers per 100 sq km. Such tiger populations have a ‘surplus’; and sub-adults and old tigers are pushed out into the fringes of these largely islanded tiger reserves. Such dispersing tigers set out to look for sanctuary and move into fringes or into adjoining habitats through forest corridors, often to find that long-used corridors and many erstwhile ‘sink’ habitats have vanished giving way to highways, canals, mines and sprawling human habitation. Disoriented yet desperate, they land up in the midst of human habitation and urban sprawl, many a time, far away from the reserves of their origin.
These ‘stray’ tigers face a bleak future and would be lucky to escape death by poison, cudgel, stoning or electrocution. The less unfortunate may be condemned to life in captivity in zoos.In the rarest of rare cases, people are accidentally attacked and killed, either misidentified as prey while they are squatting, or in self-defence when surprised. These tigers are not man-eaters. They’re simply harried, cornered animals looking to escape.
Conflict between humans and wildlife is inevitable in a densely-populated country like India, which also has high diversity of large animal species. In fact, wildlife biologists assert that, given the proximity of large carnivores and people, conflict is actually at a lower scale than it could be. A study by Vidya Athreya and other scientists, published in the Public library Of Science, last year, illustrates a situation where a population density averaging 10 leopards per 100 sq km is persisting within dense human population in a completely-modified landscape. Human attacks by leopards were rare despite a potentially-volatile situation. The recent case of a young male tiger — believed to have originated from Satkosia Tiger Reserve (Odisha) — who stayed almost inside Bhubaneswar city for nearly eight months, preying on chital and other wild prey in the outskirts and not getting into a single instance of conflict with people proves that if left undisturbed, tigers go to extreme lengths to avoid contact with humans when in human-dominated landscapes. As a tragic aside, in spite of such forbearance, this young tiger today languishes at Nandankanan Zoo.
Human-tiger conflict is rising as tigers get cornered into increasingly small, fragmented ‘protected areas’ where they breed and proliferate, but with no safe ‘sink’ or ‘dispersal’ habitats to spread into. Also, protected areas are fringed by large numbers of villages from which people enter forests for collecting firewood, forest produce, grazing, etc and expose themselves to the risk of encounters with tigers, leopards, sloth bears and elephants.
We must understand that confining tigers to small, islanded reserves is a genetic dead end for them and that conserving corridors is vital for survival of viable tiger populations. long-term solutions need to focus on increasing the expanse of natural habitats, protecting forest corridors, bringing larger tracts of habitat under the ambit of protected areas, incentivising people to move out of wildlife habitats and reducing their dependence on forests through alternate employment. More immediate mitigation measures need to be adopted urgently to minimise conflict. These may include timely and fair compensation for livestock depredation and constant engagement between local communities and forest departments — good community relations and trust are central for any effort to save the tiger. Speedy communication about wild animal movement, rapid action squads that respond to cases of conflict immediately by reining in crowds, providing first-aid and shielding the animal while arranging for its escape or capture have proven successful in mitigating human-elephant conflict. The same can be adapted for human-tiger conflict.
Prescribing mitigation measures, the National Tiger Conservation Authority has issued a standard operating procedure for dealing with human-tiger conflict. Released last year, the SOP asks for imposition of Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code to ensure law and order, to avoid agitated local people from mobbing the animal and hampering operations. It categorically prescribes that “under no circumstances, should a tiger be eliminated by invoking the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, if it is not habituated for causing human death.”
Conservationists prescribe that in areas with high tiger densities it is advisable to shoot old, injured tigers that enter into conflict rather than to capture or release them elsewhere, especially in the interest of community tolerance and support for the larger tiger population. Such accurate identification and conclusions regarding a ‘conflict tiger’ can only be drawn in areas where tigers are monitored intensively. Also, not all conflict arises in areas that are saturated with tigers. low-density tiger landscapes in areas like Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha also witness human-tiger conflict. Healthy, young and dispersing tigers — critical to rebuilding tiger populations in presently low tiger density habitats — have also been known to come into conflict with humans while passing through human-dominated landscapes. A horrifying instance is of a young tigress that was beaten to death by a 5,000 strong mob in Chhattisgarh in 2011. She had not killed or harmed anybody, but met with a horrifying death, for merely being ‘caught’ in transit as she perhaps made her way from one habitat in search of another in the vast forest patchwork of central India.
Each conflict situation has its own complexities and dimensions and calls for site-specific approach and action. The inescapable solution remains in mending the fragmentation of our forest landscapes by protecting and reviving contiguity of tiger habitat across the nation. Unless that is tackled, every other measure shall only be a stop-gap one.
(The writer is trustee, ‘Bagh’, member, State Board for Wildlife, Uttarakhand, and a former member of the National Board for Wildlife)