March 9, 1998

Tragedies of the Wild
Many species are hurtling to extinction

The air is heavy with the overpowering stench of rotting flesh. This is Gahirmatha beach, the world's largest nesting site of the Olive Ridley turtles -- and now the largest graveyard. For three months since November 1996, more than 7,000 Ridleys -- which come to nest at four sites in Orissa after an epic ocean journey -- have been found dead, the largest toll ever. Their odyssey is fatally cut short when they get entangled in the nets of illegal trawlers. Some drown in the giant nets, others are clubbed to death.

The Ridleys perish because of a relentless competition for land and livelihood in the mangrove forests sheltered by the Bhitarkanika Sanctuary. There are 190 villages here with 40,000 people. The tide went out of control this decade: about 90 per cent of these are suspected to be Bangladeshi immigrants, encouraged to settle in Bhitarkanika by local politicians. Mangroves are being cleared and offshore, the number of trawlers rises ceaselessly to defy the coast guard and trawl in the no-fishing zones off the nesting sites. "The needs of men are more important than mute mangroves and turtles," retorts Srikanta Mohapatra, a local politician.

The carnage of the Ridleys is visible evidence of a growing man-animal conflict. But elsewhere in wild India, an invisible tragedy is unfolding. Many exotic but virtually unknown -- and understudied -- animals and birds face a silent end as their habitats and precarious ecological niches disappear.

Even our most protected animals are now in deep peril. They die from poaching and poisoning; on railroads and highways cutting through their ever-shrinking habitats. Despite 23 tiger reserves, India's tiger population plummeted from 4,300 in 1989 to some 2,500 now, according to the latest census figures. There may be 27,000 elephants but the Indian tusker is in as grave a danger as the tiger. In Periyar, there are now 122 females for every male, as opposed to six females to a male in the '70s, says the Asian Elephant Conservation Centre in Bangalore. Similarly, the great one-horned rhino is being decimated by poaching: there are only 1,500 left, most of them in Assam's Kaziranga and Manas (a world heritage site now devastated by Bodo rebels) national parks.

Insurgency, rebels and Naxalites take their toll. "Some reserves like Manas, Palamau (Bihar), Srisailam (Andhra Pradesh) and Indravati (Madhya Pradesh) are totally out of control," confesses Sen. In Sariska, Rajasthan, tigers and leopards are run over by trucks barrelling along a highway that cuts through the reserve. In Dudhwa, trains crushed a tiger, an endangered fishing cat and an elephant in January alone. A time of reckoning is near.

Painful Choices
Sacrificing land to preserve the forests

"The tiger is our anna (elder brother)," says Kishtappa. He's a Chenchu, member of one of India's most primitive tribes, a people who still hunt with bows and arrows. Many Chenchu families living deep in the deciduous forest of Andhra Pradesh's Rajiv Tiger Reserve -- India's largest -- subsist on meat left over by the tiger. Kishtappa cannot fathom why anyone would harm a tiger.

Traditional hunter-gatherers like the Chenchu -- whose lives are intertwined with the forests -- are supposed to be the only humans allowed to live in national parks. But times have moved on for the large majority of protected area inhabitants, some three million of them, who want to see a changing, prospering nation outside their world. "This is the 20th century," notes Sen. "How can they not have aspirations?"

So policy makers, scientists and environmentalists are deeply divided about how to deal with pressure from expanding, prospering forest communities. Should they still be denied roads and electricity? If they want these facilities, should they be moved out of a national park? The government and NGOs are trying ECO-development -- sustainable living that entails everything from getting people to use degraded land for fodder and solar cookers to replace their fuel wood needs -- but the success is mixed. "Coordination (between departments) is the major problem," says Kishore Rao, deputy inspector-general (wildlife) in the MOEF.

There are no clear answers to the problem, but it's clear that prospering forest communities cannot be converted into regular urban towns. Areas that are critical to wildlife and flora have to be clearly identified, demarcated and then sealed off from human habitation.

Right now, there's confusion about the status of many protected areas because of a legal requirement that many states didn't bother to fulfil -- often deliberately. After every protected area is first established and the boundaries drawn, state governments are supposed to invite objections, settle access rights to people already living there and then finally redraw the boundaries through a final notification. That order, in many cases, was never passed, often for 20 or 30 years, time enough for whole towns to spring up. So now when prioritisation is inevitable, states are well placed to shrink protected areas massively. Reducing the area is the easy way out: no compensation money needs to be paid and politically everyone is happy.

"This whole exercise is fraught with danger because forest areas that rank low in priority may simply be denotified," says Asad Rahmani, director of the Bombay Natural History Society. It's already happening. In Rajasthan's Desert National Park, only 120 sq km of the 3,162 sq km grandly set aside for the park in 1980 is in the hands of the Forest Department. In the park live 12,000 people in 12 villages. In 18 years, no final notification was ever passed, a door deliberately left open for the powerful mining industry. "They (bureaucrats) were apprehensive of issuing any such notification, which could hamper mining," says V.D. Sharma, Rajasthan's former chief wildlife warden. Sure enough, the northern tip of the park is being set aside for limestone mines; the government says it intends to shrink its area by 90 per cent.

But there are genuine problems caused by careless initial notifications. Environmentalists often demand removal of industries from protected areas, but many were there much before a spate of protected areas were notified in the '70s. It is unlikely that anyone can simply uproot an iron ore plant.

The pressure on living space is so intense that the task of prioritisation must begin immediately to see what can be saved, even what can be sacrificed. This doesn't mean all parks must shrink. More than half our tigers, for instance, live in forests outside protected areas. So some protected areas need to be increased. What is left must be defended to the hilt. Otherwise India's forests and wildlife could move from crisis to catastrophe -- and that is already unfolding.

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