By Joydeep Gupta, IANS
New Delhi : The Indian government’s latest efforts at protecting wildlife and forest habitats may backfire if local communities residing in these areas are not involved, a clutch of NGOs has warned.
The government Wednesday notified eight new Project Tiger reserves. This is likely to add fuel to fire, says the Future of Conservation (FoC), a grouping of nine well known voluntary organisations devoted to environmental protection and preservation.
The FoC says that man-animal conflicts have already intensified after states started removing forest dwellers from core areas – called critical wildlife habitats (CWHs) – this month.
Ashish Kothari of Kalpavriksh, one of the NGOs in the network, told IANS: “We are seriously concerned that many state governments are rushing to identify and notify CWH without due scientific and democratic processes.”
“Already there is information this is causing conflict and tension among communities, leading to situations that will rebound on conservation,” he said.
The states have been acting on a letter by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to all chief ministers, asking them to protect CWHs while handing over control of forests to locals under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, notified early in January.
While welcoming the prime minister’s letter, the FoC has objected to the way the ministry of environment and forests (MOE&F) has identified CWHs.
The voluntary organisations say the ministry’s guidelines “do not adequately provide for a systematic, scientific and democratic process.
“The criteria for identification of CWH are ambiguous and scientifically questionable, and consultations with local communities in several aspects of the process are only optional.”
The FoC members – Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Council for Social Development, Himal Prakriti, Kalpavriksh, Samrakshan, SHODH, Vasundhara, Wildlife Conservation Trust, and WWF-India – have prepared an alternative way of identifying CWH and a more orderly way to resettle people out of forests.
They say areas with a high density of tigers and their prey, areas where breeding tigers are known to have been present till recently, areas connected to tiger habitats in an ecological way, areas with very low human population and areas where people take out very little non-timber forest products for their own use should be seen as CWH.
The group says: “Identification, mapping and notification of inviolate spaces is a necessary condition for securing tiger reserves. Following an identification survey, perimeter marking mapping, signboards and notification, monitoring and evaluation measures must be put into place.”
Opposing the ministry’s current norm, the group wants local community members and NGOs working in the area to be involved in identifying best management practices and local adaptations needed in each CWH.
The NGOs want the government to start pilot projects for joint and participatory management in select forests.
“Some of the past eco-development sites such as Kalakad Mundanthurai in Tamil Nadu and Periyar in Kerala, or others where local communities and NGOs are well-organised and already involved in conservation activities, such as Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple Sanctuary in Karnataka, could be taken up as pilot sites.”
The NGOs want the authorities to talk regularly to local populations in each CWH, and plan and implement anti-poaching and anti-wildlife trade measures in association with local communities.
Even after local communities are moved out of forest areas, they remain dependent on the forests for essentials such as fodder and fuelwood, and very often food. The NGOs suggest that the authorities keep aside land for fuel and fodder lots at relocation sites.
State forest departments have been using the Beneficiary Oriented Scheme for Tribal Development (BOTD) when determining rehabilitation packages for those displaced from forests.
The NGOs say while the scheme has many plus points, one major lacuna is that it fixes a compensation ceiling of Rs.100,000 without taking into account the previous income of a household.
The FoC wants this rule changed and says the previous way a displaced person used to make his living must be taken into account while deciding the rehabilitation package – farmers must be given land, while people who used to live on animal husbandry must get sufficient pasture.
Finance Minister P. Chidambaram told the media after Wednesday’s cabinet meeting that the government would spend Rs.5.08 billion by 2012 to resettle people from the core areas of the forests that have been identified for the new Project Tiger sites.
These forests are Parambikulam-Annamalai straddling the Kerala-Tamil Nadu border, Mudumalai in Tamil Nadu, the Dandeli wildlife sanctuary and the Hansi national park together in Karnataka, the Sanjay Gandhi national park and the Sanjaydhubri wildlife sanctuary together in Madhya Pradesh, Udanti and Sitanadi together in Chhattisgarh, Achanakmar also in Chhattisgarh, Satkosia in Orissa and the Kaziranga national park in Assam.
As conflicts intensify, the NGOs say the only way out is to have the entire rehabilitation process “open, transparent and participatory, with local communities in particular having full access to it”.
(Joydeep Gupta can be contacted at [email protected])