BIODIVERSITY-INDIA: Community Rights Key to Tiger Survival, Says Task Force

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, May 21 2005 (IPS) - India’s tigers are in peril and their survival hinges upon the local communities that live around its habitat, according to a new tiger task force set up by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to review the country’s dwindling big cat population.

India’s tigers are in peril and their survival hinges upon the local communities that live around its habitat.

This is the main finding of a new tiger task force set up by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to review the country’s dwindling big cat population.

”Excluding local communities from tiger conservation projects would not only prevent efficient gathering of intelligence against poaching activity but may actually force these impoverished communities to help the poachers in exchange for money,” said Sunita Narain, chairperson of the task force and head of the voluntary, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE).

She was speaking to IPS on the eve of International Day of Biological Diversity, which falls on May 22.

According to Narain, nearly four million people living in and at the fringes of protected areas have lost most of their means of livelihood due to the non-recognition of their traditional community rights.

The tiger task force chairperson was commenting on the recent ruling of the ministry of environment and forests that states ”all rights and concessions (traditional rights to collect minor forest products) cannot be enjoyed in protected areas.”

The task force drew the example of India’s most notorious bandit and king elephant poacher, Koose Muniswamy Veerapan, who was shot dead by police last October.

He reputedly killed 2,000 elephants in a career spanning 30 years and also gunned down with equal ease forest guards, policemen and everything else thrown at him by the governments of southern Karnataka and Tamil Nadu – between which states the Sathyamangalam forests are sandwiched.

The task force pointed out that Veerapan evaded capture because the Robin Hood-like figure had the support of local communities that were denied access to their traditional forest resources through ill-conceived forest management programmes.

Prime Minister Singh set up the task force in April after reports of the disappearance of tigers in the Sariska sanctuary in Rajasthan state. There were an estimated 16 to 18 tigers a year ago in Sariska.

Earlier this week, the ministry of environment and forests revealed at least 114 tigers had been killed from 1999-2003 and that 238 seizures of tiger parts such as bones, skin, teeth and nails had been made in the same period.

”What is needed urgently is to set up a multi-disciplinary and professional task force for wildlife law enforcement, which will be charged to follow up the investigations across borders and in major city markets of the country,” the task force said.

The catastrophe in Sariska has revealed that its feline inhabitants had fallen prey to an organised international trade that moved via Nepal, up north, to the tiger product markets of Tibet and China.

In recent years the tiger skin trade seems to have been revived despite international bans. This is mainly due to the demands of the apparel industry that is being powered by new affluence in Tibet and China.

Indian tiger experts have called for a federal agency to save the tiger, whose numbers have fallen to about 3,700 from roughly 40,000 a century ago. But conservationists say the number may be less than 2,000.

The government’s response has been to come up with plans for a Wildlife Crime Bureau on the lines of the Narcotics Bureau. But this has come in for criticism by the task force which is against creating yet another large unwieldy but ineffective bureaucracy.

”What is needed is a lean and mean organisation which could track crime, manage databases and follow up on investigations rather than create a 285-man force with a 40 million dollar budget as proposed,” said Narain.

Meanwhile, a team of the U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) began Thursday a three-day meeting in the Indian capital to improve intelligence on the tiger trade between India and China through Nepal.

Ashok Kumar, a member of the Wildlife Trust of India which is represented at the CITES meetings said the focus was on India’s new tiger crisis highlighted by the animal vanishing altogether from the Sariska reserve within a record period of six months.

Tiger hunting is now illegal everywhere, and international trade in tigers and their body parts is banned under CITES.

But the high premium attached to tiger skins, and the use of tiger bones and claws in traditional Chinese medicine for their presumed health benefits, have resulted in a thriving illegal trade.