By Malini Shankar
CHIDAMBARAM TALUQ, CUDDALORE DISTRICT, India, Nov 20 2015 (IPS)

The 2013 National Food Security Act of the Government of India seeks, according to its preamble, to “provide for food and nutritional security by ensuring access to adequate quantity of quality food at affordable prices to people”.

Despite rapid economic growth and gains in reducing poverty, India has with among the highest levels of hunger and malnutrition in the world.

Although the National Food Security Act is crucial for the poor, it is especially critical for the persistently excluded and Indigenous Peoples of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, as the Irula tribal community in the northern districts of Tamil Nadu, a state in south-eastern India.

The Biodiversity Act 2002, the National Disaster Management Act 2005, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005, the Forest Rights Act 2006, and the Food Security Act 2013 have helped the near starving indigenous community of Irulas overcome lack of livelihood and food security, and has helped in augmenting conservation of biodiversity.

“A very important change which has taken place in our country in the last ten to fifteen years… is shift from reappraisal approach to rights approach. The Right to Food. The Right to Education. The Right to Employment. The right to your biodiversity” said Prof. Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan, universally known as “Indian Father of Green Revolution” for his leadership and success in introducing and further developing high-yielding varieties of wheat in India and former member of the Upper House of the Indian Parliament.

By Malini Shankar
CHIDAMBARAM TALUQ, CUDDALORE DISTRICT, India, Nov 13 2015 (IPS)

At the dawn of Indian Independence, Government of India’s commitment to food security – in addition to the impact of the Bengal Famine – was haunted by corruption, hoarding and mismanagement, resulting in ongoing food insecurity among the indigenous people in Tamilnadu and Orissa that lasted for more than five decades,

When the Asian Tsunami struck the coast of Tamilnadu in December 2004, the Irulas, who were teetering on the verge of starvation with their hunter gatherer lifestyle, were stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea on the coastal forests of the Pichavaram mangrove forests in Chidambaram Taluq (11°25’45.55″N 79°47’0.23″E) of Cuddalore district. The mangroves themselves, with their aerial roots, had reduced the power of the killer waves, saving the lives of thousands of Irulas. Despite that, their exposure to starvation widened because the tsunami deluged their rice paddies with salt water and the Irulas’ hunting and gathering skills were unable to produce more than one or two days’ of food each week.

“The aerial roots of the mangroves regulate tides and nurture the silt in the coastal ecosystem thereby sustaining diverse varieties of fish and crops” says Dr. Gyanamurthy, a marine biologist at the Pichavaram field station of the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in Pichavaram, Cuddalore district. They fix nitrogen in the soil thus supporting cultivation of saline resistant crops like cereals, pulses, lentils and even spawn unparalleled fish diversity in the creeks offering the cleanest mechanism of sustainable eco-friendly food security to the marginalised outcastes. But such scientific documentation nevertheless needed administrative support and legal regimen to administer food security for the impoverished and marginalised indigenous people.

The enactment of the Forest Rights Act the Biodiversity Act Forest Rights Act, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, the Food Security Act and the National Disaster Management Act together have trickled down to provide food and livelihood security for the weakest sections of society. In an exclusive interview with IPS, Professor M.S. Swaminathan, a former parliamentarian who is a leader in India’s Green Revolution and founder of the MSSRF, said: “The Forest Rights Act provides an opportunity for combining conservation with livelihood security; the National Food Security Act 2013 which makes the usual access to food a fundamental right for nearly 70 – 80 per cent of our population; and the Biodiversity Act provides a method by which those who conserve biodiversity are given some kind of recognition. We have in the national plan priority protection, the Farmers’ Rights Act. For the first time in the world there is an Act which combines farmers and builders’ rights in the one Act. The National Food Security Act, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and various other Acts which have come (into force) in recent times, they all are reinforcing each other”.

India, as one of the stake holders in the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation’s CFS (Committee on Food Security), was obliged to promote policy coherence in line with the Voluntary Guidelines for the Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food in the Context of National Food Security, and in that context, reaffirms the importance of nutrition as an essential element of food security. It followed the introduction of the Food Security Bill in the Indian Parliament in 2013 and enactment in September that year.

India is the only country to have taken up a slew of legislative measures to combat hunger. “The Food Security Act in India is perhaps the singular and greatest legislative contribution of India to humanity in terms of food security,” said Prof. M.S. Swaminathan. “The Biodiversity Act propagates plant and animal genetics thereby assuring the farmers’ livelihood security. The Forest Rights Act protects the right to life and livelihoods of forest dwelling tribes assuring the marginalised forest dwellers nutrition and food security along with biodiversity conservation. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act assures the rural populace of a minimum standard of wages and minimum period of employment.”,

“Further, the Disaster Management Act lends state support and allows officers to take expedient legal measures to combat hunger during exigencies, to reduce disaster risk in the aftermath of future calamities,” he said.

Two elements are fundamental in order to make substantial and rapid progress towards global food security: coherence and convergence among policies and programmes of countries, donors and other stakeholders when addressing the underlying causes of hunger, and the recognition of the human rights dimensions of food security.

The Right to Food Team supports government, parliamentarians, civil society organizations and other stakeholders with the implementation of the Right to Food Guidelines in their work. The Right to Food Team provides technical and capacity-building assistance in the areas of assessment, institutional analysis, policy dialogue and monitoring; all of which are relevant for the right to adequate food.

But the Asian Tsunami was quite literally a watershed in many areas of governance. The Collector of Cuddalore district, G.S. Bedi, an officer of the Indian Administrative Service of the Tamilnadu cadre, included these half starving and traumatised survivors of the Asian Tsunami in the Scheduled Tribe List. Once included the Irulas were mentored about the exercise of their rights by NGOs like the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation and BEDROC among others. MSSRF also took up livelihoods training programmes to offer alternate livelihood options to the Irulas. MSSRF imparted training in crab trapping, net fishing, sustainable eco-friendly aquaculture, net making, boat building and allied activities making the tribe self- reliant in livelihood security and offering and food security.

Text and pictures by Malini Shankar

India’s many mighty rivers like the Ganges and Indus not only irrigate vast tracts of farmland and provide life-sustaining resources to millions, they also form the basis of India’s hydropower plans for the coming decade. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
BANGALORE, India, Jun 10 2015 (IPS)

As the United Nations closes its chapter on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and charts a new plan of action under the framework of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), India – a country of 1.2 billion people – is confronting its resource challenges.

One of the country’s primary concerns is how to provide its citizens equal access to fresh, clean water while also juggling the vast energy needs of its population and many industries.

India Confronts its Water Woes as it Moves from MDGs to SDGs from IPS News on Vimeo.

Sunlight pours over a break in canal-top solar panels recently installed over the Vadodara branch of the Sardar Sarovar canal project in Gujarat. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
BARODA, India, Jan 19 2015 (IPS)

It began with an experiment to install photovoltaic cells over an irrigation canal that forms part of the Sardar Sarovar canal network – a massive hydel power project across the River Narmada that irrigates some 1.8 million hectares of arable land in the western Indian state of Gujarat.

After a successful pilot project, the Government of Gujarat has now invested some 18.3 million dollars replicating the scheme over a 3.6-km stretch of the irrigation canal in the hopes of generating 10 MW of power.

The project received endorsement from U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon on Jan. 11, as it represents global efforts to move towards a new poverty-eradication framework that will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) at the end of this year, putting sustainability at the heart of the global development agenda.

Given that no extra land had to be acquired for installation of the solar power panels, its uniqueness was lauded by the U.N. secretary-general.

“Looking out at the plant, I saw more than glittering panels—I saw the future of India and the future of our world,” Ban said, addressing the media at the site on Jan. 11.

With some 21,600 solar panels running over a length of the Vadodara branch of the canal, experts say the installation could generate power to the tune of 16.2 million units per annum, since the canal runs right over the Tropic of Cancer and receives bright sunlight for eight months out of the year.

Sceptics worry that without planning, the surplus power could be siphoned off by commercial enterprises unless there are concerted efforts to combine the sustainable energy initiative with poverty eradication.

All across India, stakeholders are taking stock of progress on the MDGs, keeping their eyes on the new era of sustainable development. Many gaps remain in the country’s efforts to improve the lives of millions, with water scarcity, lack of sanitation, and sprawling slums pointing to a need for better management of India’s human, economic and natural resources.

A view of the transformer, which transmits solar power generated at the canal-top solar power plant. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

Such are the typical scenes in every slum area in India. Experts are hopeful that the post-2015 sustainable development agenda will succeed where the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) did not. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

Traditional systems of water harvesting and conservation have gained new-found respect in the era of sustainable development. Here, a woman uses her ox to churn a water mill in the north Indian state of Rajasthan. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

Indigenous people, like this Soliga woman, all across India are in urgent need of far-reaching sustainable development plans that will improve the lives and livelihoods of forest-dwellers. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

A water crisis continues to plague both urban and rural areas across India. As the U.N. gears up to implement a new sustainable development agenda, hopes are running high that gaps in the MDGs will now be filled. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

Sunlight pours over a break in canal-top solar panels recently installed over the Vadodara branch of the Sardar Sarovar canal project in Gujarat. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

A view of a polluted stream in Bangalore, capital of the southern Indian state of Karnataka, points to an urgent need for better planning and management of the country’s scarce water sources. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

The Irulas harvest produce from the mangrove forest for a livelihood. Here, an Irula man pulls a crab trap that he had laid out in the morning before heading off to fish in the sea. Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
PICHAVARAM, India, Dec 10 2014 (IPS)

When the Asian tsunami washed over several Indian Ocean Rim countries on Boxing Day 2004, it left a trail of destruction in its wake, including a death toll that touched 230,000.

Millions lost their jobs, food security and traditional livelihoods and many have spent the last decade trying to pick up the pieces of their lives. But for a small tribe in southern India, the tsunami didn’t bring devastation; instead, it brought hope.

Numbering some 25,000 people, the Irulas have long inhabited the Nilgiri Mountains in the states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, and have traditionally earned a living by ridding the farmland of rats and snakes, often supplementing their meagre income by working as daily wage agricultural labourers in the fields.

Now, on the eve of the 10-year anniversary of the tsunami, the Irulas in Tamil Nadu are a living example of how sustainable disaster management can alleviate poverty, while simultaneously preserving an ancient way of life.

Prior to 2004, the Irula people laboured under extremely exploitative conditions, earning no more than 3,000 rupees (about 50 dollars) each month. Nutrition levels were poor, and the community suffered from inadequate housing and sanitation facilities.

They were finally included on the government’s List of Scheduled Tribes, largely thanks to the efforts of a government official named G.S. Bedi from the tsunami-ravaged coastal district of Cuddalore in Tamil Nadu.

Inclusion on the list enabled the community to become legal beneficiaries of state-sponsored developmental schemes like the Forest Rights Act and other sustainable fisheries initiatives, thereby improving their access to better housing, and bringing greater food and livelihood security.

More importantly, community members say, the post-tsunami period has marked a kind of revival among Irulas, who are availing themselves of sustainable livelihood schemes to conserve their environment while also increasing their wages.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

An Irula couple fishes in the creeks of the Pichavaram Mangrove Forest in Tamil Nadu. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
PICHAVARAM, India, Nov 13 2014 (IPS)

When the Asian tsunami washed over several Indian Ocean Rim countries on Boxing Day 2004, it left a trail of destruction in its wake, including a death toll that touched 230,000.

Millions lost their jobs, food security and traditional livelihoods and many have spent the last decade trying to pick up the pieces of their lives. But for a small tribe in southern India, the tsunami didn’t bring devastation; instead, it brought hope.

Numbering some 25,000 people, the Irulas have long inhabited the Nilgiri Mountains in the states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, and have traditionally earned a living by ridding the farmland of rats and snakes, often supplementing their meagre income by working as daily wage agricultural labourers in the fields.

“If we were not included in the [Scheduled Tribes] List we would never have benefited from [development] schemes. We would have remained hunter-gatherers, eating rats and hunting snakes." -- Nagamuthu, an Irula tribesman and tsunami survivors
Now, on the eve of the 10-year anniversary of the tsunami, the Irulas in Tamil Nadu are a living example of how sustainable disaster management can alleviate poverty, while simultaneously preserving an ancient way of life.

Prior to 2004, the Irula people laboured under extremely exploitative conditions, earning no more than 3,000 rupees (about 50 dollars) each month. Nutrition levels were poor, and the community suffered from inadequate housing and sanitation facilities.

But when the giant waves receded and NGOs and aid workers flocked to India’s southern coast to rebuild the flattened, sodden landscape, the Irulas received more than just a hand-out.

They were finally included on the government’s List of Scheduled Tribes, largely thanks to the efforts of a government official named G.S. Bedi from the tsunami-ravaged coastal district of Cuddalore in Tamil Nadu.

Inclusion on the list enabled the community to become legal beneficiaries of state-sponsored developmental schemes like the Forest Rights Act and other sustainable fisheries initiatives, thereby improving their access to better housing, and bringing greater food and livelihood security.

More importantly, community members say, the post-tsunami period has marked a kind of revival among Irulas, who are availing themselves of sustainable livelihood schemes to conserve their environment while also increasing their wages.

Bioshields conservation – the way forward for sustainable development

Under the aegis of the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), Irulas are now part of a major livelihood scheme that has boosted monthly earnings seven-fold, to roughly 21,000 rupees or about 350 dollars in the Pichavaram Mangrove Forest of Tamil Nadu where their traditional homes are located.

Some 180 Irula families are directly benefitting from training programmes and subsidies granted to their tribal cooperatives, also known as self-help groups.

Members of the tribe are sharpening their skills at fishing, sustainable aquaculture and crab fattening, gradually moving further and further away from a life of veritable servitude to big landowners.

Perhaps most importantly, Irulas are incorporating mangrove protection and conservation into their daily lives, a step they see as necessary to the long-term survival of the entire community.

Indeed, it was the Pichavaram Mangrove Forest, located close to the town of Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu, that spared the community massive loss of life during the tsunami, protecting some 4,500 Irulas, or 900 families, from the full impact of the waves.

Snuggled between the Vellar estuary in the north and Coleroon estuary in the south, the Pichavaram forest spans some 1,100 hectares, its complex root system and inter-tidal ecosystem offering a sturdy barrier against seawater intrusion, waves and flooding.

According to statistics provided by Dr. Sivakumar, a marine biologist with the MSSRF in Chennai, the unlucky few who perished in the tsunami were those who were caught outside of the ecosystem’s protective embrace – some seven people from the Kannagi Nagar and Pillumedu villages, as well as 64 people who were stranded on the MGR Thittu, both located on sandbars devoid of mangroves.

The experience opened many tribal members’ eyes to the inestimable value of mangroves and their own vulnerability to the vagaries of the sea, sparking a grassroots-level conservation effort under the provisions of India’s Forest Rights Act.

“Until we were enlisted in the Scheduled Tribes List we did not know our rights, we were neither successful as hunter-gatherers nor as daily wage agricultural labourers,” says 55-year-old Pichakanna, an Irula tribal man who has happily exchanged agricultural employment for fishing and aquaculture activities that allow him to participate in mangrove conservation efforts in Tamil Nadu.

His salary now comes from prawn farming in the biodiverse mangrove forests, he tells IPS.

Dr. M. S. Swaminathan, chairman of the MSSRF, believes that “by conserving mangrove forests [we are] protecting the most productive coastal ecosystem that guarantees […] livelihood and ecological security.

“Bioshields are an indispensable part of Disaster Risk Resilience,” he adds.

This union between job creation and disaster management has been a stroke of unprecedented good fortune for the Irula people.

Thirty-three-year-old Nagamuthu, an Irula member whose parents – hailing from the Pichavaram forests – survived the tsunami, tells IPS, “If we were not included in the [Scheduled Tribes] List we would never have benefited from [development] schemes. We would have remained hunter-gatherers, eating rats and hunting snakes.

“Now we have developed a mangrove plantation on forest land granted to us by the government, and the Forest Rights Act has also given us fishing rights in the Protected Area of the Pichavaram Mangroves.”

Such developments are crucial at a time when mangroves are disappearing fast. According to a new study by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), “mangroves are being destroyed at a rate three to five times greater than the average rates of forest loss.”

By 2050, South Asia could lose as much as 35 percent of its mangroves that existed in 2000. Emissions resulting from such losses make up about a fifth of deforestation-related global carbon emissions, the report says.

Irulas now harvest minor forest produce from the rich waters around the mangroves, such as clusters of natural pearl oysters, which are very high in protein, for their own consumption.

“We have also learnt the skill of crab trapping, and we have installed crab fattening devices close to our homes deep in the mangrove creeks,” Nagamuthu tells IPS. “This has helped us carve out a sustainable livelihood.”

Tribe members have also been taught to dig canals in the eco-friendly ‘fish bone’ pattern that helps bring tidal creeks directly to their doorstep, where they can catch fresh fish for breakfast.

This canal system, now recommended by the Government of India, also helps in decreasing soil salinity, prevents mangrove degradation, and improves fish yields.

This, in turn, has improved livelihood security. Coupled with the acquisition of new and improved equipment – such as nets, boats, oars, engines, hooks and traps – many fisher families have completely turned their lives around.

Residents of villagers such as Killai, Pillumedu, Kannaginagar, Kalaingar, Vadakku, T.S. Pettai, and Pichavaram have now created a community fund that gathers 30 percent of each families’ monthly income; the savings have been used to construct a village temple, a school and drinking water facilities for 900 families from some seven villages.

Pichakanna, who is now the village elder for the newly established MGR Nagar Township, tells IPS proudly that the community fund has also helped establish an ‘early warning helpline’, which uses voice SMS technology to inform fisherfolk about wave height and wind direction, as well as provide six-hourly weather forecasts and early warnings of approaching cyclones.

A voice SMS broadcast aimed at women also passes on information about health and hygiene, maternity benefits and minimum wages.

While heads of states and development experts fly around the world to discuss the post-2015 ‘sustainable development’ agenda, here in Pichavaram, a forgotten tribe is already practicing a new way of life – and they are pointing the way forward to a sustainable future.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Local communities in India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands (ANI) have grown accustomed to modern water and sanitation infrastructure in the decade since the Asian Tsunami. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
CAR NICOBAR, India, Sep 5 2014 (IPS)

When the 2004 Asian Tsunami lashed the coasts and island territories of India, one of the hardest hit areas were the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (ANI), which lie due east of mainland India, at the juncture of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea.

Remote and isolated, the tribal communities that occupy these idyllic isles have lived for centuries off the land, eschewing all forms of modern ‘development’ and sustaining themselves off the catch from the rich seas that surround them.

But when the tsunami struck without warning on Boxing Day, and traditional wooden houses erected on bamboo stilts were washed away, surviving commuties scattered across these islands have been forced to reckon with their primitive lifestyle and open the doors to some changes, especially in Car Nicobar, capital and administrative nerve-centre of the Nicobar Islands.

One of the most notable changes has been in the realm of sanitation, hitherto an unhealthy mix of open defacation and forest-based waste management.

Before a major relief and rehabiliation operation got underway in the aftermath of the tsunami, many tribal communities in Nicobarese villages had rejected potable water schemes such as the desalination plant installed in the village of Chaura, where the population of 1,214 people expressed hesitation about drinking water “from a machine”.

Toilet facilities were also extremely limited, with most residents “answering nature’s call by going behind a bush”, according to a sports ministry official from the division of Kakana who gave his name only as Benedict.

When IPS visited an interim tsunami shelter in Kakana, Car Nicobar, in 2007, 25 months after the tsunami, the situation had scarcely improved. A hole in the ground across from the relief shelter served as a communal facility, and could only be accessed by leaping onto a mound of dug-up earth and navigating the moist forest floor, hoping to avoid an encounter with snakes en route to the bathroom.

The ‘structure’ consisted of nothing more than a deep hole in the forest floor, covered on all four sides by plastic sheeting. It lacked a roof, a tap and a light.

Locals were still trying to come to terms with the fact that their freshwater supply, once a boundless natural bounty originating from springs in the volcanic islands, had become badly polluted after the natural catastrophe.

A World Health Organisation (WHO) report on sanitation prospects on the island in early 2005 found several cases of diarrhoeal outbreak among survivors housed in temporary camps, which affected hundreds of the roughly 1,300 residents.

Now, most villages have toilets and sanitation systems in individual homes, and locals are slowly opening up to the necessity of improved waste-management systems. IPS interviewed tsunami survivors across five Nicobar islands – Car Nicobar, Kamorta, Campbell Bay, Little Nicobar, and Katchall – who expressed the universal opinion that receiving access to water and sanitation facilities, as well as permanent shelters designed and constructed by the government of India, has done them good.

“There are a few issues like water scarcity and discomfort in the humid summer months,” said 46-year-old Muneer Ahmed, chief tribal captain in Pilpillow, Kamorta. “Zinc sheet roofing and concrete houses are tough as they are weather insenstive, compared to weather-sensitive straw huts.”

“But,” he told IPS, “We are grateful for greater security.” His words reflect a prevailing attitude across the islands that returning to flimsy thatched-roof homes – despite their proximity to the beach, which most Nicobarese depend on for sustenance – is simply not an option with the memory of the killer waves still fresh in the minds of the survivors.

The same holds true for water and sanitation. Local communities now get water from infrastructure provided by the Public Works Department, Sakshi Mittal, deputy commissioner of Nicobar, told IPS, adding, “They don’t reject this supply anymore.”

Coastal fisherfolk in Tamil Nadu’s tsunami battered coasts of Nagapatnam and Cuddalore are also benefiting from similar schemes, many of them overseen by the Swiss Development Agency. “We have tiled bathrooms with ventilation and western toilets with bidets,” a fisherwoman named Vanitha in Nagapatnam told IPS.

Such developments among fisher communities are crucial as the international community finalises a new roadmap for sustainable development that will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015.

Key among the new poverty eradication targets, known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), will be the inclusion of the most marginalised segments of society.

In India, this includes fisher communities who were the worst hit in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry, with about 150,000 fisherfolk losing their homes to the tsunami. In ANI, close to 10,000 people lost their lives and and scores more were exposed to tough living conditions.

Despite construction by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) of 8,500 latrines around the islands after the tsunami, there remains a 35 percent deficit of decent sanitation facilities today.

In general, health indicators among the islands’ tribal population are higher than in other parts of India, with a maternal mortality ratio far below the national average of 250 deaths per 100,000 live births.

Although other health indicators like life expectancy rates were higher in the states of Kerala and ANI (67.6 percent and 73.4 percent respectively), the tsunami brought fresh new troubles, such as fears of malaria outbreaks, or epidemics of vector-borne diseases like dengue.

Relief workers and emergency response teams, sponsored by the government, international NGOs and the United Nations, took the lead on eradicating mosquito breeding grounds, distributing bednets, spraying insecticide in mosquito-heavy areas, as well as stocking local water bodies with a species of fish with an appetite for mosquito larvae.

According to a WHO assessment a year after the tsunami, Indian health authorities also launched measles vaccinations campaigns in the areas hardest hit by the disaster, namely the state of Tamil Nadu and the union territory of ANI, boosting measles immunisation coverage to 96.3 percent in the latter.

While they hope against hope to be spared another disaster, some of India’s most vulnerable communities are today far more resilient than they were a decade ago.

Part 1 of this series can be read here.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Excerpt:

Fisherfolk are one of the most vulnerable groups of people in India. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
NAGAPATTINAM, India, Aug 31 2014 (IPS)

As the United Nations gears up to launch its newest set of poverty-reduction targets to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015, the words ‘sustainable development’ have been on the lips of policymakers the world over.

In southern India, home to over a million fisherfolk, efforts to strengthen disaster resilience and simultaneously improve livelihoods for impoverished fishing communities are proving to be successful examples of sustainable development.

Here in the Kollam district of the south-western Kerala state,multimedia outreach programmes, using nationwide ocean forecasts, are bringing much-needed change into the lives of fisherfolk, who in southern India are extremely vulnerable to disasters.

“Despite having a 7,500-kilometre coastline and a marine fisherfolk population of 3.57 million spread across more than 3,000 marine fishing villages, India [has no] detailed marine weather bulletins for fishermen [...]." -- John Thekkayyam, weather broadcaster for Radio Monsoon
A fishing family earns on average some 21,000 rupees (about 346 dollars) per month but most of these earnings are eaten up by fuel expenses, repayment of boat loans and interest payments.

Savings are an impossible dream, and fisherfolk have neither alternate livelihood options nor any kind of resilience against disasters.

In Jul. 2008, 75 Tamil-speaking fisherfolk from the district of Kanyakumari in the southern state of Tamil Nadu perished during Cyclone Phyan, caught unawares out at sea. The costal radio broadcasts, warning of the coming storm, did not deter the fishers from heading out as usual, because they could not understand the local language of the marine forecasts.

Earlier this year, on Jul. 22, 600 fisherfolk sailing on about 40 trawlers went missing off the coast of Kolkata during a cyclone and were stranded on an island near the coast of Bangladesh. Only 16 fishers were rescued.

The incident revived awareness on the need for better communication technologies for the most vulnerable communities.

The Indian National Center for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) is leading the charge, by uploading satellite telemetry inputs to its server, which are then interpreted and disseminated as advisories by NGOs like the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) and Radio Monsoon.

Best known for its state-of-the-art tsunami early warning forecasts, INCOIS offers its surplus bandwidth for allied ocean advisory services like marine weather forecasts, windspeeds, eddies, and ocean state forecasts (including potential fishing zones) aimed at fisherfolk welfare and mariners’ safety.

“Oceanographers in INCOIS interpret the data on ocean winds, temperature, salinity, ocean currents, sea levels [and] wave patterns, to advise how these factors affect vulnerable populations,” INCOIS Director Dr. Satheesh Shenoi told IPS.

“These could be marine weather forecasts, advisories on potential fishing grounds, or early warnings of tsunamis. INCOIS generates and provides such information to fishers, [the] maritime industry, coastal population [and] disaster management agencies regularly,” he added.

This new system works hand in hand with community-based information dissemination initiaitves that shares forecasts with the intended audience.

John Thekkayyam, weather broadcaster for Radio Monsoon, told IPS, “Despite having a 7,500-kilometre coastline and a marine fisherfolk population of 3.57 million spread across more than 3,000 marine fishing villages, India [has no] detailed marine weather bulletins for fishermen either on radio, TV or print media.”

Radio Monsoon and the MSSRF multimedia outreach initiatives are the first such interventions aimed at fisherfolk safety and welfare in India.

Radio Monsoon, an initiative of an Indian climate researcher at the University of Sussex, Maxmillan Martin, ‘narrowcasts’ the state of the ocean forecasts on loudspeakers in fisherfolk villages, asking for fishers’ feedback, uploading narrowcasts online and using SMS technology for dissemination.

“As our tagline says: it is all about fishers talking weather, wind and waves with forecasters and scientists. It contributes to better reach of forecasts, real-time feedback and in turn reliable forecasts,” Martin told IPS. Information is passed on to fishers via three-minutes bulletins in Malayalam, the local language.

Ultimately all this contributes to enhanced safety and security for fisherfolk.

According to S. Velvizhi, the officer in charge of the information education and communications division at the MSSRF, “The advisories from INCOIS are disseminated through text and voice messages through cell phones with an exclusive ‘app’ [a cellphone application] called ‘Fisher Friend Mobile Application’.

“We also broadcast on FM radio in a few locations, we have a dedicated 24-hour helpline support system for fishers and a GSM-based Public Address system,” she added.

“More than 25,000 fishers in 592 fishing villages in 29 coastal districts in five states (Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Odisha, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh), are receiving the forecast services daily,” Velvizhi claims.

On the tsunami battered coasts of Nagapattinam and Cuddalore in Tamil Nadu, fisherfolk have become traumatised by anxiety, a depleting fish catch, changes in coastal geography and bathymetry, increase in loan interests, threats to their food and livelihood security and loss of fishing gear and craft.

In this context, MSSRF’s community radio initiative using affordable communication technologies for livelihood security has become a game changer.

The information dissemination services undertaken by MSSRF include – apart from ocean state forecasts –“counsel to fisher women, crop and craft-related content, micro finance, health tips, awareness against alcoholism [and] the need for formal education for fishers’ children all disseminated through text and voice messages” according to S. Velvezhi.

Summing up the cumulative effect of the initiatives, 55-year-old Pichakanna in MGR Thittu, who survived the tsunami in Tamil Nadu’s Pichavaram mangroves on Dec. 26, 2004, told IPS, “Thanks to MSSRF interventions on community radio we have learnt new livelihood skills like fishing whereas before the tsunami we were hunter-gatherers or daily-wage agricultural labourers.

“Our children are now getting formal education, we have awareness about better health and hygiene and alcoholism has decreased noticeably; this has helped [eliminate] unwarranted expenditure on alcohol and improved our health, livelihood and food security for all,” he added.

“We also understand the significance of micro-finance, water, sanitation, health and hygiene, and most importantly, alcoholism is declining.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Excerpt:

A rare sight of a traditional hut of the Nicobarese in the post-tsunami era. Seen here is a Nicobari family that has retained its traditionally designed hut alongside a “permanent shelter” made of concrete that was given by the government as compensation for loss of household in the Asian Tsunami. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
PORT BLAIR, Andaman Islands, India, May 12 2014 (IPS)

May and November bring the most vicious cyclones to the Bay of Bengal rim countries in Southeast Asia.

Local governments must scramble disaster mitigation measures, including food storage, cleaning cyclone shelters, stocking up water supply, sanitising infrastructure, and evacuating people to safety in all the regions bordering the bay.“Going by economists’ definition of supply and demand forces of the market, the Jarawas live in opulence." -- Prof. Anvita Abbi

The cyclones are the harbinger of the monsoons that play out in various densities for months on end across the subcontinent, often putting lives and livestock at peril.

Risking rejection of culture-insensitive food distribution to the evacuees, the governments generally resort to survival rations that stress shelf lives and transportation logistics, often ignoring the native wisdom in nutrition balance and distribution that complements local agro-meteorological and hydro-geological conditions.

For example, in times of cyclones or unseaworthy weather, “the Great Andamanese resort to hunting and gathering,” said Anvita Abbi, a professor at the Centre for Linguistics, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University,who has deciphered the language of the Great Andamanese in the Andaman Nicobar Islands.

“When a particular bird sings a song, they know it is time to go turtle hunting on the beach instead of fishing in the sea,” Prof. Abbi told IPS.

The tribes defer to geomorphological conditions and respect Nature’s benevolence for disaster resilience. The governments’ panic might seem redundant to the tribes: no wonder they are at odds with the mainstream society and shun contact with a corrupted system that favours a few.  The tribes’ traditional wisdom helps them literally coast to safety.

“The Nicobarese and Jarawas switch to harpoon fishing in shallow waters during inclement weather. They have boats for deep sea fishing and dugout/outrigger canoes and catamarans for coastal fishing,” said A. Justin Superintending, an anthropologist at the Port Blair Regional Centre of Anthropological Survey of India.

The outrigger canoes and dugout boats are eco-friendly to coral reefs in shallows seas. “The people of Chowra are best known for making fishing boats. In return they barter other goods and services that money cannot buy in the tribal district of Nicobar Islands,” Justin told IPS.

“The Great Andamanese shift their fishing activities to streams and rivers inland when the sea is rough,” added Prof. Abbi.

In Orissa, the tribes and people of the state use five different varieties of rice to complement the seasonal changes in the disaster-prone state.

Alternate cropping with complementary crops that can act as natural pesticide is another tradition of the Soligas in B. R. T. Hills in Karnataka in India. The Soligas also know the art of refrigerating food in bamboo stems.

The tribes of Ladakh refrigerate yoghurt in yak hide bags to make butter tea. “To cope with extreme weather in Ladakh’s cold desert, they consume fatty foods and drink lots of butter tea,” Chewang Norphel, a social worker in Leh, told IPS.

“The tribal houses are made of sun-dried mud brick with mud plaster and low roof. Small sized door and windows facing the north side are other features of ecofriendly architecture.”

According to Dr. Avula Laxman, senior deputy director in the Division of Community Studies of National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau – National Institute of Nutrition, “Yes, tribals do adopt coping strategies, especially during natural calamities like droughts/floods.

“They adopt different measures such as consumption of low cost foods, reduce food consumption, borrow food or cash depending on their socio economic status, seek assistance from Government or Administration, use stocked grains, or food stocks or rely on savings, may migrate for employment or sell assets to buy food” according to a survey conducted by the National Institute of Nutrition in Hyderabad, Laxman told IPS.

The practise of communal cooking and communal eating is based on sharing resources, and individualism is anathema to tribal society.

Another best practice that they have “transferred as a low cost technology” to modernised humanity is breast milk banks.

Traditional wisdom has it that if a mother dies at childbirth and the child survives, any other lactating mother in the community or even in a hospital assumes the responsibility of breast feeding.

Even when a natural mother lacks enough breast milk, other nursing mothers take over to provide the infant essential nutrition and resilience. In Jarawa society, in fact, every lactating mother breast feeds every newborn infant to foster a bonding in the newer generations, according to the book “Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the 20^th Century” by Kiran Dhingra.

“Their kinship terms have evolved. It is not surprising that lactating women who stay back in Strait Island get to babysit the kids of those away in employment in Port Blair. It is therefore not surprising that they breast feed another infant,” said Abbi.

This tradition permeates a cross-section of Indian society, transcending barriers of caste and creed. This is the root of the concept that there are no orphans in tribal societies even if they have “precise linguistic expressions for bereavement of siblings and in laws,” according to Prof. Abbi.

Laxman said that, “Tribals are trying to adopt urban and rural cultures, because of encroachment/migration of rural populations into tribal areas. The tribals’ unique culture is totally changed.

“Because of the Public Distribution System programmes, the tribals are compelled to eat rice continuously, because rice is chiefly/easily available at fair price shops. They are changing their healthy lifestyles to modern unhealthy lifestyles. This was observed especially in Kerala tribal population, leading to high stress, insecurity in their lives, leading to high hypertension and high diabetes even among tribal populations.”

Call them fair weather friends but the hill tribes like “Gaddi and Lahauli tribes of Lahaul and Spiti in Himachal Pradesh India adapt to the geomorphological conditions in the avalanche-prone area to shift their livestock to greener pastures in the plains during summers and stock up food grains and dry rations for the long winters,” said forest officer Hira Lal Rana in Lahaul, Himachal Pradesh.

Prof. Abbi sums up the import of traditional wisdom for disaster resilience. “Going by economists’ definition of supply and demand forces of the market, the Jarawas live in opulence because their demand and supply of their needs is favourably tilted towards the Jarawas.

“The forests supply more than enough of what they need so they live in opulence.  Economists say reaching an equilibrium point of demand and supply curve is the hallmark of development. This is met by the forests. They don’t need and they don’t want our system which creates subservience.”

A sinkhole is widening in Car Nicobar, but the authorities are clueless about its potential dangers. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS.

By Malini Shankar
CAR NICOBAR, India, May 2 2014 (IPS)

While the United States Geological Survey (USGS) is sparing no effort to fill a rapidly widening sinkhole in Florida since Apr. 23, India’s Geological Survey has closed its field station in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands where sinkholes have sprung up all over as an aftermath of the 2004 Asian tsunami.

The administration in this popular tourist destination in the Bay of Bengal may be prepared for another tsunami. But it seems clueless about these holes in the ground that can sometimes cave in or lead to other geological events like hot springs, water spouts, natural gas emissions or even cracks in the subterranean magma chambers.They have accounted for the disappearance of human beings, livestock, rivers, buildings and vehicles.

Islanders told IPS that sinkholes have appeared all over Nicobar. Whether that is also the case with the Andamans remains a matter of speculation as there is no official documentation of it, nor did the administration facilitate this writer’s photo assignment to visit the geologically volatile islands.

IPS discovered and photographed sinkholes in three Nicobar Islands – Car Nicobar, Kamorta and Campbell Bay.

“Car Nicobar is full of sinkholes after the tsunami. Even though I grew up here, our parents are now petrified of us swimming near the beach,” says Dr. Christina Rossetti, a local of Car Nicobar who works at a government-run hospital here.

Indian Air Force officers at Car Nicobar documented a water spout in April 2013 which shot up from a sinkhole to 1,000 metres in the sky over the Bay of Bengal.

Tsunami survivors in Car Nicobar also told IPS about water spouts that injured their eyes during the disaster.

Sinkholes can be either the cause or the consequence of quicksand, hot springs, geysers, natural gas emissions or water spouts. Initially the surface starts collapsing.

“Usually the depression goes on increasing in depth and it transits from depression to saucer to cup,” Dr. Arun Bapat, formerly head of earthquake engineering research at the Central Water and Power Research Station in the western Indian city of Pune, told IPS.

“Sinkholes are usually formed in calcareous formation. The reduction or dissolution of calcium due to drainage or erosion or natural flow of water can cause sinkholes. Earthquakes are not the main cause of sinkholes. But it is possible that in calcareous rock, when a landslide has occurred during or immediately after earthquake, landslides could lead to sinkholes,” says Bapat.

Sinkholes look deceptively benign, but anything from quicksand to natural gas could be hidden beneath, deceiving people and livestock who may innocently trample the surface and be swallowed into geysers or cavernous black holes in the ground.

Sinkholes, which range from a few centimetres to 600 metres in diameter, can appear in the aftermath of big seismic events.

Referring to Thailand, the 2005 United Nations Environment Programme report ‘Rapid Assessment after Asian Tsunami’ says: “Between the earthquake of 26 December 2004 and 24 January 2005, 25 sinkholes have been reported, an unprecedented frequency; 17 of them were reported in the six tsunami-affected provinces.”

But no such assessment has been done for India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

IPS approached several authorities, including the National Geophysical Research Institute, the National Institute of Ocean Technology, the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services, the Geological Society of India, but drew a blank.

The secretary of the Disaster Management Authority for Andaman and Nicobar Islands (DMA) was on leave and the director of DMA did not answer calls.

Sakshi Mittal, deputy commissioner of Nicobar, said, “This has not been brought to my notice yet.” Lt. Gen. A.K. Singh, Lieutenant-Governor of Andaman and Nicobar, the highest ranking official of the island territory, told IPS, “We have no idea about sinkholes, please complete your research and inform us.”

This administration seems unaware of potential dangers even though the area is home to 350,000 people, 20,000 of whom are highly endangered indigenous people. Its picturesque locales drew 250,445 tourists in 2013.

Ambikaprasad Mallik, a scuba diving instructor in Havelock Island, told IPS, “If a series of sinkholes on the beach collapses at one go, the difference of levels in the water and land masses can create waves and even cause a small local tsunami.”

Sinkholes occur in many parts of India and the world. They have accounted for the disappearance of human beings, livestock, rivers, buildings and vehicles.

“Sinkholes represent a hazard to property and human safety in a wide variety of geologic settings across the globe,” says the USGS on one of its websites.

Florida in the U.S. is particularly prone to sinkholes, with one last year swallowing a 37-year-old man in his sleep. Another engulfed a forest in Louisiana.

Geologists fight shy of forecasting the precise cause and consequence of sinkholes.

Prof. Kusala Rajendran of the Centre for Earth Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore told IPS, “It is unlikely to lead to anything life threatening, but there may be signatures of deformation such as fissures. This might depend on the region. During seismic activity, land can go down soon after the earthquake. Sinkholes form much later. They develop gradually and are well expressed.”

Bapat says, “The sinkholes recently formed in Andaman and Nicobar are probably due to the tsunami. Sometimes, due to geological formation and geometry in the coastal area, stationary waves are formed and this keeps the water vibrating in vertical direction.”

USGS notes: “Sinkholes are dramatic because the land usually stays intact for a period of time until the underground spaces just get too big. In most cases, the subsidence rate of a sinkhole represents the most significant potential impact and risk to public safety.”

Sinkholes on volcanic slopes like Krakatau in the Java Straits have triggered minor earthquakes. Barren Island, South Asia’s only active volcano located in the Andamans, has been spewing lava since January 2010.

With no public transport available to Barren Island, this writer’s request to the island administration to facilitate a photo shoot there and in other parts of Andaman district where mud volcanoes are expanding was not accepted.

A young man from the Paudi Guhiya tribe salvages crops from the agricultural fields in Lahunipada in northern Orissa that were battered by floods in October following Cyclone Phailin. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS.

By Malini Shankar
BHUBANESWAR, India, Nov 30 2013 (IPS)

More than a month after Cyclone Phailin battered Orissa, tribes in the eastern Indian coastal state are still feeling its wrath. Besides the damage to their homes and hearths, it has also meant a loss of their traditional food.

“Calamities like Cyclone Phailin affect all equally, but the tribes are far more vulnerable to the impact of calamities because of lesser resilience,” Special Relief Commissioner P.K. Mahapatra tells IPS.

This is particularly true of a state like Orissa where natural disasters play out repeatedly and where 24 percent of its 42 million population are tribespersons who live off the land.

“Powerful cyclones have battered Orissa like heat-seeking missiles in 70 of the last 110 years,” Mahapatra says. The native diversity of food consumption has critical significance in terms of culture-sensitive food security during calamities.

“The tribes need at least one season to rebuild,” he says.

Phailin that made landfall Oct. 12 was the most powerful storm to hit India in a decade. Administrative preparedness helped keep the toll at a low 21, according to official data.

But as the state picks up the pieces, many are emphasising the importance of locally procured food during emergencies and pointing out how new consumption patterns introduced during natural disasters can adversely affect tribes.

Take, for instance, Gajapati district where 70 percent of the population is tribal and which was severely affected by Cyclone Phailin.

“Ten percent of the district’s population, including tribes, were evacuated to cyclone shelters and given emergency food aid like everyone else. They have suffered crop loss and damage to thatch roof dwellings,” B.K. Hota, emergency operations officer tells IPS.

A tribal woman in Sundargarh district, which was affected by flooding after the cyclone, says women are concerned that crop loss would affect children’s nutrition.

Bijay Kumar Sahoo, inspector of supplies, told IPS, “Accessing the remote tribal hamlets in the dense jungles is very difficult, so distributing food and civil supplies during calamities is very challenging.”

It is largely for this reason that India’s Central Rice Research Institute in Cuttack town in Orissa has developed varieties of rice that can withstand Orissa’s extreme weather: varieties that can grow in irrigated areas, saline water, drought prone areas, shallow lowlands and water logged areas.

But then the native diversity of food consumption has critical significance in terms of culture-sensitive food security during calamities. In fact, native food diversity dispenses with infrastructure support for food aid distribution.

In the first few days after disasters, the administration provides “flavoured, uncooked beaten rice, high protein biscuits, water and oral rehydration kits” which are easy to pack and distribute.

But the logistics of transporting cargo can be offset by harvesting locally produced yams or sprout/millet porridge, leaving water and sanitation to the administration.

According to the State Emergency Operations Centre of Orissa, in the second phase when relief starts, the administration hands out rice, lentils and monetary subsidies to those affected.

And this is where culture-sensitive food security is critical for communities like tribes.

Doling out partial or pre-cooked food to homeless tribes may be a necessity to avoid starvation, but sustaining them with entirely new consumption patterns can have a long-term impact on their health and constitution.

“Traditionally, tribes walk such long distances to fetch their meagre forest-based foodstuff like tubers or fish catch that they will never get sedentary disorders like diabetes,” Jupiter Das, a Red Cross official in Puri district tells IPS.

Native wisdom defers to seasonal sources of supplementary nutrition, alternate cropping and sustainable development of the economy and society. If a sustainable means of harvesting such native food diversity could be evolved, food aid distribution becomes a lot less complicated, aver experts.

“Tribals’ food includes coarse grains, fish, millets, lentils, mushrooms and tubers. Rice and millet consumption among tribes is a consequence of forest conservation laws that deprive tribes access to forest produce,” says Tushar Dash of Vasundhara, an NGO that works on community forest rights and land tenure in Orissa.

In a study titled ‘Genetic resources of wild tuberous food plants traditionally used in Simlipal Biosphere Reserve, Odissa, India’ conducted between 2008 and 2012, researchers have documented tribes’ traditional food security.

“A total of 55 wild edible tuberous species representing 37 genera and 24 families were inventoried, including 17 species used during food deficiency to meet seasonal shortages,” it says.

“Ten species were domesticated by tribes, thus reducing threats on wild tubers, and 20 species were traded in local markets to generate additional income exemplifying economic benefits from wild tubers.”

“We don’t have information on climate neutral crops. However, some reports reveal that some of the tribes may consume mango kernels during drought and scarcity conditions,” Dr. Avula Laxman of the National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau at the National Institute of Nutrition, Hyderabad, tells IPS on e-mail.

Native wisdom has practical advantages during calamities.

Sambit Rout, a district administration official in Puri district, still remembers what a fisherman near Chilka Lake told him on the night that Cyclone Phailin made landfall: “There is no more cause for worry because the wind has changed direction.”

Rout told IPS: “I was floored by his native wisdom.” He also alludes to an almanac anointed day when tribes in north India stock food grains and fuel wood for imminent calamities.

The World Food Programme of the United Nations also stresses the advantages of local procurement of food resources. Perhaps it’s time India turned to native knowledge to mitigate food insecurity during calamities.

“No casualties have been reported till now,” India’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) declared at 9:30 am the morning after the near Super Cyclone ‘Phailin’ made landfall in India’s east.

The response “has been a success because of coordination between NDMA and the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) and then different government agencies, ministries and down to the district level administration who were involved in coordination,” NDMA vice-chairman Shashidhar Reddy told IPS.

“What contributed to minimising loss of life is evacuation of people from the vulnerable areas, and the accurate forecast helped in preparation and evacuation unlike during the Uttarakhand flash flood crisis in June 2013.”

The Indian Meteorological Department had forecast a “very severe cyclonic storm” on Monday Oct. 7, and highlighted the path of the cyclone. The coast of Orissa straddles the path of almost all cyclones that spin into life taking birth in the currents of the channel separating the Andaman from the Nicobar Group of Islands in the Bay of Bengal.

The NDMA and the Orissa state administration did not want to take chances with waves forecast to be six to eight metres high. The Super Cyclone in October 1999 had pulverised Orissa, leaving 15,000 dead. About 2.5 million head of livestock perished, and 90 million trees were destroyed. It seemed there was nothing people could do to reduce the impact of the cyclone.

“Translation of technical knowledge and insights gained into societal, environmental or economic benefits is crucial,” Dr. Shailesh Nayak, secretary to the Ministry of Earth Sciences – one of the nodal ministries in disaster mitigation – told IPS.

Binapani Mishra of SWAD, an NGO working in the field of food security in disaster relief in Puri district in Orissa, told IPS that there had however been an impact.

“I have visited three villages of Konark block in Puri district. The rooftops of two houses have been blow off by gale winds, one person died in wall collapse. There was no power supply anywhere in Orissa after the cyclone made landfall, I could not even charge my cellphone.”

People evacuated to cyclone shelters received adequate food and have started returning to their homes, Mishra said. “There is not much loss of livestock but the environmental damage is significant.”

“Extreme weather systems have caused extensive losses of lives and destruction of property in the Bay of Bengal region even when proper instrumentation and monitoring were available,” George P Carayannis, president of the Tsunami Society International in Honolulu in Hawaii, told IPS in an email interview.

“The paths and landfalls of severe weather systems are often difficult to forecast adequately and to provide timely warnings to the population in low-lying coastal areas of India, Bangladesh and Myanmar.”

NDMA had about four days to prepare after the cyclone warning was issued. The NDMA undertook mass evacuation of 367,234 fisherfolk dwelling in low-lying coastal areas of Orissa and 96,770 people in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh state. They were taken to more than 200 cyclone shelters and 56 relief centres dotting the coastal landscape in Orissa and Andhra Pradesh.

Police forces were deployed to monitor evacuation and to patrol the beaches. Cyclone shelters were stocked with blankets, food stocks and medical supplies; medical teams with para-medical staff were despatched to cyclone shelters.

NDMA broadcast warnings to fisherfolk regularly on radio and television through the week, dam discharge was monitored and ‘managed’ to accommodate heavy rainfall, power supply was ‘managed’ with intentional outages to prevent short circuit during the cyclone’s landfall, equipment like tree cutters were supplied to districts administrations; press releases were issued hourly.

Rescue teams and battalions of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) were deployed in vulnerable places. The ministry of defence deployed teams of naval divers, and the armed forces were put on standby. Ships docked at Paradip port were sent out to deep sea so they could be more stable beyond the rim of the cyclonic system.

Helplines, communication hubs and control rooms were opened in Vishakhapatnam and Srikakulam in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh and in the most vulnerable districts of Orissa three days before landfall.

“The problem with forecasting hydrometeorological hazards and mitigating their impact is not only the lack of proper instrumentation,” said Carayannis. “Warning or forecasting require much more than instruments.”

Orissa state in India is the capital of extreme weather events. “Forty-nine of the last 100 years saw floods, 30 years were drought-ridden, and 11 years faced cyclones,” Prafulla Ratha of Concern Worldwide told IPS.

Children at a care home in Orissa in India. Children worldwide are particularly vulnerable in disasters. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS.

By Malini Shankar
DEHRADUN, India , Oct 2 2013 (IPS)

In Uttarakhand, the small Indian state in the Himalayan foothills that was a victim of flash floods that killed at least a thousand people in June this year and uprooted thousands of families, the story is told of a child who went every day to the helipad, believing his father will return when, in fact, the father died in the floods.

There are many such stories, Ray Kancharla of Save the Children told IPS.

Children are the most vulnerable when natural calamities strike. Children, women, the frail and infirm, and the elderly need special care and attention in disaster zones. Often they are unable to cope with the aftermath of a disaster, even if they have survived it, and might not be able to access search and rescue personnel, food aid, or relief material.

Separation is a trauma peculiar to children. Search and rescue workers, because of the emergency nature of their work, tend to be hurried. Often they do not have the time to check how many members of a family or group are still missing. Only visible survivors are picked up and evacuated to scattered shelters. Reunification becomes the task of disaster managers and relief agencies.

In January 2010, an earthquake struck Papua New Guinea, the small island state in the Pacific Ocean, and all the fatalities reported were helpless children because training in ‘disaster risk reduction’ had equipped adults with the knowledge that when the sea withdraws it heralds a deadly tsunami.

“No adult died because adults knew that when the sea withdraws [from the shore], it portends the arrival of a tsunami, and all the adults fled to higher ground,” said Aloysius Laukai of the New Dawn FM radio station. “The unfortunate casualties were all children,” Laukai told IPS.

“Mapping of the frail, infirm and elderly is very important in any disaster-prone area,” Aapga Singh of HelpAge India, an NGO dedicated to the elderly, told IPS after the Uttarakhand flood disaster. “It would not only be helpful to rescue these people in an efficient manner during emergencies, but also in relief disbursal; vulnerable people are either left behind or get in last.”

There are instances of children being separated from their parents and families during every recent natural calamity. The December 2004 Asian tsunami saw a seven-year -old girl separated from her family for nearly eight years before she was reunited with them in Sumatra in Indonesia only in 2012.

Even if public memory is short, trauma to the survivors can last a lifetime. Lessons learnt have to be documented in public domains to avoid recurrence of disasters in calamity-affected landscapes, say activists.

Separations have been rampant after the Asian tsunami, the Kosi floods in Bihar in India (2008), Cyclone Aila in Bangladesh and India (2009), a super cyclone in Orissa, India (1999), floods in Assam in India (2012), and the Uttarakhand floods (2013).

Trauma in children manifests itself in ways such as “thumb sucking, bedwetting, clinging to parents, sleep disturbances, loss of appetite, fear of the dark, regression in behaviour, and withdrawal from friends and routines,” Murali Kunduru of Plan India, an NGO, told IPS.

With loss of appetite manifesting in children suffering from separation-induced trauma, the significance of culture-sensitive food security assumes critical importance.

Apart from the primary trauma of separation, and battle for survival against the power of calamities, women and children are particularly vulnerable to lack of water and sanitation.

”Without adequate nutritious food, both children and adults lose immunity and become predisposed to water-borne infections and sicknesses like “diarrhoea, cholera, typhoid, respiratory infections, skin and eye infections which are all likely to occur when water supply and sanitation services are disrupted during disasters,” adds Kunduru.

When nursing mothers are rendered homeless because of disasters, they need to be housed in shelters which have gender sensitivity and adequate privacy. Similarly shelters need to conform to the needs of physically challenged persons – ramps for wheelchair-bound refugees have to be factored in during their construction.

In the Uttarakhand floods, the tourist economy was hit so hard that people dependent on tourism for their livelihood migrated to larger cities and towns in the plains to seek employment.

“Children’s education is affected by disasters when adults migrate in search of livelihoods, often leaving adolescent boys in charge of families; young children, especially boys, drop out of school to earn a livelihood, disrupting their education resulting in lifelong impact,” says Shekhar Ambati of Aide et Action.

With women moving out of kitchens to supplement family incomes being earned by their young wards, children’s nutrition suffers.

“As part of our working paper on development-induced displacement we found that around 25 percent of children had to drop out of school. This is one of the risks to the population due to displacement,” writes Dr. K Hemalatha, a community worker, in a working paper on development-induced displacement, co-authored by Fr. Arun Anthony and Pitambari Joshalkar and published by Christ University, Bangalore. The study was funded by the International Federation of Catholic Universities.

Often the lack of inclusivity rebounds on the vulnerable during disasters. Planning can go a long way in efficient disaster mitigation. Database management of population, knowledge of consumption patterns, standards of living and human development index have to go into planning to mitigate the effect of disasters, particularly on children and the vulnerable in calamity-prone areas, say activists.

Melting glaciers are wreaking havoc in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
UTTARKASHI, India, Jul 27 2013 (IPS)

Over a month after flash floods in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in north India left 1,000 dead and 6,000 missing, the government has yet to release a full agricultural impact assessment, sparking fears about the extent of damage to the region’s farmland.

Questions remain as to how soon soil restoration efforts will fructify and when the farm economy, which accounted for just under 11 percent of the state’s 160-billion-dollar gross domestic product (GDP) in 2012-2013 will be restored to functionality.

Heavy flooding on Jun. 15-16, the result of torrential rains and glacial leaks in the Himalayas, wreaked havoc on Uttarakhand, as the headstreams of the holy River Ganga swelled and swept away roads, homes, scores of pilgrims, cattle and buildings.

With the government focusing its efforts almost entirely on an emergency rescue and relief operation coordinated by the armed forces (with over 42,000 rescues under its belt to date), the plight of farmers has been largely ignored.

Experts from the region say the summer crops have been washed out and the farms are in no shape to yield a winter harvest this year; the sowing season for rice, which coincides with the height of the monsoon (June to September) has been delayed as a result of heavy inundation of paddy fields caused by downpours and landslides.

Though agricultural fields are routinely inundated with the clay that runs down surrounding mountains during summer glacial melts and the annual monsoon, this latest calamity has created a disaster zone in what is frequently referred to as the “land of the gods”.

“It is possible that the top soil may have been altered for a considerably longer duration of time than expected,” Ram Kishan, regional emergency manager of South Asia for the UK-based NGO Christian Aid, told IPS.

This Himalayan state, irrigated naturally by perennial glacier-fed rivers, boasts a high degree of agricultural diversity. Rajma, or red kidney beans, and potatoes comprise the staple diet of the majority of Uttarakhand’s native population of 10 million people, according to the 2011 census.

Crops like rice, wheat, barley, millets, lentils, pulses, potatoes, fruits, vegetables, flowers, spices, herbs and mushrooms have been drowned by the floods, while debris from landslides has also compromised the grazing pastures of the state’s roughly 11.9 million heads of livestock, including cows, bullocks, buffaloes, sheep, goats, horses, pigs, hens, chickens and other birds like geese.

“Initial estimates suggest that 25 to 30 percent of cultivation has been affected,” said Kishan; this represents a huge chunk of the state’s average annual production of 8.2 million tonnes.

NGOs like Christian Aid fear that the resulting price rise in all essential commodities, like vegetables, fruits, milk, dairy products, cereals, lentils and pulses, in the near term will adversely affect the average farming family.

Over 65 percent of Uttarakhand’s residents, most of them subsistence farmers with small landholdings of less than a single hectare per family, are dependent on agriculture, according to Aide et Action.

Farmers and tourism

Farmers dependent on seasonal tourism to supplement their incomes during the monsoon months are particularly affected.

Uttarakhand is a popular destination for foreign tourists and local pilgrims alike: “Forty-seven million domestic tourists and (half a) million foreign tourists were expected in the current fiscal year”, according to Shekhar Ambati at Aide et Action. But the flash floods, he said, eroded this economic base.

The tourism industry is one of the largest employers in the region, hiring locals as porters, guides, drivers, naturalists and translators. Others rent out their mules, offering tourists rides on rocky terrain in order to earn their daily bread.

The tourist economy also supports local artisans and makers of traditional handicrafts, opens up jobs as caterers and cooks through the hospitality sector and enables families to establish small businesses like tea stalls, souvenir shops or grocery stores.

Ambati fears that the destruction of the “lifeline of religious tourism” will snowball, affecting the number of tourists arriving in the region and further endangering farmers’ incomes.

Quoting small business owners and vegetable sellers at the main market in the town of Rudraprayag, Eila Jafar of Care India told IPS that farmers are already starting to feel the crunch of scant agricultural yields.

“The number of daily wage labourers coming to the main market has reduced to a great extent,” Jafar told IPS.

Road conditions have deteriorated significantly since the floods: some roads were washed away altogether and others have been made impassable by debris, which is having an extremely “negative impact on the market and economy,” Jafar added.

Farmers who relied on the tourist infrastructure to sell their produce are among the worst affected.

“The state’s chamber of commerce and industry estimates that Uttarakhand has lost revenue earnings of over 20 billion dollars from its tourism sector alone in the current fiscal year on account of torrential rains that devastated the state,” says Ambati.

With tourism unlikely to recover for two to three years at least, the situation calls for “intervention” from the government to ensure that farmers have food and livelihood security in the short term.

(END)

The Indian Armed Forces had run a massive rescue operation in the flood-hit state of Uttarakhand. Credit: Courtesy Ministry of Defence, Government of India

By Malini Shankar
DEHRADUN, India, Jul 2 2013 (IPS)

Over 580 bodies have so far been found. Hundreds more will likely never turn up. Survivors say they are suspended in a kind of nightmare, either haunted by memories of their brush with death or desperate for news of loved ones. At least 3,000 are reported to be missing.

A fortnight after massive floods trapped thousands of tourists and pilgrims in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, frantic search and rescue operations are still under way.

Known as the Land of the Gods, this Himalayan state was tranformed from an idyllic prayer site into hell on earth when, on Jun. 15-17, torrential rains and flash floods caused by a cloudburst swelled the two headstreams of the holy river Ganga, which carried off thousands of people along with roads, homes, shops and large chunks of the mountains.

At the time of writing, only the pilgrimage town of Badrinath has been completely evacuated.

“The death toll is expected to increase after search and rescue operations cease and recovery commences,” he said, adding that the list of missing will be confirmed by Jul. 15.

Headlines and searchlights have largely focused on immediate events, bypassing the long-term, structural implications this tragedy will have on disaster management in India.

Already, the rescue operation is straining from a lack of coordinated action: families fear that their missing loved ones, living on nothing more than prayers, will not last much longer, while experts warn that swift and sanitary disposal of the dead is vital to prevent the spread of diseases; some scientists even fear that an outbreak of plague in the Himalayas is not far off.

When a rescue helicopter crashed in a valley thick with wildlife on Jun. 24, killing all 20 personnel on board, it provoked legitimate fears that the NDMA was floundering.

Confidence plummeted still further when a 3.5-magnitude earthquake struck Uttarakhand on Jun. 27, sparking panic that it would trigger landslides.

Requiring precision, highly trained personnel and a tight organisational command structure, search and rescue efforts have largely been entrusted to the armed forces.

Over the course of ten days the Indian Air Force flew approximately 2,000 sorties, averaging about one every five minutes, with help from the Indian Army, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and the state police and civil administration.

An additional 600 sorties have so far carried 24 tonnes of food into the affected areas for survivors and the displaced.

Troops have helped erect temporary steel bridges at crucial access points, as many bridges and long stretches of road were washed away in the rapid waters.

Paramilitary forces like the ITBP and the NDRF are rescuing frail and infirm people trapped in tough terrain while drones scan caves and scour remote terrain to evacuate those stranded on riverbeds or clinging precariously to fragile, wet embankments.

Grateful to be alive, Shobha Karandalaje a politician from the South Indian state of Karnataka, told IPS, “It was a scary experience. We were on our way to Kedarnath (a popular pilgrimage town in Uttarakhand) when suddenly the downpour worsened; rivers were in full spate, land sliding all around us,” she recounted.

“We were stuck in our jeep for a full five days in Rudraprayag (a bustling town on the forest’s edge at the point of confluence of the Alakananda and Mandakini rivers), surviving on snacks, sipping water. We trekked back 35 kilometres to Yamunotri, where road construction workers helped us reach Dehradun (Uttarakhand’s capital) safely.”

Deforestation on the steep Himalayan slopes has increased the likelihood of landslides in Uttarakhand. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

Successful rescues notwithstanding, disappointment hangs thick in the air, with scientists lamenting that the tragedy could easily have been minimised if developers had heeded warnings about the fragility of the surrounding ecosystem and if the state government had paid greater attention to weather forecasts.

India’s NDMA, set up in 2005 after the calamitous Asian Tsunami of 2004, is tasked with taking measures to reduce the risk to human lives and livelihoods before calamities strike, embodying the “paradigm shift from the erstwhile relief-centric and post-event syndrome to pro-active prevention…” according to the official guidelines.

Determined to avoid a tragedy on the scale of the Boxing Day tsunami, the government invested huge amounts in forecasting services that could deliver accurate reports to the NDMA, which is expected to take all necessary measures to minimise loss of human life.

Accordingly, the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) issued a forecast of heavy rains in Uttarakhand starting Jun. 15, which failed to elicit a timely response from the state.

Addressing a press conference on Jun. 17, State Chief Minister Vijay Bahuguna justified his government’s inaction by claiming that the “generic forecast (delivered ahead of the floods) was not actionable…(and) evacuating residents and pilgrims in the peak pilgrim season was impractical.”

He skirted allegations that unsustainable tourism development on the steep hill slopes coupled with forest denudation for the construction of numeours dams across rivers in landslide prone areas were largely to blame for the catastrophe.

Nor did he respond to activists’ long-standing grievances over mismanagement in disaster preparedness at the state government level.

Despite the Government of India approving a budget for a Doppler Weather Radar system capable of predicting a cloudburst, the state government has not granted the necessary land to house the forecasting equipment, effectively prioritising tourism development over disaster management.

Money for the acquisition of 200 satellite phones for the NDRF is also mired in bureaucratic delays, officials admit.

Being plugged in to a vast network of state and district-level offices, the NDMA should have monitored dam discharge, identified arterial routes for evacuation, stocked up on emergency supplies, created communication hubs and kept ambulances on standby in preparation for responding rapidly to forecasts.

Instead, the agency was caught off guard with barely minutes to prepare for the crisis.

The Central Water Commission, authorised to issue flood forecasts in India, failed to raise the alarm even on the night of Jun. 17 when the Mandakini River was already in full spate.

The CWC’s director of the flood forecast monitoring directorate, V.D. Roy, told IPS this was due to the fact that the raging water was technically “below the statutory warning level of 539 metres at (11 p.m.) on Jun. 17.”

But scientists and advocates refute this claim, insisting that the Commission ought to have foreseen the calamity heading for the most vulnerable regions of Uttarakhand like Uttarkashi, Hemkhund Sahib and Kedarnath.

Others accuse the government of failing to utilise India’s massive media apparatus to minimise the tragedy.

“Weather reports are disseminated to all public broadcasters, such as All India Radio and Doordarshan. If there is a specific warning, all broadcasters…should interrupt normal programming to disseminate this warning. This protocol must be developed and put in place,” NDMA Vice Chairman Shashidhar Reddy told IPS.

*Malini Shankar is a photojournalist, radio broadcaster and documentary filmmaker based in Bangalore, India.

A state-of-the-art nuclear medicine hospital for cancer treatment in the heart of Bangalore goes well with the global image of this tech-savvy city.

Staff at HCG hospital in Bangalore don safety gear before entering the Cyclotron. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

The HealthCare Global (HCG) hospital is equipped with facilities to manufacture and trade in nuclear medicine and offers the advantage of easy access for cancer patients.

However, locating such a facility in downtown Bangalore has its risks, particularly as a potential source of radioactivity that could affect residents in the surrounding, densely populated slum, or diners at two nearby restaurants.

Although advances in nuclear medicine and diagnostics – such as mammography, X-rays, cobalt radiation, gamma rays exposure, CT scans, thyroid treatment and radio isotopes – herald an era of advanced medical care, experts say that India’s nuclear medicine industry needs tighter regulation, sharper scrutiny and better planning.

Given that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) itself plainly states that standards for nuclear medicine differ from state to state, it is not at all an easy task to regulate or standardise radiation or leakage in terms of millisieverts per year.

The problem is made worse by the fact that India’s Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), tasked with monitoring nuclear applications throughout the country, is funded by the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) – the very department the AERB is expected to regulate.

Although headed by the Indian Prime Minister, the DAE does not answer to the Indian Parliament.

This compromise in independent regulation has many implications, but Indian scientists and medical professionals are particularly concerned about its impact on the nuclear medical sector.

India’s vast, unplanned cities call for extra caution, since nuclear medicine diagnostic centres are often located in densely populated urban jungles. Often, diagnostic laboratories are located close to residential areas, schools, slums or restaurants.

“Advanced diagnostic laboratories and multi-speciality hospitals that use nuclear applications like radioisotopes in nuclear medicine, X-rays, mammography, etcetera, are all sources of radioactivity,” says Dr. Udaya Kumar Maiya, oncologist at the Bangalore Hospital.

“Adequate safety and security protocols with rigid usage norms are essential for prevention of harm to the general public, patients and the environment,” he told IPS. If the sector is “callously managed” the results could be “catastrophic”, he cautioned: a single radioisotope has the capacity to harm millions of people through contamination or radiation exposure.

As Dr. Guru Shankar, medical superintendent at the Victoria Hospital, the premier government medical college hospital in Bangalore, pointed out, “Even if one technician forgets to give protection to the reproductive organs of patients who are subjected to multiple exposures (for treatment) it can lead to destruction of reproductive organs like ovaries or testes.”

Though Shankar — who also serves on the district disaster management committee of the National Disaster Response Force — has not come across anyone who has crossed the “threshold of high radioactivity in the 34 years that I have served in government hospitals”, he is aware and concerned about possible dangers.

Nuclear medicine and radioactive sources have potentially hazardous effects if they inadvertently escape into the surrounding area, particularly in urban settings. Over-exposure to mammography – particularly for technicians – can also lead to a higher susceptibility to cancer.

“The (spurt) of unplanned growth in urban areas like Bangalore is a recipe for disaster. This is where the role of the AERB is crucial,” Maiya added.

The ability to isolate facilities that manufacture or utilise nuclear medicine is challenged by the rapid growth of India’s metropolises. Urban planners have failed to make provisions for arterial roads for emergency disposal of nuclear medicine or evacuation and assembly points in case of accidents. City planners have also neglected to designate disposal centres for nuclear medicine waste.

However, director of the Pet CT Cyclotron at the HCG hospital in Bangalore, Dr. Kumar Kallur, assured IPS in an exclusive interview that nuclear medicines are perfectly safe and well regulated.

“The radiation is contained within the cyclotron vault and it never escapes. Moreover isotopes produced have a very short life span – anywhere between two minutes to two hours, necessitating easy access in a place like (downtown) Bangalore.

“Cyclotrons (used in the manufacture of nuclear medicines for cancer treatments) cannot be installed without AERB approval, which monitors every single aspect of the cyclotron operations during peak performance.”

He added that cyclotron licences are only issued upon strict inspections of location, disposal mechanisms, manufacturing facilities  and trained staff, and that the hospital itself is expected to produce quarterly safety analysis reports for submission to the Board. “The AERB makes surprise inspections. At the slightest hint of radiation leakage the operations will completely stop,” Kallur stressed.

“Patients who have undergone nuclear medicine therapy are admitted to AERB-approved isolation wards. Even the human waste generated by such patients is subjected to delay and decay in tanks that are tested periodically before the sewage is discharged into the public sewage system,” Kallur assured IPS.

But others are not convinced and some experts have gone so far as to label the regulatory process a “farce”.

In his recently published book “The Power of Promise” physicist M.V. Ramana charged, “The AERB’s effectiveness is constrained by the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) choice of institutional structure. Rather than make the AERB independent of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), the AEC made the AERB report to itself.”

He also lamented the fact that the secretary of the DAE is the ex officio chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, which effectively allows the DAE to exercise administrative power over the AERB.

“Until recently, the chairman of the Nuclear Power Corporation was also a member of the AEC,” he wrote.

“The AERB’s budget comes from the DAE. All these factors place structural limits on the AERB’s effectiveness,” Ramana told IPS.

He went on to add, “The AERB does not carry out any monitoring of essential performance metrics such as radiological exposure of workers at DAE facilities or measurement of levels of radio nuclides in the vicinity of nuclear facilities.” Instead, these tasks are “entrusted to the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited and the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Bombay”.

Scientists here feel the government should undertake disaster prevention measures such as establishing evacuation points, frequent broadcasts of “Dos and Don’ts”, better training for investigative officers, designated arterial routes for mass evacuation and easy access to first aid in the event of an accident, or disaster.

(END)

By Malini Shankar
BANGALORE, India, Dec 26 2012 (IPS)

Of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) -development targets agreed upon by the international community, whose 2015 deadline is approaching fast – MDG 7 has proven a particular challenge, especially for sprawling, populous countries like India.

With the ambitious aim of improving both natural ecosystems and human environments, MDG 7 comprises numerous targets, from halving the percentage of the world’s population without access to safe drinking water and sanitation, to protecting global fish stocks by preventing illegal fishing and overfishing.

Having pledged millions of euros to helping developing countries achieve the MDGs, the European Union has kept a sharp eye on India, whose regulations and efforts regarding MDG 7 have been inadequate, experts say.

China and India combined are still home to 216 million people without access to clean water and sanitation.
Meanwhile unsustainable fishing practices carry on unchecked. The Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute’s latest census counted 243,939 trawlers, despite an official EU ban on these fishing vessels in shallow waters off the coast.

The EU has also placed a full ban on fishing in protected areas like the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park, but commercial fishers take advantage of loopholes in the law to invade these reserves.

Mangrove forests effectively shielded some coastal areas from the Asian tsunami, while those areas without mangrove cover suffered immense damage. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
PORT BLAIR, India, Dec 26 2012 (IPS)

In commemoration of the eighth anniversary of the Asian tsunami, Wednesday was a day of prayer and mourning across the Andaman Nicobar Islands – located at the juncture of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea – and south India’s coastal Tamil Nadu state, two areas that suffered thousands of casualties on that fateful day.

Also known as the ‘Boxing Day Tsunami’, the gigantic waves claimed 230,000 lives across South and Southeast Asia on Dec. 26, 2004. While the northern Andaman Islands were largely spared the pounding, the southern Nicobar Islands were virtually flattened by the tsunami.

As the islanders remembered their dead, they also noted with gratitude that which spared them even more destruction – the mangrove forests that shielded the islands from the killer waves.

Rana Mathew, former Public Relations Officer of ANI, told IPS, “The mangroves played a crucial role in saving the North Andaman Islands from the tsunami waters. The thick mangrove forest surrounding the island chain provided a protective cover… saving many lives.”

“Mangroves act as a living buffer, or bioshield, preventing coastal erosion and damage to infrastructure and loss of life by reducing the force of the winds and waves passing through them; so that there is much less damage inland from these destructive forces of nature,” Alfredo Quarto, executive director of the Mangrove Action Project (USA), told IPS.

“In Thailand, damage to the mangrove-lined coast up to a certain distance inland is documented; evidence suggests that mangrove forests prevented further damage inland. The brunt of the wave force did not pass further inland and was seemingly dissipated by the first line of mangrove defence,” he added.

Denis Giles, editor of the Andaman Chronicle in Port Blair, recounted the horror he experienced eight years ago: “I was asleep when the earthquake struck. I took out my camera and rushed to the Haddo Wharf where a building had collapsed, trapping people. Commotion ruled. Two ships collided.

“I noticed a ripple in the sea, and then water gushed inland. The Chatham Bridge disappeared under the seawater. Radio reports said the Nicobars had vanished. It felt like the world was going to end…mangroves certainly helped save human habitation in the Andamans,” he told IPS.

Great Nicobar – the southernmost island, nearest to the epicentre in Sumatra – was engulfed, possibly because the mangroves bordering the island had been destroyed in favour of building a helipad, school and hospital.

“Nowhere was the violence of the tsunami felt more than in Katchal and Trinket, except perhaps the Great Nicobar Island. Trinket Island was trifurcated and declared unfit for human habitation by the (Indian) Administration. Yet within two years the people of Trinket returned and recolonised the trifurcated Trinket, which was saved by the mangroves,” Samir Acharya of the Society for Andaman Nicobar Ecology (SANE) told IPS.

“The destroyed mangroves are coming up again, perhaps as insurance against any future tsunami. The biggest contribution of the mangroves was protection of the freshwater source, which made recolonisation possible. The large area of mangroves in Katchal substantially reduced the impact of the tsunami and the island would probably be depopulated if the mangroves were not there.”

According to the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation’s ‘Toolkit for Establishing Coastal Bioshields’, “Walls of water 10 metres (33 feet) high penetrated up to three kilometres inland in some islands, causing extensive damage in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and the coastal districts of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Pondicherry.”

“Almost 154,000 houses were either destroyed or damaged, entailing losses of about 228.5 million dollars. The tsunami destroyed or damaged nearly 75,300 fishing crafts including wooden catamarans, mechanised boats and trawlers worth about 215 million dollars; fishing gear worth 15 million dollars were also lost leading to loss of livelihood for thousands of fishing families.”

The experience of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands eight years ago point the way forward for disaster management policy in India, which cannot afford to become complacent and allow its coastal inhabitants to suffer similar destruction in the case of another disaster.

Environmental scientists and researchers believe that policies to tackle the threat of another tsunami need only turn to natural ecosystems for advice.

Dr. V. Selvam, lead author of the Toolkit and director of coastal systems research at MSSRF, singled out the experiences of two villages in Tamil Nadu as examples of the effectiveness of mangrove forests. The first village, T.S. Pettai, suffered little loss of life and property thanks to the presence of mangroves, whereas the mangrove-bereft Muzhukkuthurai village experienced much destruction.

“Eleven people died and 136 houses (88 percent of the village) were totally damaged due to the tsunami in Muzhukkuthurai village,” Selvam told IPS, whereas T.S. Pettai reported no deaths.

Shekhar Kumar Niraj, field director of the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park, reiterates the role of bioshields in disaster mitigation. “Coral reefs absorb dynamic forces like tsunamis and cyclones. The Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park, comprised largely of an underwater reef, effectively prevented damage from the tsunami while the absence of such reefs north of Rameshwaram saw widespread damage to the coastal communities: Nagapatnam was devastated by the tsunami.”

“The December 2004 tsunami brought home the role mangroves can play in reducing the damage to life and property of coastal communities. Although a tsunami is a rare occurrence, India’s coasts are regularly under threat from various other natural hazards such as cyclones, storms, sea surges and flooding, which cause heavy damages to property and human lives,” Dr. Gladwin G. Asir, a marine geologist who worked with the Tuticorin-based NGO Peoples’ Action for Development, told IPS.

The fact that neither the Government of India nor state governments have acknowledged the role mangroves can play in disaster mitigation speaks volumes for the political will to implement effective disaster risk reduction policies in the country.

Forty-nine percent of all disaster survivors are women. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Malini Shankar
BHUBANESWAR, India, Oct 13 2012 (IPS)

In the aftermath of a natural disaster, women are often the most vulnerable. Particularly in rural areas, women suffer disproportionately from inadequate shelter and poor sanitation facilities and are often tasked with rebuilding shattered homes.

The theme for this year’s international day of disaster reduction, led by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), is more relevant than ever: ‘Women and Girls: The [in]Visible Force for Resilience’.

Across India, droughts and floods – which Rajan Joshua of the Society for Education and Development (SEDS) described as “two sides of the same coin” – have put scores of women at risk, but also highlighted their ability to endure and adapt to even the most harsh conditions.

Vikrant Mahajan, chief operating officer of Sphere India, a New Delhi-based non-governmental organisation working on disaster relief operations in the subcontinent, told IPS, “Forty-nine percent of all disaster survivors are women”, many of whom face extreme challenges in the post-disaster period.

While conducting field research for her PhD, Parimita Routray, a student of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in Bhubaneswar, encountered shocking tales from rural women across the eastern state of Orissa, which is prone to floods, sea surge, storms, cyclones and seawater incursions.

“I have seen fisher folk using the beach for defecating and using sea water for cleansing,” Routray told IPS. “During my field visits, I have not come across a single water or sanitation programme for fisher folk.”

The lack of facilities itself is a “disaster in the making”, especially in a state that is susceptible to a host of natural catastrophes, she added.

“Women from the Kusupur village in the Puri district of Orissa, told me they find it extremely difficult to manage in flood or cyclone shelters, especially during their (menstrual cycle),” Routray added.

“All kinds of people (live) in those shelters and there is no privacy. A woman by the name of Pramila Pradhan in Puri district told me that women often avoid eating during the day to ensure that they can use the cover of darkness to answer nature’s call.”

At nightfall women must bear the additional risk of encountering floating animal carcasses or live snakes struggling to survive in receding waters. Without proper toilets they are also more likely to contract waterborne diseases, and must guard against epidemics like cholera, malaria, dengue and diarrhoea.

Crime rates, too, rise inevitably along with floodwaters, often hitting women hardest.

Mamata Nayak, the village council chief in Chahabatia village in Puri, told Routray that when outdoor areas used as toilets are submerged by floods, whole families are forced to defecate on dried cow dung cakes inside their homes, and then dispose of the waste in the water outside.

The Kosi River flood, which impacted over 3.3 million people in India’s western Bihar state in 2008, highlighted another aspect of women’s vulnerability to natural crises.

For miles around, agricultural fields were submerged in silt, leaving millions homeless and preventing farmers from cultivating their fields. The desilting process has not been completed to this day, forcing men to migrate in search of employment.

The women left behind were tasked with repairing homes that had been destroyed in the floods, as well as running households on next to nothing.

Even today, “Women (lament) that government officials who interview them for compensation demand that they produce property papers (land deeds) in order to legally claim compensatory housing,” Jaya Jha, coordinator of collaborative advocacy with Sphere India told IPS.

“These women are now desperately in need of shelters, water and sanitation. Inadequate power supplies and a dearth of health care services are worsening the situation,” she added.

Because they bear the brunt of disasters, women are determined to find ways to mitigate the effects of natural calamities.

Mamtha Kulkarni, a Bangalore-based advocate hailing from the Gadag district in northern Karnataka, a highly drought-prone and arid region, told IPS, “Water supply is reliable only twice a month and rainfall is so scanty that growing water-hungry crops like rice and green vegetables is impossible.”

“So instead, women in the villages cultivate gherkins, onions, garlic, tomatoes and aubergines. The only fruit we can grow is bananas. All our food recipes utilise these commodities to balance our nutrition needs – our staple diet includes maize flour-based steamed cakes and lentil salads,” she said.

Annie George of Building and Enabling Disaster Resilience of Coastal Communities (BEDROC), an NGO involved in tsunami relief in the town of Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu, believes women-led efforts are the best solution.

“Recovering and strengthening traditional skills is far more sustainable than developing alternate skills and livelihoods. Protection, promotion and expansion of livelihoods should be the approach (…).”

Strong policies, legislation and other supportive structures and networks are “essential and the governments should take this aspect very seriously”, she added.

In the Anantapur district of the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh – a region afflicted by drought in six out of every 10 years – droughts and floods are becoming more frequent due to climate change.

“For SEDS (located in Anantapur) it was clear that the women and the community as a whole need to be able to produce, reproduce and invent ways to mitigate disturbance of their livelihoods as a result of climate variations,” SEDS CEO Manil Jayasena Joshua told IPS.

“We support community organisations, (traditional) agricultural practices, natural resource management and health services,” Joshua stressed.

“All our projects, programmes and trainings are aimed at promoting self-reliance for rural women in the disaster-prone Anantapur district. An integrated approach is essential for long term disaster risk reduction,” he added.

(END)

Elephants in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are in danger of being culled. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
PORT BLAIR, India, Oct 5 2012 (IPS)

Midway through Wildlife Week in India, celebrations have been marred by news that 29.8 kilogrammes of ivory, worth 336,800 dollars, had been seized on the Andaman Trunk Road.

“Chances are that the feral elephants in Northern Andamans fell prey to poachers,” Denis Giles, editor of the Andaman Chronicle in Port Blair, told IPS.

Though they are a highly protected species under India’s Wildlife Protection Act, elephants on the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands (ANI), which lie at the juncture of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, are deprived of all protection, reflecting a serious lack of political will for wildlife conservation.

Now, spotted deer introduced by the British as a source of protein in the Islanders’ diet, and feral elephants introduced for logging, are in danger of being culled because they are considered an ‘invasive species’.

The issue has generated hot debate across the country, with scientists, conservationists and researchers deeply divided over how to tackle the problem.

Chief Wildlife Warden for the Forest Department, Dr. Shashikumar, told IPS, “There is no credible estimate of the size of the cheetal (spotted deer) population on the Islands. Today, about 86 of the 130 elephants that were shipped to the Islands for logging are domesticated and are mainly in the custody of the Forest Department and Corporation.”

When logging stopped, 40 of the elephants were abandoned by their captors on Interview Island, located 925 kilometres south-east of Kolkata, and 10 elephants were dumped in the jungles of North Andamans, 20 nautical miles southwest of the Myanmar Coco Islands.

According to a recent study by the Foundation for Ecological Research, Advocacy and Learning (FERAL), a Pondicherry-based NGO, “The presence of introduced herbivores has led to the local disappearance of a few species and is likely to affect species richness over large parts of the island chain, if not controlled.”

“Forest Department sources have maintained that cheetal are causing habitat damage. However, the type of damage being caused and the likely consequences on the forest (ecosystem) have not been quantified,” according to the FERAL study.

This argument that invasive creatures are decimating the fragile island ecosystem has found support among people like Dr. K. Sivakumar, scientist in Endangered Species Management at the Wildlife Institute of India in Dehradun, who told IPS, “It is neither recommended nor feasible to introduce any kind of birth control programmes for cheetal in the Andamans. Elimination is the only option.”

He also dismissed the idea of relocating the deer, claiming they are far too sensitive to survive capture and relocation.

On the other hand, “Trying a birth control programme for elephants, as they are a smaller population, is recommended,” Sivakumar explained.

“Animal welfare advisors must also offer solutions. No budgets are made available for removal of cheetal in a humane manner, or for that matter feral dogs in the Andamans, which threaten to wipe out endangered species,” Bittu Sahgal, editor of the Sanctuary Asia Magazine in Mumbai, told IPS.

Culling sets dangerous precedents: elephants and cheetal are both listed as endangered animals under the Wildlife Protection Act (WPA) of 1972; they enjoy legal protection from hunting in most parts of India.

But Shashikumar explained to IPS that WPA regulations do not protect ‘invasive species’ in the Islands, and cheetal are often hunted by the local communities. “As and when hunting cases are detected action has been taken,” he said, adding that poachers exploit the lax laws, wantonly killing deer.

The lack of legal protection for elephants on the Islands possibly explains the cache of ivory seized in the Andamans earlier this week.

“The Wildlife (Protection) Act does not include the term ‘culling’. Only the Federal Government has the power to declare a wild animal ‘vermin’ for a specified area, through a notification valid for a specified period only,” said Praveen Bhargav, a Wildlife First trustee.

Conservationists around India are strongly against culling.

“Culling is the most disgusting and detrimental way to contain wild animals. (Instead), the elephants can be brought back to the mainland as soon as rescue centres are put up. The deer should be left in place. It is easy to introduce some form of birth control or see which predators were native to the islands before being wiped out,” wildlife activist and Member of Parliament, Maneka Gandhi, told IPS in New Delhi.

“Although expensive, given the small population of elephants it is logistically feasible to capture and translocate elephants to the mainland but there might be a certain level of injury during translocation,” said Sivakumar.

Humans must account for introducing species, and ensure their survival. If it was possible to ship the animals to the Islands in the first place, then shipping them back should be logically plausible, conservationists argue.

(END)

Excerpt:

Nile crocodiles and estuarine (saltwater) crocodiles account for the deaths of hundreds of human beings every year. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
PORT BLAIR, Aug 15 2012 (IPS)

Twenty two-year-old Ajay Kallu, hailing from the Bakultala village in northern Andamans, was devoured by an estuarine crocodile when he waded waist deep into a creek to fish on the morning of Aug. 1, marking the fifth fatal crocodile attack in 28 months in the remote Islands that lie at the juncture of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea.

Wildlife officer Dr. Shashikumar told IPS, “On receiving report of this incident the forest officials rushed to the site by road; traffic regulations (for) convoys in the Jarawa Reserves delayed our arrival by nine hours. By then it was dark and too late for search and rescue; we have laid traps to net the crocodile for relocation.”

The first reported incident in this latest string of attacks was a U.S. tourist killed by a saltwater crocodile in April 2010.

“It is impossible to tell why it happened; some experts feel it might have been a migratory crocodile that attacked a snorkeler. It was a very unlucky coincidence because it was the first time ever, and the only recorded incident thus far to take place outside a creek in the open sea,” Samit Sawhney, who was in charge of Barefoot Resorts in Andaman’s Havelock Island at the time of the killing, told IPS.

Shrinking space in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, caused largely by expanding human settlements, has led to an increase in human-animal conflict. Conservationists fear that an increase in human deaths could lead to the culling of errant wildlife.

“Roughly 70 years of expanding human settlement (has led to) widespread encroachment of crocodile habitat,” wildlife researcher Manish Chandi of the Andaman Nicobar Environment Team in Port Blair told IPS.

“Nesting habitats, freshwater streams and estuarine creeks are now paddy cultivation landscapes,” he said. “Increased boat traffic and intensive fishing encroach on crocodiles’ habitat. Destruction of littoral, mangrove and beach swamps also encroach on the habitat of Salties (saltwater or estuarine crocodiles) in the islands,” Chandi added.

Irresponsible disposal of hotel waste, fertilisers, chicken feed, meat leftovers, domestic sewage and effluents from the tourism, logging, marine food processing and paper industries into the creeks have turned crocodiles into scavengers, and predators of other, smaller scavengers like dogs and jackals.

Gradually, crocodiles have lost their fear of human beings. Mohan Halder, head of the Tushnabad village development council located 25 kilometres northwest of Andaman’s capital Port Blair, told IPS that “crocodiles now dare to enter dry land; now we know that all those who went missing during fishing were killed by crocodiles.”

Jarawas, the indigenous inhabitants of the islands, who have fallen victim to aggressive crocodiles while rafting or wading in the creek and lived to tell the tale, only confirm Halder’s suspicions.

Sanjeev Mondal of the Ograbraj Village of Ferrarganj, about 30 kilometres northwest of Port Blair, agrees that “callous waste disposal and illegal slaughterhouses are an issue in Ograbraj”.

“But then in Manpur, where there are no slaughterhouses, a woman who herded her cattle through the creek towards her home was also killed by a crocodile,” he told IPS.

Mondal lays the blame for these incidents with the forest department, which he claims has failed to “take precautions to tie nets in crocodile infested creeks to prevent crocodiles from entering human settlements”.

But these precautions are easier said that done. According to Chandi, “Maintaining enclosures to keep crocodiles out of the village area may not be entirely feasible, given the need for dinghies to navigate into creeks in village precincts.”

Balance of nature disturbed

Sapan, a farmer from Collinpur village in Ferrarganj, 35 kilometres north of Port Blair, laid out the consequences of this new phenomenon, which has disturbed ancient life patterns of both humans and animals.

“With (an) increase in crocodile attacks, fear stalks people; they have stopped fishing. We have cultivated for eons but there was never the risk of fatal crocodile attacks.”

“The increase in the crocodile population is because the Forest Department has relocated overpopulated crocodiles into these creeks for ‘wildlife management’,” he charged. “If necessary, the department must kill these crocodiles,” he said angrily.

“Relocating problematic crocodiles to the Loha Barack Crocodile sanctuary in South Andamans is a possibility, but the problem cannot be wished away because carrying capacity is an issue in the sanctuary too,” Shashikumar told IPS.

The latest crocodile attack in Bakultala prompted Member of Parliament, Bishnupada Ray, to call for “identifying and killing the killer crocodile besides shifting the entire habitat of the estuarine crocodiles”. Absent a seismic event to rival the power of the 2004 Sumatra earthquake, which could redesign the entire landscape, this is an impossible task.

“Local communities in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands – both settler and indigenous – have displayed high levels of tolerance toward crocodiles with whom they live and have been living for over a century,” Chandi stressed. “Catchy media headlines, (provoked) by the MP’s statement, could change the way people regard these animals.”

Furthermore, crocodile attacks have been reported in Bakultala, Collinpur, Havelock, Hut Bay, Tushnabad, Ograbraj, Manpur and Baratang. So the idea of identifying, trapping or relocating one lone crocodile is laughable, at least to experts.

Estuarine crocodiles are also guarded by the Wildlife Protection Act as a Schedule 1 “critically endangered animal”, which means killing them would risk imprisonment and fines.

Human encroachment has not only suffocated animals’ habitats but also torn to shreds the delicate balance that had hitherto determined peaceful coexistence between human beings and wildlife.

Increasingly, the relationship is being determined by violence. But experts warn that humans must steer clear of retaliatory acts, as wildlife lives by instinct, not reason.

“If a crocodile cannot live in peace in a creek where else must it go?” asked Zubair Ahmed, editor of the local daily ‘Light of Andamans’ in Port Blair.

Long-term strategies have to be evolved to mitigate human-animal conflict. For example, consumption of locally produced goods and services can minimise the human footprint, and better utilisation of human capital can give a tremendous boost to the economy without ruining the environment.

(END)

*Malini Shankar is a wildlife photojournalist, radio broadcaster and filmmaker based in Bangalore, India.

Excerpt:

Indian Railway officials inspecting the burnt carriage in which 32 passengers perished on Monday. Credit: Indian Railways

By Malini Shankar
CHENNAI, Aug 4 2012 (IPS)

At 4:30 a.m. on the morning of Jul. 30, sleeping passengers in carriage S 11 on the Chennai-bound Tamilnadu Express were awoken by a blazing fire, as the train approached the east coast town of Nellore, just two and a half hours shy of its final destination.

At least 32 people burned to death in the train, their bodies charred so badly that hospitals were forced to use DNA analysis to identify the victims for anxious families.

Officials have not ruled out a short circuit in the train toilet or sabotage, considering one survivor reported hearing a loud bang in the burning train car.

Whether or not gas cylinders or other inflammable materials were aboard the train is yet to be established by the Railway’s formal inquiry.

For grieving family members, the inquiry might be too little too late.

But if similar tragedies are to be avoided in the future, authorities must use this accident to draw lessons in disaster management for the colossal Indian railway network, which operates 9000 trains carrying 18 million passengers daily. This number does not include the countless thousands who travel on train roofs, undeterred by the risk of fatal injuries inside mountain tunnels or the possibility of electrocution.

It quickly became apparent to disaster management experts, after the fire had been put out and the survivors pulled to safety, that the lack of emergency preparedness on most Indian trains is a huge liability.

It was the gatekeeper of a railway crossing who first noticed the fire in the passing carriage and notified the Nellore railway station, which halted the train. By then screaming passengers had already pulled at the emergency brake.

The burning car was immediately separated from the train to prevent the fire spreading to other coaches. But this did not make up for the fact that there were no fire alarms in the train cars.

The public relations officer of the South Central Railway, Frederick Michael, confirmed to IPS that there were no fire hydrants in the sleeper car.

“Since it was night time, the passengers had closed all the windows and one door of the vestibule that connects to the rear car was also locked for the night to prevent criminal elements’ entry and mischief,” he said. The other vestibule door, according to reliable sources, was also closed for the night, resulting in a death trap for the passengers.

Inflammable material like synthetic cushion covers and curtains, inadequate emergency exits and fire extinguishers, to say nothing of a poorly trained cabin crew are the main culprits in this avoidable disaster, experts told IPS.

Lower class train cars, which carry millions of Indians, do not contain a single fire extinguisher or hydrant. Nor are passengers instructed in basic emergency evacuation procedures. Further, there is no public address system on board the long-distance non-luxury trains.

Railway coaches are in dire need of inflatable life rafts with a rigid hull, disaster management experts aver. These rafts should automatically unfurl themselves as escape chutes from the hinges of the emergency exits in case of a fire, or during a water evacuation.

These can help save lives and can also double up as easy transport for frail, infirm and physically challenged passengers.

Wide emergency exits with collapsible shutters that can automatically open during emergencies need to be installed by the dozen in every train car. Currently each car has only four emergency exits and four entry doors for carriages that accommodate 72 passengers and probably carry scores of other unreserved commuters.

The spokesman of the Integral Coach Factory (ICF) in Chennai told IPS that ICF only manufactures coaches for Indian Railways but is not responsible for the design of the carriages, nor the rolling stock – hardware such as wheels, steps or sleeper frames – within them.

The fact that the Railway Authority does not provide for the needs of physically challenged persons is hazardous to all passengers during emergencies and seriously hinders rescue operations – with the infirm or the disabled getting left behind, or other passengers stuck behind them.

The average height of the train floor is at least 1.5 metres above the ground. The steps are arranged more like a ladder than a staircase, making it impossible for physically challenged passengers to use them unassisted.

Though the mobile “medical relief van” stationed at all railway stations reached the burning train within minutes, they found they could not access the passengers inside, as the inflammable material and burning heat had caused the doors’ locks to melt and fuse together.

Ambulances rushed the critically injured survivors to the district general hospital after rescue teams cut through the burning car. If the fire had occurred in the countryside it would have led to far more casualties, experts say.

C. U. Rao, general secretary of the Indian Red Cross Andhra Pradesh chapter, the state where the tragedy occurred, told IPS, “The Nellore branch of the Indian Red Cross scurried to (transport) injured passengers to various hospitals, installed freezers to keep the corpses awaiting DNA identification, brought their mobile blood bank to the site of the disaster, and distributed food packets to survivors in the immediate aftermath of the calamity.”

But these services should be the responsibility of the railway authorities. Emergency equipment should be installed in every railway station across the country as part of disaster mitigation efforts, especially since the railway network has been responsible for the deaths of 1,200 people in the last five years alone according to statistics provided by Indian Railways.

Michael believes that “a review of design is urgently called for; hereafter we will have to heed attention to alternative designs.” Wide collapsible doors that automatically roll up in the event of fires are far more effective than doors that have to be opened manually.

Locks and emergency brakes need to be automated to ensure heat does not create vacuum chambers and seal doors shut.

If the Indian Railways fails to learn its lessons from tragedies like the one at Nellore, then it is condemning thousands of other passengers to a similar fate.

(END)

It took six years for a dedicated team of scientists from the Wildlife Institute of India, wildlife officials from six Indian states and officials from the federal ministry to secure international protection for one of India’s most precious biological reserves.

India’s Western Ghats mountain range is the birthplace of 62 rivers. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

Finally, earlier this month, the United Nations’ Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) granted World Heritage Site status to India’s Western Ghats, which many believe to be the crown jewel of India’s biodiversity reserves.

The mountain range, which geologists estimate to be more than 150 million years old – older even than the Himalayas – runs along the country’s western coast and is the thought to be the last vestige of all representative ecosystems in the subcontinent.

Hosting six different types of forest ecosystems, including thick wet evergreen rainforests, moist deciduous forests, pine forests, grasslands and Sholas, or valley forests, the site is home to the largest floral and faunal diversity in the world.

More than 62 rivers originate in the Western Ghats, serving the water needs of at least 74.85 million people around the Indian Ocean rim in 28 countries.

The forests here are also crucial catchment areas for monsoon rains. The mountain range runs parallel to India’s west coast for a distance of nearly 1,600 kilometres, averaging a height of 1,200 metres above sea level. Hardly anywhere else in the world is there a more conducive rainfall laboratory occurring so naturally. Small wonder, then, that 17 countries in Asia supported India’s nomination of the Western Ghats for World Heritage Site protection.

Grasslands that flank the valley forests harbour rare wildlife like king cobras, Malabar pit vipers, cobras, kraits and pythons. At least 508 species of birds, 156 species of reptiles, 334 species of butterflies, 120 species of mammals, 121 species of amphibians and 218 species of fish are endemic to the Ghats.

The cloud-kissed mountains harbour more than 4000 species of endemic flora; a single cave in the Kudremukh forest sprouts three rivers – the Tunga, Bhadra and Netravati.

A total of 39 sites are earmarked for UNESCO inscription, effectively protecting their fragile conservation status with solid international monitoring.

“The 39 sites cover an area of some 8000 square kilometres, or roughly five percent of the 140,000 square kilometres of the Western Ghats,” Dr. V.B. Mathur, the dean of the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), told IPS.

The Ghats also contains one elephant reserve, 11 tiger reserves, 12 wildlife sanctuaries, seven national parks, eight reserved forests, four eco-sensitive ranges, and two wildlife-dense forest divisions.

Better protection, less development?

Conservationists who have long lamented the weakness of environmental protection and conservation laws in India were quick to praise UNESCO’s decision.

But the move is now facing stiff opposition from political leaders and businessmen, whose plans for anthropocentric development of the reserve will effectively be thwarted.

In the past, mine pits have been “excluded” from the environmental mandate, allowing mining to continue in enclosures where conservation laws were effectively rendered defunct.

With international observation it will no longer be possible to manipulate conservation laws to allow activities like mining, dam construction, hydel power projects or highway construction.

The governments of Karnataka and Kerala in particular are strongly against additional protection of the mountain range, with the Karnataka Legislative Assembly going so far as to adopt a resolution to oppose the UNESCO tag, while local politicians in both states insist that existing laws are adequate to safeguard the biodiversity hotspot.

“Conservation of the Ghats should come from concern within rather than attention from the outside,” Dr. K.N. Ganeshiah of the University of Agricultural Sciences told IPS. “The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel set up by the federal Ministry of Environment and Forests has done a far more meaningful job of advising what we need to do and those recommendations are more inclusive and elaborate than what the World Heritage tag can offer,” he stressed.

He is not alone in his trepidation. The Ghats’ rich terrain and sprawling river systems make ideal real estate for development projects involving hydel power and mining. The forest minister of Karnataka bemoaned the fact that “even development of eco tourism will be affected” by UNESCO’s strict conservation standards.

International monitoring required

That it took an Indian Supreme Court ruling to halt construction of the seventh dam across the Kalinadi River that meanders through virgin jungle in the Western Ghats speaks volumes about the appalling lack of political will for conservation.

Similarly, it was the Supreme Court that put a halt to iron ore mining in the Kudremukh forest in 2000, tipping the scales against economic profits in favour of long-term protection of the fragile ecosystem, which contains the largest valley in all of Asia and is home to the endemic rainforest species Poeciloneuron indicum.

If not for a Supreme Court verdict in 1996, mining in the Dandeli Anshi Tiger Reserve in the Western Ghats would never have ceased.

Such interventions have repeatedly vindicated conservationists’ calls for international monitoring of the site.

Experts argue that the presence of at least 50 dams in the mountain range also shed light on government indifference to conservation.

Manoj Kumar, a forest officer in the Dandeli Anshi Tiger Reserve, explained that apart from eating up large swathes of forest, dams also block wild animals’ migration paths. “This could lead to inbreeding, which results in local extinction of some species,” he said.

UNESCO protection crucial for tigers

The mountain range is also a sanctuary for a slowly growing tiger population, though the endangered animals are far from being entirely safe.

Signs of increasing tiger presence have prompted calls for notification of the Kudremukh forests as a tiger reserve. A future Kudremukh Tiger Reserve could create a corridor for wildlife migrating from the nearby Bhadra Tiger Reserve.

According to a 2010 study by the WII, the Western Ghats hosts almost a third of the tigers in India. “Around 534 (tigers currently live here), (indicating) a rise of about 32 percent since 2006,” the report stated.

A previous report by the WII identified one corridor in the Western Ghats, the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve, as one of the potentially sustainable landscapes for long term in situ tiger conservation.

Apart from tigers, other carnivores in these thick jungles include leopards, black panthers and the Indian wild dog. Rare and endangered wildlife include the lion-tailed macaque and fresh water otters and dolphins.

A black-coated feline in the Anamalai Tiger Reserve is yet to be identified by the scientific community. However, tribals and communities dwelling in the forest fringes have established that a black skinned carnivore, distinct from the Black Panther, has roamed the forests for centuries.

(END)

The Sethusamudram Shipping Canal Project could destroy the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
RAMESHWARAM, Jul 16 2012 (IPS)

One hundred and fifty years ago, the British colonial administration in India proposed a shipping canal project that would allow cargo vessels, commercial liners and large ships to cut through the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park in the Palk Straits between India and Sri Lanka, thereby slashing 424 nautical miles (about 780 kilometres) off the traditional shipping route around Sri Lanka to the Far East.

Opposition based on ecological concerns, fear of heightened seismic activity in the region and cultural sensitivities stalled the project for over a century but it forced its way back onto the negotiating table.

The Indian Prime Minister finally inaugurated the Sethusamudram Shipping Canal Project (SSSCP) on Jul. 2, 2005 but it was contested in the Indian Supreme Court, which stayed the project in September 2007.

Earlier this month an expert committee headed by R.K. Pachauri, chairman of The Energy Research Institute (TERI), submitted a report to the Indian Supreme Court stating that alternative routes to the controversial SSSCP, which cuts through the historic Adam’s Bride in the Gulf of Mannar, are not viable.

The SSSCP will cleave through the protected Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park, allowing a shorter travel route for shipping tankers plying between the Middle East and the Far East through the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal.

The area in white depicts the deep sea where no dredging is necessary for the shipping canal. The area in blue, south of the Adam’s Bridge, indicates the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park. Credit: Captain S. Viswakarma

It is estimated that ships from Europe and Africa sailing to the Far East may save up to 5000 dollars per voyage if they use the canal.

The shorter shipping canal is also expected to give a tremendous economic boost to small Indian ports like Tuticorin, Kanya Kumari, Nagapatnam, Ennore, Cuddalore, Thondi and the temple town of Rameshwaram.

Risks abound

More than 2000 ships will transit through the canal carrying more than 15 million tonnes of crude oil, and other internationally tradable commodities, leaving the marine park very vulnerable to oil spills.

“An important aspect of risk management relates to the possibility of oil spills which, even with the most stringent measures and precautions, would be difficult to rule out completely. The study clearly finds that oil spills could possibly pose a risk to the biosphere reserve, which needs to be protected under all conditions,” the expert committee report stated.

Staunch opponents of the project claim that dredging can destroy the shallow sea floor, disturb the shoal ecosystem, and ruin the habitat of rare and endangered species. The ecosystem in the National Park is comprised of shifting sand banks under the rocks, shoals and underwater reefs, all of which could be destroyed by the shipping canal.

In addition, there are no guarantees that the canal will survive another tsunami that could easily be triggered off the volatile coast of Sumatra, Indonesia.

Adam’s Bridge also has cultural and religious value, as Hindus believe that Lord Rama crossed it to rescue his kidnapped wife, Sita, from Ravanna in Sri Lanka. The so-called ‘bridge’ is comprised of a chain of limestone sand banks connecting India and Sri Lanka and has, over the years, been submerged by rising seas.

Environmental impacts

The expert committee report, which was compiled by members of the National Institute of Oceanography and the National Institute of Ocean Technology, states, “For infrastructure to be created in such a fragile ecological zone, a rigorous analysis of possible scenarios related to the impacts of climate change will be critical in decision-making that aims to minimise risk both in economic as well as ecological terms.”

The Gulf of Mannar is a fairly shallow ecosystem, thus necessitating extensive dredging both for construction and maintenance. Oceanographers believe that due to the high frequency of sand generation from the ocean floor, caused in large part by the shoal ecosystem in the shallow waters, constant dredging will be necessary to maintain a deep-sea shipping canal, making the project cost ineffective.

Additionally, the southeast coast of Tamil Nadu is highly prone to tsunamis, given that the bulk of seismic tsunamis in the past millennium have been triggered off the coast of Sumatra.

“Long gravity waves like tsunamis can diffract around islands and can have (a severe) impact in ‘shadow zones’ also; during the 2004 tsunami for instance, there was loss of life and significant damage on the west coast of Sri Lanka, even though the west coast was not facing Sumatra,” Dr. Tad Murty, vice president of the International Tsunami Society in Honolulu, told IPS.

Shekhar Kumar Niraj, field director of the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park, told IPS, “SSSCP will also affect the marine wildlife here, most of which is coral-based.

“Coral comprises the basis of a fragile reef ecosystem, which provides a habitat for crabs, clown fish, dugongs, dolphins, porpoise, prawns, parrot fish, sea cucumbers, sea horses, sea snakes, turtles, whales and a whole list of highly endangered endemic marine wildlife. The marine diversity includes four species of shrimp, 106 species of crabs, 17 species of sea cucumbers, 466 species of molluscs, 108 species of sponges and 100 species of echinoderms. More than 2000 species of finfish are found in the Gulf of Mannar,” he added.

“The critically endangered green sea turtle lays its eggs all along the beaches of the Rameshwaram peninsula, which will undoubtedly be disturbed by the dredging,” Niraj warned.

The shallow sea is home to at least five sub-species of sea horses endemic to the Gulf of Mannar Marine Biosphere Reserve. Sea grass is clearly visible in the shallow sea, indicating the presence of dugongs, which are now only present in less than a dozen sites in South East Asia.

Loss of livelihoods

The project also threatens the safety of small fishermen whose nets will likely get entangled by large, passing ships.

“Small fishermen operate in the (early) hours of the morning so lack of visibility itself can be deleterious to the fisherfolk. Trawler fisherfolk too face the danger of ship collisions,” John Swamy, advisor on sea safety for the South Indian Federation of Fishermen Societies (SIFFS), told IPS.

The reef ecosystem is a very rich fishing ground for fisher folk from both India and Sri Lanka and will adversely affect their livelihoods as well. Tamil Nadu recorded a total of 68,397 metric tonne of marine products in 2008-2009 valued at 32.13 million dollars.

The shipping canal is also likely to decimate the trade in seashells worth at least 15 million Indian rupees or about 2.7 million dollars annually.

David, a traditional fisherman from Rameshwaram, told IPS, “With fish catch depleting and fuel costs only increasing, traditional fishing will die out with our generation.”

About 542 traditional fisher boats operate in and around the Rameshwaram Peninsula, and 3146 fishermen depend on these shallow waters. Their estimated fish catch amounts to an average of 226-279 tonnes per annum according to a study conducted by India’s federal Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute.

Many believe the shipping project epitomises the danger inherent in shaping the natural world to suit human needs regardless of long-term impacts on the environment, livelihoods of marginalised peoples and future generations.

(END)

Heads of state and governments are meeting in Rio de Janeiro this week to decide how to renew their pledges made during the first Earth Summit held in Rio in 1992.

The Chikka Sampige tree is revered by the Soligas tribe in the Billigiri Ranga Temple Tiger Reserve as the sister of the 1000 year old Dodda Sampige tree. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

The Indian government, with its impressive dossier of legislation on conservation and biodiversity, is at the forefront of negotiations on sustainable development, but a closer look at the country’s involvement in a largely failed attempt to safeguard the earth’s fragile ecosystems suggests that the entire global model is deeply flawed.

The Rio summit 20 years ago appeared to be a valiant effort to involve stakeholders in environmental conservation, poverty eradication, and climate change mitigation through equitable legal responsibilities.

But concepts like the Green Economy and the Convention on Biodiversity agreed upon in 1992 turned out to a clever disguise for profit making at the expense of the environment.

Anil Agarwal, founder-director of the Indian environmental think tank, Centre for Science and Environment, proclaimed back in 1992 that environmental conservation was interwoven with the development paradigm: only if impoverished people are allowed to harness forest resources for their livelihoods can poverty be banished, he averred. Poverty and profits thus became two sides of the same coin in Rio in 1992, and ‘biodiversity’ was another commodity up for grabs.

India followed up on the first Earth summit by enacting the Biodiversity Act and the Forest Rights Act, which gave forest dwelling ecological refugees and third generation indigenous people the right to harvest forest resources for livelihood purposes and granted the right of residence in forests.

Protected Areas like wildlife sanctuaries and national parks, tiger reserves and biosphere reserves were obliged to accommodate forest dwellers.

Following the Stockholm conference of 1972, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi pledged to resuscitate the Royal Bengal tiger’s gene pool, habitat, and wildlife through Project Tiger – an ambitious conservation agenda.

But just over three decades after those promises, 22 tigers were massacred in the premier Sariska Tiger Reserve in India, where impoverished farmers, lacking employment opportunities in forests, avenged the loss of their cattle by conniving with poachers to kill every single tiger in the protected area.

Though tiger reserves have increased in number from 28 to 43 after the Sariska slaughter, “Coexistence (between forest dwellers and wildlife) is a myth and conflict is inevitable,” said Praveen Bhargav of Wildlife First in Bangalore.

“Development is necessary. Resources have to be utilised. But both development and resource utilisation has to be done on a sustainable basis with an eco-friendly model,” said Dr. Suresh Patil, deputy director of the Anthropological Survey of India in Kolkata.

To date, this has not been the case in India.

“The Biodiversity Act (2002) is no more than an emaciated version of the global compact. The Act neither informs nor influences the working of the Forest Act, Forest Conservation Act, Wildlife Protection Act and the Forest Rights Act, legislation that covers over 95 percent of biodiversity in India,” M.K. Ramesh, Professor of Environmental Law at the National Law School of India University in Bangalore told IPS.

National and state level Biodiversity Boards have turned out to be toothless. A case in point was the Biodiversity Board of the state of Karnataka dropping a proposal to notify an island in the Arabian Sea as a sanctuary, despite its rich biodiversity, because the Indian Navy uses the wildlife on this Island for target practise in the name of defence preparedness.

“In short, the lofty ideals (of biodiversity conservation) were lost in translation and the Convention turned out to be an entity sans eyes and sans teeth  – a mere cadaver,” Ramesh lamented.

Now, the same mistakes made in 1992 appear on the brink of being re-enacted. The ‘solutions’ now on the table at Rio involve the same attitude towards biodiversity, conservation and climate change that first put the earth and its natural resources up for sale.

In fact, Ramesh dismissed the concept of carbon credits as no more than “pollution (or) carbon coupons”.

Forest cover

A major question for conservationists is how can poverty rates be reduced if forests, the main source of many people’s livelihoods, are not protected? If forest cover is lost will it not affect monsoons, agriculture, standard of living and food security?

Kudremukh’s cloud forests, located in the Western Ghats, are home to some of the most endangered wildlife in India: tiger, leopard, Malabar civet cat, wild dogs, black panther, sloth bears, elephants, jackals, four types of deer, lion-tailed macaques, langur monkeys, gaur, porcupines, and three varieties of mongoose.

In addition, the area is home to the Indian hare, wild boars, king cobras, Indian pythons, pit vipers, the Malabar Trogon, the Great Pied Hornbill, the Malabar Whistling Thrush, peacock and the Imperial Pigeon.

Three rivers – the Tunga, Bhadra and Netravati – originate from just one cave in the Kudremukh forests.

Yet, despite all that is known about this wildlife-rich forest, it still took an Indian Supreme Court ruling to close down the Kudremukh Iron Ore Company’s mines in 2005.

Seven years after the ruling, the forest has still not been notified as a tiger reserve despite signs that tiger presence is steadily increasing.

Former employees of the mining company are eager to relocate away from the forest in search of new employment opportunities, creating ideal conditions for designating the Kudremukh National Park as a Tiger Reserve – but political will is seriously lacking.

“The human footprint in tiger terrain alienates the tigers’ prey base (or faunal spectrum),” said Dr. Y.V. Jhala, senior Carnivore Biologist at the Wildlife Institute of India (WII).

“Biodiversity loss can be minimised by strictly regulating habitat degradation, fragmentation and loss. Species extinction can be prevented by devising and rigorously implementing species conservation plans including conservation breeding, wherever required,” Dr. V.B. Mathur, dean of the WII, told IPS.

Aquatic habitat in India is also a site of political neglect, with severely depleting fish stocks impacting fisherfolk across the country.

T. V. Ramachandra, limnologist at the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science, told IPS, “Fragmentation of forests in the catchment of aquatic ecosystems, dumping of urban solid wastes, disposal of untreated domestic sewage and industrial effluents contaminate the water bodies.

“These have led to the disappearance of native biodiversity as is evident from disappearance of fish fauna. Streams in the catchment have become seasonal due to drastic land cover changes, fragmentation of forests and invasion of weeds,” he added.

Rio+20 should have been an opportunity for captains of industry to combine the economic growth paradigm with proper urban planning, adequate employment opportunities in rural areas, and protection of biodiversity reserves.

Instead it appears to be “the expensive political circus” that Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen warned against during the 2002 Johannesburg summit, which also failed to reach binding agreements on environmental protection.

If the current paradigm persists, the human carbon footprint will erase the tiger’s footprint on the forest floors of Indian reserves and elsewhere.

(END)

A wilting mangrove forest in Car Nicobar, destroyed by the Asian Tsunami in 2004. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
BHUBANESWAR, India, Jun 14 2012 (IPS)

The heat wave in the Indian state of Orissa, which saw a 10-degree Celsius increase in summer temperatures last month, claimed 21 lives, according to government sources; unofficial estimates counted 87 deaths.

Prafulla Ratha the team leader of emergency services at Concern Worldwide in Bhubaneswar, told IPS that one of the factors responsible for the fatalities was “workers not heeding the government’s advice regarding working hours and necessary preventive measures”.

But according to environmental experts, the problem was not desperately impoverished workers who could not afford to lose a day’s wages; rather it was the failure of disaster management to adequately plan for the heat wave, which was just one of the many hydrometeorological disasters that affected – and will continue to impact – Indian Ocean rim countries.

Orissa is the capital of disaster management. Forty-nine of the last 100 years saw floods, 30 years were drought-ridden, and 11 years faced cyclones.

A supercyclone that hit the state in 1999 claimed 15,000 lives, 2.5 million heads of livestock and 90 million trees.

Building resilience via strong disaster management policies, plans and action in the future will be crucial to avoiding such destruction in the future.

Indian ocean rim at risk

About 74.85 million people living on coastal areas in the 24 Indian Ocean rim Countries (IOC) are vulnerable to hydrometeorological disasters, making effective disaster management one of the most pressing issues of the day.

Most disasters affecting IOC countries include water and weather related calamities such as avalanches, cloudburst, coastal incursions, cyclones, drought, desertification, floods, flash floods, famine, hurricanes, storms, sea surge, tornadoes, tsunamis, and typhoons.

Such catastrophes destroy lives, property, and livelihoods in the short term and take a deadly toll on whole economies and national resilience in the long term. But planning ahead for such events has proved to be extremely difficult.

Unpredictable El Niño South Oscillation originating in the southeastern Pacific Ocean every few years upsets weather differentially around the world every time it occurs.

B.N. Goswami, director of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, told IPS, “Weather and climate can never be predicted perfectly. El Niño and La Niña are strongly related to occurrence of drought or floods over Indonesia and northern Australia and less strongly associated with drought or floods over India and eastern Africa. The impact over Sri Lanka tends to be generally opposite to that over India.”

If floods devastate India, Sri Lanka will likely experience drought in that same period, but predicting this accurately is still impossible today.

The vagaries of the weather can have tumultuous effects on agriculture, trade, industrial production, tourism, fisheries, demography, and the economy.

“The impacts of El Niño during winter are warm conditions over south Asia, dry and warm conditions over southeast Asia and southeast Africa, and dry conditions over north Australia,” said L.S. Rathore, director general of the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD).

Glenn Cook, manager of Western Australia Climate Services in the Bureau of Meteorology, told IPS, “Over the past five years, the most notable hydrometeorological event would be the extremely dry year in 2010 in Western Australia since records commenced in 1900.

“Horticultural crops were destroyed (by) flooding in the Gascoyne River and at least 2000 cattle drowned. Whilst the major town of Carnarvon was protected by levies, estimates of the damage caused by the flooding were in the order of 100 million (Australian) dollars,” he added.

A full year after El Niño ceased, Western Australia endured its highest recorded temperatures during the late summer (February) of 2012.

But unlike Australia, most coastal communities around IOC lack resilience.

The flooding of the Kosi River, after its dam burst in August 2008, was a preventable disaster of tragic proportions that claimed 434 lives, left three million people homeless, ruined 340,000 hectares of farmland, damaged 300,000 structures and affected the livelihoods of 2.3 million people.

Flash floods in Karnataka’s drought-ridden districts in October 2009 claimed 36 lives, left 86 missing and submerged 11 districts, ruining thousands of acres of farmland. Reasons for the flash flood were soil erosion, desertification and dam mismanagement in the upper and lower riparian states – in other words, the disaster was entirely preventable.

Similarly, the Thai floods of October 2011 became a disaster when the receding floodwaters were blocked by man-made structures.

“Some types of extreme weather and climate events have increased in frequency or magnitude (and) populations and assets at risk have also increased,” according to the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation.

Long-term disaster management

“Crop insurance (and) contingency funds are necessary policy initiatives,” said R.S. Deshpande, director of the Bangalore-based Institute of Socio-Economic Change.

Mitigating flash floods requires sustained desilting of water bodies. “Dams effectively mitigate floods. Prevention of soil erosion, afforestation, and strengthening embankments also go a long way,” R.C. Jha, chairman of India’s Central Water Commission (CWC) told IPS.

IMD undertakes “observation and collection of hydrometeorological data, transmission of data to forecasting centres and dissemination of hydrometeorological bulletins, including forecasts, to flood forecasting centres of CWC,” Senior Scientist of the Hydrometeorological Division of IMD in New Delhi, Surinder Kaur, told IPS.

But IMD’s exhaustive database is unable to indicate weather patterns. It was not able to predict the severity of Orissa’s supercyclone of October 1999 and the Thai floods last year, both of which had their genesis in a tropical cyclone originating off the Malay Peninsula on Oct. 18 of the respective years.

It is thus clear that a database of rainfall patterns is necessary. Without data analysis or interpretation, data collection will remain a fruitless exercise.

Further aggravating the situation is India’s economic growth that leaves no space for forests and carbon sinks, both vital components in mitigating climate change.

Forests disappear and bioshields wilt, eroding topsoil and river embankments. Years of political connivance with encroachers, corruption and negligence means that dams, reservoirs, lake systems and storm water drains have not been desilted for decades, embankments and river shores are not strengthened and catchment areas, water weirs and drainage basins are encroached upon.

Rajan Joshua a pioneer in watershed management in Andhra Pradesh’s desertified Anantapur district, said, “Watershed management, rainwater harvesting, desilting of all water bodies, ecological succession of endemic biodiversity, and clearance of all encroachment in the catchment area help in mitigating desertification (in the) long term.”

V.S. Prakash, director of the Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre in Bangalore, added, “Drought management in the country primarily hinges on integrated sectoral water resources management and coordination between science, the administration, legal framework, political systems and communities.”

Preparedness for hydrometeorological disasters lies in reducing biodiversity loss, husbanding bioshields, strengthening river embankments, fiscal incentives, mitigating desertification and drought, soil conservation, weather forecasting, record keeping, building resilience, urban planning, corruption- free administration and foolproof inter-agency coordination.

Excerpt:

A reconstructed school at Chukchuka in Car Nicobar Island serves as an emergency shelter. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
PORT BLAIR, India, Jun 3 2012 (IPS)

Islanders on India’s Great Nicobar Island in the Bay of Bengal, barely 144 kilometres from Sumatra, fled when they felt the first tremors of the 8.6 magnitude earthquake on Apr. 11. They leaped across creeks inhabited by estuarine crocodiles, haunted by memories of the devastating 2004 Asian tsunami that took the lives of thousands of people.

The residents took refuge in shelters that lacked ‘earthquake safe’ certification. They were literally caught between the devil and the deep sea,  since a tsunami originating off Sumatra can arrive on the Great Nicobar Island within 15 to 20 minutes.

Though the tsunami didn’t come, the earthquake in April exposed many Indian Ocean littoral states’ lack of preparedness against increasingly frequent natural calamities.

Chief Secretary of the Andaman Nicobar Island (ANI) Administration, Shakti Sinha, said, “We did not issue a tsunami warning in Great Nicobar as (the wave) was likely to hit only the Island’s west coast that is devoid of inhabitants.”

“As per standard operational procedure, the Indian Tsunami Early Warning Centre (ITEWC) identified the regions under risk and issued warnings to only two Nicobar islands, where the public was advised to move to higher grounds,” T. Srinivas Kumar, oceanographer at the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS), informed IPS.

INCOIS is the official agency designated to map the tsunami hazard for all countries on the Indian Ocean Rim – Australia, Bangladesh, Comoros, Reunion Islands, Indonesia, India, Iran, Kenya, Madagascar, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritius, Mozambique, Myanmar, Oman, Pakistan, Seychelles, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Timor Leste, Tanzania and Yemen.

INCOIS is responsible for the safety of 74.85 million coastal residents around the Indian Ocean. Sumatra’s coast has triggered the bulk of the world’s seismic tsunamis in the last millennium.

“The Administration’s actions conformed to National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA)’s and INCOIS’s guidelines; accordingly, islanders from Kamorta and Katchal were evacuated to safety swiftly,” Sinha confirmed.

But Zubair Ahmed, a journalist in Port Blair, told IPS that the absence “of mass transport vehicles for evacuation (shows) the challenge is now translating strategy into to action”.

For instance, India’s state-run TV Doordarshan and All India Radio (AIR) did not receive the official tsunami warning. Thanks to personal initiatives, Doordarshan was “ready with a text scroll and broadcast the first tsunami alert within 15 minutes of the warning”, station director Sajan Gopalan told IPS.

All India Radio in Port Blair aired no announcements about the tsunami warning. “ITEWC disseminates tsunami bulletins to all stakeholders, as mandated in the NDMA guidelines,” INCOIS’s Kumar clarified. That Doordarshan and AIR are not subscribing to early warning alerts highlights a glaring deficiency in disaster preparedness. AIR officials were unavailable for comment.

Ashok Sharma, director of the Directorate of Disaster Management (DDM) for ANI said “We are in the process of incorporating all departments for coordination.”

“The DDM will now upgrade technologies like mass (text messages), electronic display boards and loudspeakers for mass communication of early warning alerts,” Sharma added. The fact that these basic steps are being taken eight years after the Asian Tsunami shows negligence on the part of officials.

Following the tsunami in 2004, India’s Central Food Technology Research Institute “suggested” setting up 22 nationwide hubs for air-dropping culturally sensitive, nutritious, pre-cooked food packets during disasters, but this plan never materialised. However, “two months of supplies are available on all the islands,” Sharma assured IPS.

Still, the Island Administration has no temporary shelters on the disaster-prone islands because the “costs of constructing a second housing establishment for a rare natural calamity are prohibitive; instead government schools serve effectively because they have water supply, sanitation, storage space, and large halls,” Sinha explained.

India is not the only country unprepared for disasters. Sri Lanka’s chaotic traffic congestion during the Apr. 11 emergency prompted President Mahinda Rajapakse to instruct the “staff of the Disaster Management Centre to revise plans for traffic management during evacuation,” J.M.S. Jayaweera, director of the preparedness division of DMC Sri Lanka, told IPS.

In the Maldives, officials struggled to evacuate unevenly distributed populations in far-flung islands.

Meanwhile, an audit of disaster preparedness plans in the ANI betrays even more shortcomings.

The assets, liabilities and consumption patterns of Islanders have not been inventoried, thereby preventing speedy compensation. Surplus telecommunications spectrum for emergencies remains a pipe dream – the INCOIS website was jammed on Apr. 11. Only some earthquake shelters are certified. Without inter-agency coordination, the practice of mock drills every 12 weeks is futile. Without mass transportation systems, traffic management plans are meaningless.

Ambulances do not have state of the art equipment and the Islands themselves do not have an air ambulance. Helicopter services are almost exclusively reserved for bureaucrats, while ailing patients are forced to await the departure of weather-dependent ships, which defeats the purpose of emergency medical care.

Since natural calamities are so unpredictable, disaster mitigation calls for foolproof preparedness against every possible eventuality.

Years of scientific research, including the study of Cetacean stranding on beaches, volcanic activity and historic earthquake patterns, have not brought us any closer to earthquake prediction.

Indonesia sits on the Sunda Trench that is at the vertex of two tectonic plates. The continual thrust of the Sunda Plate against the Indian Plate “causes subduction of the latter under the Sunda Trench. That is the reason why the northwest coast of Sumatra is so prone to large earthquakes”, a study by the Tectonic Observatory of the Caltech University concluded after the Asian Tsunami.

The United States Geological Survey’s “history of earthquakes” database reveals a recurrence of major earthquakes on the 11^th and 26^th of almost every month.

Earthquakes have occurred on Feb. 11, Mar. 11, Apr. 11 and Aug. 11 in the Malacca Straits, and Dec. 11 in Taiwan. The Andaman earthquake struck on Jun. 26, 1941, the Great Alaska earthquake on Mar. 27th, 1964, the Assisi earthquake on Sept. 26, 1997, the Gujarat Earthquake on Jan. 26, 2001, the Bam earthquake on Dec. 26, 2003 and the Asian Tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004. Large tsunamis have recurred in the same fault zone once in every 50-60-year cycle.

Considering that “the 2004 earthquake was only a partial rupture of the seismic stress” according to Caltech’s Tectonic Observatory, governments around the Indian Ocean need to be prepared for even worse disasters than those we have already seen.

*This is the first of a two-part series on hydrometeorological disasters in the Indian Ocean Rim.

(END)

A glimpse of seagrass close to the seashore of the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park, which is home to a spectrum of marine wildlife Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
RAMESHWARAM, India, May 2 2012 (IPS)

Forest officials of the Gulf of Mannar Marine Biosphere Reserve abutting the Palk Straits between India and Sri Lanka have reported a decline in marine wildlife, as smugglers exploiting lax conservation laws in the region tank up on protected species used in traditional Chinese medicines and fine dining.

In coordination with the Indian Coast Guard, forest officials have recorded more than 200 cases of smuggling, accounting for the loss of over 13,000 kilogrammes of sea cucumbers (Holothurian scabra) and seahorses (Hippocampus species) in the last 16 months alone.

Illegal marine wildlife traders in India smuggle their catch to neighbouring countries like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, where the red-flagged items become legal marine exports to other Southeast Asian countries due to exemptions in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

“The seahorse found in the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park is one of the five rarer species of seahorses,” Shekhar Kumar Niraj, field director of the Gulf of Mannar Marine Biosphere Reserve, informed IPS.

In 2001, India’s stringent Wildlife Protection Act listed sea cucumbers and seahorses as ‘schedule I’, thereby making forest officials legally responsible for their protection.

Around the same time as this classification came into play, the markets for traditional Chinese medicines exploded.

A fragile ecosystem

The Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park (GOMMNP), part of the Gulf of Mannar Marine Biosphere Reserve, is an undersea reserve formed by the strip of land that once connected India to Sri Lanka. The peninsula divides the Palk Straits in the north from the Gulf of Mannar in the south.

The fragile reef ecosystem is shallow and forms the habitat for corals, crabs, clown fish, dugongs, dolphins, porpoise, prawns, parrot fish, sea cucumbers, seahorses, sea snakes, turtles, whales and a whole list of highly endangered endemic marine wildlife.

The marine diversity includes four species of shrimp, 106 species of crabs, 17 types of sea cucumbers, 466 species of molluscs, 108 species of sponges and 100 species of echinoderms.

More than 2000 species of fin fish are found in the Gulf of Mannar and seagrass is also clearly visible in the shallow sea. Prosopsis jujuba, a shrub forest species endemic to dry arid zones, “is surprisingly dominant in the mangroves and mud flats, amply justifying the protection lent to the marine national park,” Sundar Kumar, the wildlife warden of the underwater reserve, told IPS.

“The hotbeds and kingpins of marine wildlife crime are in Rameshwaram, Mandapam, and Tuticorin all around the Indian coast of the GOMMNP,” T. Rajendran, assistant conservator of forests for the marine reserve, told IPS.

Lose-lose deal for fisherfolk

“There is no local consumption or markets (for smuggled goods). Only the middlemen gain. These are the (people) who are connected to international crime syndicates,” added Niraj. These ‘middlemen’ buy sea cucumbers from fisherfolk for about 50 dollars per kilogramme and sell them for a profit of 600 percent, at 307 dollars per kilogramme.

“Sea cucumbers have ecologically significant roles in scavenging coasts and seabeds, which in turn helps other species like corals and seagrass to flourish and propagate,” Niraj explained.

“Only owners of trawler fishing boats indulge in poaching sea cucumbers, which is a double whammy for us traditional fishermen; not only is the catch depleting, but fuel prices are increasing. The additional burden of illegal poaching of marine wildlife by trawler fishermen make us suspect in the eyes of the enforcement agencies,” lamented K. David, a traditional fisherman in Rameshwaram.

Field director Niraj disputes the fact that trawler fisherfolk are the only smugglers involved in this rackets, pointing to statistics of recent raids that show traditional (Dinghy) fishermen also indulging in the smuggling of sea cucumbers and seahorses.

David is convinced that traditional fishing will come to an end when his generation is “dead and gone”, since youngsters like 10-year-old Vishal Selvan and 11-year-old Alan want to become merchant navy captains and Indian Administrative Service officers respectively.

In order to keep traditional fishermen from engaging with smugglers out of economic desperation, employment schemes have been put in place to guarantee the livelihoods of various fisherfolk, in the face of depleting fish stocks.

“The alternative livelihood initiatives carried out by the United Nations Development Programme-Global Environmental Facility (UNDP-GEF) through the Gulf of Mannar Marine Biosphere Reserve Trust (GoMBRT) include Palmyra mat weaving and thatch making, clown fish and other ornamental fish fattening, goat rearing, jasmine cultivation, betel leaf cultivation, salt-fish making and plaster of Paris for doll-making,” V. Deepak Samuel, programme specialist at the energy and environment unit of the UNDP-GEF (GoMBRT), told IPS.

Unchecked crime

“We are as yet unable to trace the route of smuggled goods and links beyond Sri Lanka to markets in the Far East, primarily because once the goods arrive in Sri Lanka they become legal exports, blocking our investigations further,” explained a wildlife crime inspector, speaking under condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety.

Patrolling the sea is all the more challenging given enforcement agencies’ meagre logistical capacity.

Led by Rajendran, the entire patrol operation includes four range forest officers, 22 foresters, 11 guards, two watchers and 33 anti-poaching camp watchers who share six jeeps, six wireless sets, two base stations, six anti-poaching camps, eight mechanised patrol boats and three speed boats between them – to patrol an area of 10,500 square kilometres or 18,900 nautical miles.

They lack night vision lamps and financial incentives. They are no match for the 25,000 well equipped trawlers that fish illegally across the whole Marine Biosphere Reserve every day.

Still, the greatest challenge is not out on the water.

“Opposition to protection of marine wildlife (and) fishes comes from even official establishments like the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, the Marine Products Export Development Authority and the National Institute of Oceanography – all in the name of livelihoods,” Niraj said.

“Growing numbers of anthropologists propagate illusions glossing over the likely consequences that would emerge should we lose the remaining biodiversity… They quote the Convention on Biological Diversity where sustainability, right to access and benefits sharing are the guiding principles. However, sustainability that applies to economic principles may not exactly apply to ecology because of biological principles that are very different,” Niraj explained.

Poaching of sea cucumbers even in the seas around the Andaman Nicobar Islands is so rampant that natives report they hardly sight sea cucumbers anymore.

*Malini Shankar is a wildlife photojournalist and filmmaker based in Bangalore.

These sand dunes in the Thar Desert in India are one of identified sites for cheetah reintroduction. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
BANGALORE, Apr 11 2012 (IPS)

On Monday, the Indian Supreme Court declined to call a scheduled hearing of the Federal Ministry of Environment and Forests regarding plans to reintroduce African cheetahs, which were declared extinct in 1952 as a result of over-hunting by India’s nobility, into 10 identified sites in north and central India by May 2012.

The proposed hearing was a result of objections filed by the state of Gujarat about the Indian government’s decision to undertake Project Cheetah, armed with a budget of 58 million dollars, to restore the animal’s ‘lost heritage’ in the country.

“The cheetah is the only large carnivore that has been extirpated, mainly by over-hunting in India in historical times. India now has the economic ability to consider restoring its lost natural heritage for ethical as well as ecological reasons,” according to the study ‘Assessing the Potential for Reintroducing the Cheetah in India’ compiled by Y.V. Jhala, carnivore biologist at the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) and M. K. Ranjitsinh, of the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI).

The WII-WTI joint study assesses 10 sites from seven landscapes located in five states – Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh – for their potential to harbour viable cheetah populations.

“In the first phase of reintroduction 10 – 15 individual animals will be brought into each of the three sites and then supplemented every two to five years as needed. Overall about 45 cheetahs will be reintroduced. This year the budget allocation is 351,000 (dollars). A large part of the cost is for habitat restoration and voluntary relocation of villagers with good incentives on par with Project Tiger. The cheetahs are being donated by the Cheetah Conservation Foundation of Namibia,” Jhala told IPS.

The Government of India initiated its own study back in 2009, which recommended importing healthy populations of cheetah from both Africa and Iran to sustain the gene pool for the long-term conservation of the species, provided that landscape and habitat conservation, as well as relocation of human settlements, go on simultaneously as planned.

The WII-WTI study reasons that the cheetah’s presence will restore degraded habitats where its prey base – black bucks, deer and hare – thrive.

According to Jhala, “The cheetah was a major component of the ecological process that shaped the communities of India. The speed of the chinkara and blackbuck evolved directly due to predation pressure by the cheetah. It was also a top predator in several ecosystems within India especially in the arid and semi arid grassland scrub systems, but it also flourished in dry and open forest systems along with other large carnivores like the leopard, lion, and tiger.”

Semi arid scrub jungles, sand dunes and grasslands are characteristic ecosystems in the 10 identified sites of reintroduction.

The project was all set to take place from March to May but the Supreme Court hearing posed an unexpected hurdle.

Now, it appears the case is yet again “on hold”, but the controversy continues unabated.

Too many cats, too little space

The Gujarat government strongly opposes cheetah reintroduction because one of the identified sites – the Kuno Palpur wildlife sanctuary – is also the identified site for relocation of some of the Asiatic Lions from Gujarat, where they are overpopulated in the limited confines of Gir National Park.

Kuno has other wild cats including tigers and leopards all of which relocated or migrated naturally from their original habitats. Gujarat contends that so many wild cats cannot coexist and compete for the same scarce prey.

Since the lion is considered the “pride” of Gujarat, the state government has strongly resisted Project Cheetah and found unlikely support among conservationists who oppose reintroduction of an already extinct species, and instead wish to channel all available resources towards conservation of the tiger.

Cheetah reintroduction is only a distraction from the tiger crisis, they aver.

“The cheetah reintroduction project is poorly conceived scientifically and has very little probability of establishing a viable population of wild cheetahs in India over the longer term. It therefore is a distraction and waste of scarce conservation resources,” says wildlife biologist Ullas Karanth of the Wildlife Conservation Society in Bangalore.

Despite a concerted effort to safeguard endangered tigers, “we are continuing to lose the tiger in many reserves (and) habitats,” Praveen Bhargav, of Bangalore’s Wildlife First, told IPS.

“The WII recommendations on securing scientifically identified high-priority landscapes are not being implemented due to conflicts with other development ministries. Furthermore, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs is refusing to acknowledge the negative impacts caused by hyper-stretching the implementation of the Forest Rights Act. Throwing in the cheetah in this complex cauldron of conflicts is a sure recipe for disaster,” he warned.

India has seven other wildcat species: the caracal, jungle cat, Asian wild cat, leopard cat, clouded leopard, rusty spotted cat and snow leopard, leading many to question why importing cheetahs is taking precedence over preservation of local species.

“(Project Cheetah) is not intended to undermine the conservation of other species but we need to do both: conserve tigers, lions, as well as bring in cheetahs that have become extinct due to humans. It is our moral and ethical obligation to restore our lands, recently lost biological heritage. India now has the economic ability to restore its lost heritage,” argued Jhala.

The 2009 government study cites the primary risk factor in the operation as human-animal conflict.

“However, today this landscape is characterised by low prey densities, probably due to poaching by tribal communities that reside within the protected areas,” it said, a situation that will only be exacerbated by the presence of yet another hunter, looking for food. Relocation as a wildlife management technique is a successful experiment in many parts of Africa where habitats are shrinking but wildlife population is increasing, as strict vigils deter poachers.

But others believe that cheetahs are so fragile that it would be safer to breed them in captivity in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. Reintroducing them to the wilderness has proved in the past to be a traumatic experiment, since they are, by temperament, as pusillanimous as domestic pet cats and are not known to battle with other big cats like lions. At least in Africa, the cheetahs are familiar with lions, but they have absolutely no experience coexisting with tigers, which they will be forced to do in India.

Wild cats of different families normally cannot coexist. In the aftermath of the massacre of all 22 tigers in India’s premier Sariska Tiger Reserve, the leopard population exploded. Cheetah reintroduction could easily usher in unknown consequences. A project that lacks the support of sufficient wildlife psychology research is tantamount to gambling tax-payers’ many in a costly venture that could be disastrous for all the populations involved.

Without addressing the basic malaise that was responsible for the slaughter of the precious Sariska tigers – human-animal conflict – reintroducing cheetahs could be reduced to an exotic wildlife experiment, at the risk of grave damages.

Leading thinkers in the field believe India would do well to conserve its political will and scarce resources to safeguard the habitat and gene pool of the remaining tigers and lions, before bringing in a whole new beast altogether.

*Malini Shankar is a wildlife photojournalist and filmmaker based in Bangalore

Fishers benefit greatly from community radio. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
BANGALORE, India, Apr 6 2012 (IPS)

Community Radio (CR) broadcasting in India, long bound by red tape, has received a fillip with the government announcing a hike in advertising tariffs and the auction of licenses.

“The increase in advertising tariffs will improve revenue generation for CR stations and make them sustainable,” Sajan Venniyoor, founder member of the New Delhi-based CR Broadcasters Forum, told IPS.

On Mar. 25, the Directorate of Audio Visual Publicity (DAVP) announced a quadrupling of advertising revenues for CR stations to Indian rupees 240 (4.5 dollars) per minute.

Venniyoor, who is on the expert committee of the government’s CR Broadcast Support Fund, said although CR stations have support from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and multilateral funding, things will vastly improve once advertising revenues roll in.

“Besides, large infusions of money from government sources could prove to be a double-edged sword and completely skew the programming of a CR station,” Venniyoor said.

“As things stand CR growth has been stymied by security concerns and a telecom ministry which treats a wireless license application from a small, rural CR station in exactly the same way as it treats a mobile tower application from a telecom major, leading to a merry paper chase,” Venniyoor said.

R. Sreedhar, director of the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA), calculates that the new tariff will allow CR stations to more than break even, given that the average running expenditure is about 2,000 dollars per month.

CEMCA works to encourage the development and sharing of open learning, distance education knowledge, resources and technologies.

“A CR station is supposed to broadcast a minimum of eight hours, though the license is for 24 hours. Even if they manage to get advertisements for about 50 percent of the allowed time, the station becomes sustainable,” Sreedhar told IPS.

If a CR station gets advertisements for 20 minutes per day, it means it can earn about 2,838 dollars a month with enough to pay the advertisement managers, said Sreedhar, adding that advertising on CR has the potential to boost the local economy and human resources.

The reluctance of the government to allow expansion of CR can be seen from the fact it issued the first license seven years after a Supreme Court ruling in 1995 declaring airwaves to be public property.

News reporting has remained banned on CR and a new policy announced in 2006 stipulated that 50 percent of the content had to be created by and for the community.

Supporters of CR consider 2011 to be a landmark year because that was when CEMCA announced that as many as 231 licenses were in the pipeline and a CR Broadcast Support Fund was mooted.

Given the lack of ‘definition of news’, CR broadcasters fear that airing anything remotely connected to current affairs could result in the revocation of license.

Ajith Lawrence, who started Radio Alakal (Radio Waves) in 2006 on the strength of the Supreme Court ruling, came to grief after being on the air for just a few months, thanks to narrow interpretations of what constitutes news.

Lawrence said Radio Alakal was started with a view to providing fishers and their families living on the Thiruvananthapuram coastal belt with vital information such as weather conditions and the availability of catch along with music and entertainment.

Radio Alakal quickly caught on because the fishers were already sensitised to the value of timely information through having lived through the devastation of the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

“Even the tsunami experience did not stop local officials from withdrawing the license,” Lawrence told IPS. “It is time the government woke up to the huge potential of CR in disaster management and in improving the lives of marginalised coastal communities.”

In such circumstances, CR stations have desisted from reporting even earthquakes.

Ashish Sen, president of the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMRC) in Asia Pacific says that “without definition of what comprises news, confusion reigns – the digging of a well or a marriage can be news in a small village.”

Sreedhar believes that there is now new thinking in government on CR going by a bold plan to auction FM licenses and earn revenues. In a statement on Mar. 20, the DAVP announced that it expects to earn over 341 million dollars from the auctions.

There are fears, however, that some CR stations have huge advantages over others when it comes to attracting advertisers.

Arti Jaiman, station director of Gurgaon Ki Awaaz (Voice of Gurgaon), says that the mission of his CR, to articulate the rights of marginalised communities, is not likely to attract advertisement revenue.

On the other hand Gurgaon ki Awaaz, which started broadcasting in November 2009, is located in Gurgaon which falls in the state of Haryana but has the advantage of being part of the National Capital Region of Delhi.

Other CR stations do not have such advantages of location and, given the government’s restrictions on range and power of transmitters, may not reach the kind of audiences that will attract advertisers.

“We will just have to wait and see how all this plays out,” Venniyoor said.

*This story was produced with the support of UNESCO.

As the amount of protected forest dwindles rapidly in India, indigenous groups and wildlife find themselves living cheek to jowl in an increasingly contested space.

The Billigiri Ranga Temple Hills tiger reserve (BRT) in the South Indian state of Karnataka has become the site at which impoverished tribes like the Soligas and endangered species such as tigers are scrabbling for survival in the tide of India’s rampant neoliberal development program that is throttling both the environment and indigenous peoples.

Though the Soligas have traditionally been a subsistence community, their newfound participation in the market economy has made them reliant on the trade of non-timber forest products (NTFPs), which is detrimental to the local ecology.

“The Soligas’ dependence on different types of spinach, lichens, mosses, honey, seeds, nuts, berries, yams, roots, tubers, and fruits have reduced drastically, as these products [no longer] generate a substantial income,” Suresh Patil, deputy director of the Anthropological Survey of India, told IPS.

“Instead, they now prefer to work as daily wage labourers in the coffee and tea estates surrounding the forests,” or engage in extracting and selling forest products.

In order to sustainably integrate tribes into the mainstream economy the government of India introduced Large Scale Adivasi Multi Purpose Societies (LAMPS), a scheme through which forest contractors buy forest produce from tribes under the supervision of forest officials.

These contractors would then supply the produce to large economic enterprises for the manufacture of cosmetics, herbal medicines, and pharmaceuticals.

This system has created a strain between tribes and the forests in which they live, leaving tribes aspiring for a higher standard of living but constantly unable to achieve it, given their battle for space with the wildlife.

The Central Tiger Task Force report ‘Joining the Dots’ claimed, “Villagers (in Karnataka) regard the tiger and the park administration as their common enemy number one. They live sandwiched between the two, and are bitter about their desperately wretched existence.”

“Thousands of years ago humans could coexist with wildlife, for they took from forests only those resources needed for their basic survival. There were no linkages to the market then,” Ullas Karanth, a biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, told IPS. Now, however, the Soligas’ use of cattle and wells – in their effort to generate more income and escape the throes of poverty – has ramped up the human- animal conflict in the already overcrowded reserve.

Tigers and leopards have begun to prey on cattle, causing great hardships for tribe members. Crop raiding elephants also threaten forest dwellers and squatters.

Human settlements in forests account for deforestation, rendering thousands of creatures homeless. Deforestation also traumatises migrating wildlife and separates individuals from the herd, which can lead to inbreeding.

Still, experts point out that the Soligas are only marginally responsible for deforestation when compared to the scale of deforestation perpetuated by the state forest department itself. Industrial farming in the BRT, including huge coffee estates owned by the biggest industrial houses in India, has seriously impinged on the protected land, pushing wildlife further into a concentrated space with tribes.

Following a lengthy lawsuit, which finally culminated this year in the Soligas winning access to 60 percent of the protected tiger reserve, conservationists fear that the tigers will bear the brunt of dwindling forest space.

The renowned tiger conservationist Valmik Thapar remarked famously, “[That] tigers and people are forced to co-exist, through some innovative scheme of increased use of underutilised forest resources involving the local people, does not make any sense to tiger conservationists, especially since human and cattle populations are constantly rising.”

“Each tiger must eat 50 cow-sized animals a year to survive, and if you put [a hungry tiger] amidst cows and people, the conflict will be eternal. Tigers [have witnessed a decline of] over 95 percent of their former range in India.”

“The premise of continued co-existence over vast landscapes where tigers thrive ecologically and people thrive economically is an impractical dream, with which I totally disagree. Such dreaming cannot save the tiger in the real world,” he said.

“This scenario is a “no win” situation for everyone and [could] result in the eventual extinction of tiger populations Alternatives where tigers have priority inside identified protected reserves and people have priority outside them have to be explored fast and implemented expeditiously. There is no other way,” Thapar concluded.

In 1998, when the Bhadra wildlife sanctuary was officially declared a protected tiger reserve, the government of Karnataka – assisted by a generous World Bank loan – earmarked a sizeable plot of land to create a township for relocated forest dwellers.

Indigenous groups living in the Bhadra sanctuary became the beneficiaries of a very sound relocation package. All the settlers were given ample arable land for cultivation, housing with sanitation, infrastructure for a sufficient power and water supply, agricultural produce markets, and facilities such as banks and schools and hospitals for both humans and livestock.

The Soligas have fiercely resisted a similar relocation package, claiming they would rather suffer death than be separated from their ancestral land.

However, conservationists are agreed on one thing: if the Soligas’ move to resist relocation is replicated in the future, habitat conservation could be futile. According to experts like Thapar, “The present concept of a ‘new’ coexistence [between tribes and tigers] is a utopian idea and will not work. This I am absolutely clear about.”

*This is the second of a two-part series on the struggle for space between indigenous peoples and endangered species.

*Malini Shankar is a wildlife photojournalist and filmmaker based in Bangalore.

Tucked away in a dense and ecologically diverse tiger reserve in Southern India, tribes-people and wildlife defenders are locked in a battle of indigenous peoples’ rights versus wildlife rights.

Earlier this year the Soligas – a tribe hailing from the Billigiri Ranga Temple Hills tiger reserve (BRT) – won the rights to their ancestral land, following a thorny legal encounter with the state forest department, which had earlier threatened to displace 1,500 indigenous families in order to protect 30 endangered tigers.

Tribal representatives insist that the Soligas’ presence on the reserve is not detrimental to the tigers, claiming back in December, “We have been the ones who looked out for the tigers. Give us poison rather than move us from our home.”

Last month the tribe secured access to 60 percent of the forest that they claim is their ‘birthright’ and rejected a relocation package outside the tiger reserve, which is situated at the confluence of the Eastern and Western Ghats in Chamrajnagar district in India’s southern state of Karnataka.

A press release by the UK-based tribal advocacy group Survival International said last year, “This unprecedented move brings an end to (the tribe’s) fears of eviction and the ban on their right to hunt and cultivate.”

But wildlife conservationists across India are deeply alarmed by the tribe’s decision to stay in the BRT, since it does not appear to take into account the irreversible impact of human settlement on wildlife populations and complex ecologies.

Many experts believe that continued human presence in the small, bio-diverse forest could be detrimental to the wildlife, particularly pyramid species like tigers.

The BRT was officially declared a protected reserve last year, when scientists discovered it was home to a huge variety of wildlife including endangered tigers, leopards, elephants, wild dogs, bears, 270 species of endemic birds, scores of snake varieties and other reptiles, as well as turtles and monitor lizards, all in a 541 square kilometre forest.

Anthropologists say this dense concentration of wildlife is already a strain on nature’s ability to provide adequately for all the forest’s dwellers. Add to this a human settlement that relies heavily on forest produce for its survival and the situation bodes badly for the wildlife.

The Soligas are considered by many to be to be an environmentally “low impact” group. They worship a 1000-year-old tree as their supreme deity and have, for centuries, lived as one with the forest.

“The Soligas’ traditional health care system is holistic, [relying on] herbal remedies. Their customary diet includes millet, pulses and 20 varieties of leafy vegetables found in the forest,” said H. Sudarshan of the tribal advocacy NGO Vivekananda Girijan Kalyan Kendra (VGKK).

However, the Soligas’ transition from a subsistence community into increased participation in the formal market economy through trade in forest products has increased their environmental impact on the reserve.

“Excluding firewood extraction, trade and consumption of minor forest produce (like herbs, roots, tubers, barks and mosses) account for 60 percent of their total cash income; they supplement their incomes by working as daily wage labourers with either the forest department or with the forest fringe coffee estates,” Siddappa Shetty, a senior fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment in the BRT, told IPS.

“Granting land and community rights within Protected Areas – which [comprise] less than four percent of India’s landscape – to growing populations of forest dwellers engaged in raising crops and livestock and commercial collection of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) for markets is a retrograde step,” Praveen Bhargav of the Bangalore-based Wildlife First, added.

“Since India’s independence, vast areas of wildlife habitats under the control of local communities have been decimated. While the consequences of mining, dams and wildlife resorts are clearly visible, the destruction caused by millions of people extracting forest products remains largely unseen,” he told IPS.

“Today, India’s Protected Areas are the last refuges where endangered species have a slim chance of survival. Rampant, market-driven exploitation of NTFPs in these ecologically sensitive hotspots could affect the delicate balance of nature,” he said.

According to a recent study by Aditi Sinha and Kamaljit S. Bawa, researchers at the Department of Biology at the University of Massachusetts, “the Soligas” – meaning children of Bamboo – “harvest an average of 86 percent of the fruit yield per tree.”

Quoting other scientific studies, Bhargav added, “Current harvesting techniques used by the Soligas have negative impacts on trees since they focus on maximizing economic returns by adopting methods of extraction like lopping branches and cutting trees. Such practices can ultimately decrease the rates at which trees grow, thereby making the extraction of Phyllanthus fruits unsustainable.”

Given that at least eight varieties of birds, 100 species of insects, one leopard, one bear, a dozen Langur monkeys, a colony of 200 bats, a herd of 35 spotted deer and five snakes can dwell in and around a single tree in a tropical forest like the BRT, every tree culled by human beings contributes to the human-animal conflict for space.

Statistics from the Chamrajnagar Deputy Commissioner’s office revealed the tribal population to be 60,930 in 2001.

According to the Wildlife Institute of India (WII)’s most recent tiger census, the 541 square kilometre reserve was also home to 37 tigers in 2010. An average adult Royal Bengal Tiger needs at least 50 square kilometres of space, which means that the current terrain deficit for the endangered creatures is staggering.

“Tigers occupy areas where human impact is minimal; high tiger densities occur in areas with low human disturbances. When humans outnumber wildlife, the wildlife will not survive,” Y.V. Jhala, head of the WII’s national tiger census, told IPS.

“While it is imperative that we redress injustices done to forest dwellers, it is vital that we do not simultaneously perpetuate injustices to wildlife, which are far more disenfranchised,” Barghav told IPS.

*This is the first of a two-part series on the struggle for space between indigenous peoples and endangered species.

*Malini Shankar is a wildlife photojournalist and filmmaker based in Bangalore.