While tiger tourism has exploded nationwide, making many of the stakeholders richer, poor villagers living near tiger reserves often pay a heavy price for it
The poisoning of a tigress and her four cubs in the MM Hills region of Karnataka is akin to a chronic ailment which refuses to die but manifests its scare only once in a while, thereby lulling the senses and giving a false 'all is well' impression.
On the face of it, the Karnataka incident – three people have already been arrested – is a classic case of vendetta. A tiger straying out of a reserve kills a cow, infuriating the farmer whose livelihood depends on his cattle.
To add insult to injury, the forest department, flouting directions put in place by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), doesn’t offer the monetary compensation in time to the farmer. Or, offers too less an amount.
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In disgust, the farmer exercises the only option he believes is available to him. He laces the cow or buffalo’s carcass with poison, ensuring a painful death for the killer animal when it returns to finish off the meat. This particular case has created sensational headlines because the tigress came to the 'crime scene' with her four cubs.
Two emerging realities
That such poisonings are still taking place in various parts of India, no matter how infrequently, is the elephant in the room that we refuse to see. But, see it we must, and do something about it fast.
The babus sitting in their AC chambers in the corridors of power, formulating policies for saving India’s wildlife, seldom understand the plight of villagers hit by man-animal conflict. And, the obvious dire need to speed up the compensation mechanism.
Maybe because of my work as a wildlife filmmaker, which regularly takes me to various hotspots for animals and birds all over the country, I can report about two emerging realities that are at odds with each other.
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The first reality is about the way tiger tourism has exploded all across the country over the past two decades. Not only is it good for the tiger, it has also brought much-needed economic prosperity to diverse sections of society associated with this sector: resort owners (the dizzying pace with which new resorts and homestays are spreading deserves a separate story), guides, drivers, nature gift-shops and roadside eateries around the tiger reserves.
Thanks to our wonderful poster boy in hypnotic stripes whose one glimpse is enough to stop a runaway horse, people around the tiger reserves never had it so good. A tiger sighting makes everybody happy – and many people rich.
Less of a hero
Of course, not everybody benefits from tiger tourism, and that’s the other, unenviable, reality. Millions of farmers who till the land from sun-up to sun-down in the regions bordering the tiger reserves, with a few cattle for additional financial support, do not think much of a tiger.
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These people, not associated with tourism sector in any way, often view tigers and leopards as threat to their lives and to their livestock.
Millions of farmers who till the land from sun-up to sun-down do not think much of the tiger. In all the economically poor zones of India, tigers' survival faces an uphill task.
Their fears are not unfounded. Several areas in the Chandrapur region of Maharashtra – the seat of its most popular Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve – have turned into veritable killing fields. Not a week passes when some incident of human killing or maiming by a tiger does not get reported from here.
The story is similar in the villages sprinkled around Pilibhit Tiger Reserve, which more or less dethroned the venerable Dudhwa as the most popular reserve for big cats in Uttar Pradesh over the past five or so years.
Tigers attacking people in the villages surrounding Pilibhit have become such a recurrent theme, and it is happening at such monotonous regularity that even the local media has lost interest in such incidents.
Major threat to big cat
Early this year, the venerable Science magazine of the United States, while commending India for having doubled its tiger population in a decade, also pointed out the potential threat to the big cat: triggered by bad economies of certain states.
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This was not an opinion piece, mind you, but a detailed, well-researched report whose lead writer was YV Jhala, a big cat expert and former senior scientist with the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), ably assisted by Rajesh Gopal, the former head of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA).
The report held that in all the economically poor zones of India, tigers’ survival faces an uphill task.
But I am talking about something which the report did not take note of. Namely, the financially stretched groups of small farmers and villagers barely survive in the midst of throbbing tiger tourism and its large number of beneficiaries.
This may shock many big cat lovers, but to these marginalised people, their one precious cow holds more value than a tiger. But the babus sitting in their air-conditioned chambers in the corridors of power, formulating policies for saving India’s wildlife, seldom see the real picture. And, the obvious dire need to speed up the compensation mechanism.
(The Federal seeks to present views and opinions from all sides of the spectrum. The information, ideas or opinions in the articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Federal)
