Protecting wildlife and people

Protecting wildlife and people
H.S. Panwar

The rural development strategy in the forested regions continues to suffer from inappropriateness and inadequacy of resources. The strategy has ignored the symbiotic relationship between natural resources and people and the vitiated humans-to-forest ratio.

The aim should be to enhance economic productivity per unit area so that more people may derive sustenance from the reduced resource base. Lack of funds, because of low priority to rural development in the hinterland in national planning, is also a major deficiency. Traditional lifestyles with intrinsic sustainability and a favourable humans-to-land ratio are no longer practicable in most locations. Lack of viable alternatives and the recent commercialisation of produces of all forest and other natural systems compel people to overexploit. The local people, the natural systems and the wildlife living in these systems are all victims.

Wildlife conservation aims at safeguarding the natural ecosystems and encompasses also the security of the now commercially important biological diversity of these systems. This imperils our food and environmental security. However, not just big dams and mining projects but the aberrations in land and natural resource use as well as the inappropriate strategy of rural development constitute the threat. It is unrealistic to expect even `conservative' India to do away with mega development and industrial projects. The challenge is for all right-minded and value-inspired people to make common cause in imparting due sense and restraint to the development process so as to spare the important conservation areas and minimise environmental damage at all project sites. The affected people must be rehabilitated and viable alternatives developed for the lost resources.

Thanks to bandwagonism of various kinds, the organisations in states responsible for forest and wildlife conservation are branded as anti-development and anti-people. Many NGOs, flush with donor funds bestowed upon them in the name of human rights, find these organisations convenient scapegoats. They become handy tools for legitimising political expediency, enhancing the damage to wildlife conservation. Thanks to these difficulties, even committed officers avoid wildlife postings. The more steadfast are thrown out. Lately, the organised mafia trafficking internationally in wildlife products such as tiger bone, animal skins, ivory, rhino horn, and shahtoosh has made inroads into many major protected areas.

The local peoples' alienation from conservation has been enhanced by such commercialisation. Take, for instance, the central highlands belt stretching across Orissa, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. The moist, deciduous forests here are subjected to many fires every year first for new fodder in winter, then in the spring for mahua and tendu leaf and finally, in the the late summer, to facilitate collection of the sal seed. Denudation of the forest floor, failure of natural regeneration of trees, impoverished nutrient cycling, declining vigour of standing trees and shrubs and the concomitant epidemics of pathogens and pests are the consequences.

Cash-strapped states have little to offer the people and take recourse to populist measures like opening up protected areas to collection of various forest produce and even go to the extent of denotifying or reducing the extent of such areas. In many states, the Central assistance for wildlife conservation gets used for mitigating fiscal imbalances and, in some, gets diverted to other budget heads. The Centre remains a helpless onlooker.Unless the wildlife conservation agencies and concerned individuals become aware of the holistic picture and pull their act together in a common strategy, we have little hope. It is in this context that one of the main planks of the new strategy addresses `integration of conservation and development at landscape level'. This bases itself upon the close links between land use, rural and industrial development, dependence of people upon natural resources and the needs of nature conservation in a reasonably large tract defined by physical and socio-economic parameters of interdependence. Awareness-based, mutual accommodation of concerns would be the aim of such a strategy aimed at the security of soil, water, biodiversity and the well- being of the local people. From the mid-70s onwards, the strategy has been tried around some national parks with good results, and its adoption on a larger scale holds promise.

The writer is a wildlife conservationist