WHEN I first came to Ranthambhore in 1971 with my father, I remember going into the park and seeing people everywhere. What are lakes today were wheat fields with people guarding them day and night. The roads going in and out had a constant flow of traffic from bullock carts and bicycles to people on foot. Any land that could be cultivated was under the plough. Any other land that was left was over-grazed by cattle which belonged to the Gujjar tribes who lived in the park. If you were lucky then maybe you would see spotted deer or sambar and even they ran away on seeing an approaching vehicle. Seeing a tiger was unimaginable. Less than 15 tigers inhabited the park at the time.

To the outside world, the Gujjar tribes lived an idyllic life. No electricity, no education, no access to modern medicine. Mortality of every kind was high, population growth was high as was child marriage and having many children was the norm. Yet it seemed idyllic because they lived a frugal existence, living off the land, thriving on animal husbandry and subsistence farming. There is a common joke about their simplicity – ‘Once a Gujjar from the villages in Ranthambhore caught a train and took his shoes off when he boarded the train. He was surprised not to find them when he got off at the next station.’ Really cute? It is this simplicity that makes it possible for everyone to exploit these people. Politicians, bureaucrats, and traders – everyone takes advantage of their simplicity and they do not know any better. This is an age when everyone has to interact and trade with each other. Invariably the less educated people end up being exploited.

The Gujjars are not traditionally agricultural tribes, so the little agriculture they did was poorly managed and yielded a below average crop. Animal husbandry was the mainstay of their income. The need to sell milk forced them to interact with traders in town. Being a simple, illiterate tribe they were invariably cheated by the traders. Being totally illiterate meant that even their animal rearing practices were very basic and as such could never really achieve the true potential of the business itself. For many it meant having their numerous cattle free grazing in the park, making even fertile pastures into over-grazed and degraded landscapes. As their own populations grew they need more land and more cattle to meet even their basic survival needs. Sustainability even at subsistence level is questionable.

In 1976, with the park having come under Project Tiger, a resettlement programme was launched and 13 villages were convinced to relocate. Once this happened the lakes of Ranthambhore once again became lakes. The agricultural land became pasture land for ungulates to thrive on and the tiger could roam freely without threat. Soon Ranthambhore became the most popular tourist destination. There is no doubt in my mind that had the resettlement of the Gujjar tribes not taken place, the tiger and its habitat would by now have disappeared as it has in the neighbouring Sawai Mansingh and Karauli Tiger Reserves. Life for those who moved out is better because they now have access to education, health care and a road infrastructure to take and sell produce. The ones still inside the park are today desperate to move out.

 

 

With the resettlement of the Gujjar’s a new problem emerged. The Meena tribes who lived on the outside fringe of the park began to eye the new pastures inside the park. While the Gujjars lived inside the park, the Meena’s could not graze their cattle inside as the Gujjar’s would not allow them to. Now this was suddenly possible. As the Meena’s were more militant and better connected, the park versus people conflict escalated. Local politicians belonging to the same tribes provided necessary encouragement. In the absence of political will this conflict has led to the killing of forest guards, brutally injuring a park director and deputy superintendent of police with no one ever having been arrested or convicted. As always, politics took precedence over protecting our natural heritage.

Simultaneously, the population around the park has gone up from less than 70,000 in 1973 to over 200,000 now.

As another tiger crisis looms, saving protected areas has become a priority and debates rage as to how it can be best done. Some claim that handing protected areas over to tribes is better than keeping them sterile from human intervention. The belief is that tribes care more for their environment and will therefore better protect the parks.

We completely disagree with the argument that local tribes will better manage the protected areas only because they are tribals. In Ranthambhore there have been common lands in the form of gauchara, siwaichak and reserve forests where people could graze their cattle and collect dry wood. All these lands belonged to local panchayats and were meant to be managed by them. Have they been managed? In reality, almost all the siwaichak and gauchara lands have been encroached upon and the little that remains is completely degraded. On the pretext of collecting dry wood people continue to go into reserve forests and cut down trees only to go back a few days later, when it is dry, to bring it out. The park would be completely destroyed in a matter of days if it was handed over to the local tribes.

 

 

Before we hand over protected areas to tribal people we need to ask ourselves: How do we describe tribals? And what is real tribal life? True, tribal cultures existed for centuries in harmony with their local environment because they continued to live primitive lives that had their own natural checks and balances. Poor medical care meant that population growth was always kept in check by nature which would intervene in the form of plagues and diseases. Life expectancy was low. Child marriage, multiple births, witchcraft, polygamy and so on, was the norm. Education, immunization, birth control, modern medicine, electricity and other benefits of modern development never reached them. Once the modern world touches tribal life, the entire natural balance of tribal culture is destroyed and with it the sustainability of tribal cultures vanishes.

Even if in some remote areas there are genuine tribal communities that exist, who are totally cut off from the modern world, can we really keep it that way? Can we deny their children vaccination? Or education? Or modern medical care? Can we prevent their exploitation? These are all extremely relevant questions, worth asking before we even embark on this path.

 

 

The key word is sustainability! Today our protected areas are dwindling mainly because the extraction of its natural wealth, once sustainable, is now no longer so. This is true even when it is looked at from the vantage point of a simple tribal lifestyle because the sheer number of people infringing on our natural resources is increasing each year at a staggering pace. If tribal people have no interaction with the outside world, and continue to live in the same way as they did a hundred years ago, possibly their lives could have been sustainable in relation to their local environment. This is no longer the case in many places in India, certainly not in Ranthambhore.

On the one hand we claim that tribal cultures of child marriage, polygamy, witchcraft are ‘uncivilized’ and against the law and that our constitution wishes to give priority to tribals in jobs so that they can join the mainstream. On the other, we want to keep tribals the way they are, primitive.

Denying tribal people access to modern education, health care, electricity and jobs would mean keeping them in the stranglehold of poverty leading to further exploitation. Giving them modern amenities would mean they would not be tribals any more because they would want the luxuries and all the other trappings of the modern world. What then is the solution?

This was the very question we asked ourselves when we started to work with local communities around Ranthambhore in 1989, hoping to involve them in helping to save the tiger and its habitat. The path we chose was of engaging them in socioeconomic development that would help them lead better and more sustainable lives. We have tried to make the people more informed and aware of their environment so that they can better understand their own impact on the environment and vice-versa.

Facilitating people to make an informed choice and then helping them achieve their goal is what we are striving to do. Our efforts of 15 years may not have changed everyone, but the impact is certainly visible.

 

 

Today a modern 80-bed hospital situated on the fringe of the park provides health care and family planning services to all the people living around the park. Hundreds, including tribal people, can see again after being operated for cataract removal. Hundreds of rural women, mainly tribal can have a safe delivery. In a district which has one of the highest premature and underweight births, our hospital provides the only neonatal intensive care saving hundreds of lives each year. Rural poor for the first time can get affordable modern surgical care like laproscopic gall bladder surgery, transurethral resection of the prostrate, sutureless cataract surgery, microscopic reconstruction of the middle ear and so on.

Our family planning programme has helped many rural families (most of whom are from tribal communities) make the choice of having smaller families. As a result, there has been a reduction in population growth by nearly 4% between 1991 and 2001. Fewer people means less pressure on the park and its resources.

Over 300 families are using biogas as an alternate means of fuel, saving wood that would have been taken out of the park. The by-product provides natural manure helping reduce the dependence of local people on expensive fertilizers that will also have a far reaching impact on the overall productivity of the land. Over 100,000 trees provide wood for wood to local people as a result of our afforestation programme.

 

 

The artificial insemination programme started recently is helping hundreds of families improve the breed of their cattle so that stall-feeding can become economically viable and the need to free graze their cattle is reduced. The next step would be to help establish milk cooperatives to help market the milk.

Our education programme is helping provide quality education to the local children. The school provides scholarships to rural children most of whom belong to tribal communities. Providing a good education is a dream for most people that live around the park, irrespective of their caste or background. Our outreach environment education programme involves over 4000 children who come together in the form of nature clubs to learn about their environment. A mobile library provides resource material to help them learn about their environment. Every year children from the nature clubs participate in debates, street plays, painting competitions, song and dance, as a means to learn about their environment. Hopefully many will grow up to be sensitive to nature and their habitat.

Our legal cell works tirelessly to help the forest department to fight legal battles in court involving poachers and other wildlife crimes.

All of these programmes help in making local people less dependent on the natural resources of the park while at the same time improving the quality of their lives. It is possible that this is also making them ‘less’ tribal as they are integrating into the mainstream of the nation. However, this has to be the long term goal of conservation.

Our natural resources are dwindling every day while the demand for their use is increasing at an unsustainable rate. Even subsistence extraction of natural resources from our dwindling protected areas is unsustainable. If we truly want to save whatever is left then we need to guard our protected areas by making them totally inviolate. At the same time we need to find ways to encourage people that live around these protected areas to lead more sustainable lives.

 

 

Unfortunately, the weakest link in tiger conservation continues to be the protection of the park boundary. It is a universal law that anything that is rare and valuable has to be protected by policing. Why do we think that our protected areas don’t need to be policed?

There is now an emergency with regard to saving what remains of our national parks. It is a contradiction that at one point our policy-makers want to provide opportunities to tribal people in every walk of life through reservations so that they can integrate into modern societies and the constitutional mandate of equality for all can be served to the fullest. On the other hand they want to justify keeping some tribes as tribes living primitive lives, being exploited at the hands of every other community.

It is time we realized that to truly save our remaining national parks we need to keep them inviolate of any forest produce extraction. The idea of tribals managing their own forests may appear a good one in principle, but as their own numbers have increased so have their needs, making even subsistence extraction unsustainable. Nor should we hide behind the ‘noble’ objective of helping marginalised people as yet another way of dividing our country into tribes and non-tribes. This is probably the last chance to save whatever little remains of our protected areas; not doing so would be a disaster.