MANY of the national parks and sanctuaries (collectively, the ‘parks’) that survive in India were originally protected for shikar. These include Bharatpur, Sariska, Ranthambhore, Gajner, Baretha, Darrah, Sitamata, Nahar, Nagarhole, Panna, Kuno-Palpur, Shivpuri, Rajaji, Simlipal, Gir, Bandhavgarh, Ratapani, Bhoramdeo, Jambughoda, Devgarh-Baria, Orchha, Shyamgiri, Sanjay-Dubari, and many others.

Today, the surviving parks face enormous human pressures from within and without. The moral or strictly conservationist ethic for protection has reached its limits – rather than resolving conflicts our political system is forcing us to choose between parks and people, between conservation and development. Long-term sustainability is naturally given short shrift, as ecological concerns have no vote bank (even if parks provide Rs 40,000 crore of free firewood and catchment for 300 rivers).

There is, however, one measure which can and does help bridge the gap between conservation and development – wildlife or eco-tourism. Unlike agriculture, grazing and firewood removal, tourism is generally compatible with wildlife conservation, as has been the experience the world over. Tourism can and does generate revenue and create a growing number of local jobs. These attributes of tourism marry it well to the economic and political system. By gearing up for tourism, parks can and must pay for themselves by building articulate public constituencies for conservation, the same role that princely and colonial shikar played in a different value system in the past.

Eco-tourism is working to protect conservation areas in countries as diverse as Costa Rica, Belize, Botswana, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, even as it is successfully investing in local communities and generating local employment. In Southern Africa, the success of community-sensitive tourism has actually led to a major increase in the conservation areas, besides generating scarce foreign exchange, improving local infrastructure, and spreading conservation education.

 

A concern often articulated about wildlife tourism is that it could end up benefiting only a select few – those who have the enterprise and capital to develop businesses – presumably ‘outsiders’. The reality is quite different. Most of the wildlife tourism lodges in India are run by resident locals. The vast majority of the jobs and businesses again employ resident locals. Each major tourism park supports more than a hundred taxi drivers and at least the same number of guides. These are overwhelmingly resident locals. In their own interest, wildlife tourism operators have no choice but to train and hire employees from local communities. This they mostly do, in eminent self-interest. What self-interest is doing, legislation doesn’t need to enforce.

Another problem attributed to tourism is the nuisance to wildlife. This nuisance, while aesthetically displeasing, has not caused even one local species extinction. In perspective, it is not as damaging as agriculture or grazing. The negative effects of ill-planned and concentrated tourism can be mitigated by expanding tourism areas and spreading the locus of tourism. Expanding tourism areas is a great support for conservation. One of the expansions of Corbett, long argued for on ecological grounds, was finally approved only to spread the park’s growing tourist traffic! Such is the influence of a revenue-generating industry on local governments.

It is no coincidence that the peak of poaching in Indian parks occurs in the monsoon, when parks are shut to tourism. The movement of attentive tourists and guides work as a check on park authorities and poachers alike, and keep up the invigilation of large parts of parks. Just as block shooting did in the past. Once organized shooting was banned in India, we assumed poaching had stopped, so there was no need for watch and ward. As if poachers care about the niceties of law.

 

Tourism generates employment for guides, restaurateurs, taxi operators, hoteliers, local provision merchants, mechanics, and so on. Further, tourism helps create a local constituency which is monitoring wildlife and effectively patrolling roads, rest houses, and whole forest blocks. Guides get training by the park authorities. They become champions of conservation in their villages. A network of information is set up in adjoining areas about the main mammals and the health of the forest. Ecological information is disseminated well outside the park, helped no doubt by park museums and educational materials. This virtuous process of conservation education is already at work in parks such as Ranthambhore, Corbett, Bandhavgarh, Bharatpur, Kanha and Nagarhole. These are the same parks about which information is most easily available and where poaching is immediately exposed.

Little information is available on the rampant poaching and timber theft variously at Palamau, Satkosia Gorge, Chandaka, Katerniaghat, Suhelwa, Bhitarkanika, Hastinapur, Valmikinagar, Simlipal, Bhimgarh, Hazaribagh, Nanda Devi and Chandraprabha, where there is no organized tourism. It is not surprising that the tiger poaching scandals at Sariska, Panna and Ranthambhore were uncovered by visiting journalists, not park authorities or even Project Tiger staff. This is again the clear benefit of the vigilance of the tourist constituency.

 

Domestic tourists should be asked to pay fees in excess of the nominal ones currently being charged (avg. Rs 25). Surely the experience of a world heritage site should cost more than a local cinema ticket! Local people and school children may be exempted from such hikes. With foreign tourists paying higher fees (avg. Rs 500), parks like Corbett and Panna are already yielding fees in excess of a crore of rupees apiece annually, almost as much as their annual budgets. These fees should be earmarked into local eco-development funds, or park budgets for purchasing land in critical buffers and corridors. Such funds could also be used for rehabilitation of insular villages and paying for crop damage.

There is no reason for such funds to revert back to the state governments; they can be used to build up local support for conservation. If such monies were regularly deployed on arranging fodder and water for surrounding villages in the lean summer months, how easily conservation conflicts would be diffused. It is purblind and mean not to spend these funds locally and in a timely fashion.

 

Park administrations should immediately get out of tourist infrastructure and leave this to the private sector, websites, or state tourism departments. Else park directors will continue to spend substantial amounts of their time booking accommodation for all and sundry VIPs. This would also release more funds from limited park budgets for the strengthening of invigilation and control. It is not clear what should be done to forest rest houses, which are regularly used by VIPs. Should they be managed by state tourism authorities? Or can they be leased by the parks to private parties for usurious amounts? In either case, the tourism infrastructure would improve at no cost to the taxpayer, besides augmenting park revenues.

The maintenance of forest roads for wildlife viewing is a dual benefit for the park concerned. The same roads which are maintained for tourism are also used by forest guards. To negate the problems from concentration, tourism should also be developed in the buffers – to increase vigilance there and to take pressure away from core zone attractions.

Finally, tourism at each park could be restricted to a carrying capacity scientifically assessed and publicized in advance, so there aren’t long queues at park entrances (and no black market for entry permits either!). Much like the Bhutanese approach to tourism, where the annual number of tourists admitted is limited and publicized in advance. The idea of restricting scale would find sanction in the economic theory of Herman Daly (the founder of steady-state economics). Ranthambhore and Corbett are attracting more and more wildlife lodges, well beyond the carrying capacity of the parks, while a legion other parks, of comparable value, continue to be ignored.

If lodges face a problem with restrictions on tourism capacity, they are welcome to widen the tourism offering to include bird-watching walks outside the park and in the buffer, fishing (where permitted), boating (where feasible), cycling, local cultural attractions, tree-planting and community service, conservation education programmes, photography workshops, yoga camps, and so on. This diversification is essential to their businesses anyway, given the concentration of wildlife camps around the more popular parks (29 camps in Kisli, outside Kanha, 35 in Corbett, and 25 in Kaziranga).

Not only is there a concentration of tourism camps around a few parks, in the absence of any kind of zoning, most camps are located adjacent to parks. There is merit in residing beside the forest, but ideally this should be non-park reserve forest, some distance from the main park gate. Park authorities can issue tourism-friendly guidelines to make this happen voluntarily.

 

A time has come for the government to enact, and for parks and Indian wildlife tourism operators to adopt, a normative, ecofriendly code for the nascent industry – to cover zoning for lodges and rest houses, architecture of camps, tourist behaviour in parks, disposal of wastes, the use of park fees, and plans to augment local employment generation. Those camps which align to this code could be certified annually; before long the entire industry’s standards will improve. In this way, a more enlightened and sustainable model of wildlife tourism will develop in India, and help parks achieve their conservation objectives.