CURRENT AFFAIRS

Description

Description: Explore the social costs of tiger conservation in India, including forced displacement and its impact on indigenous communities, and the need for inclusive conservation approaches.

Social Impact of Tiger Conservation: Displacement and Indigenous Communities

This coercive, top-down approach to managing protected areas has created socio-cultural disruption and often even failed to conserve biodiversity. This has led to management decisions seriously threatening the livelihood and cultural heritage of local people, such as the resettlement programme established to move people from villages inside the park, and the reduction of access to resources and traditional rights.

About Project Tiger

Tigers are both a Flagship and Umbrella species. As a Flagship species they are important for conservation and as an Umbrella species, conservation of tigers leads to conservation of other species. Tigers and high intensity biotic disturbances such as poaching and stealing of kills do not go together. If the tigers in the wild have to survive, it is imperative that other species of wild animals that are directly or indirectly a part of the food chain must also thrive. Therefore, the survival of the tiger is an important yardstick to measure the existence of a healthy forest ecosystem.

Project Tiger, a Centrally Sponsored Scheme of Government of India, was launched on the 1^st of April, 1973 for in-situ conservation of wild tigers in designated tiger reserves.  Under this project the strategy involves exclusive tiger agenda in the core/critical tiger habitat, inclusive people-wildlife agenda in the outer buffer, besides fostering the latter agenda in the corridors. 

Displacement due to tiger conservation

In many developing countries, official policies and laws governing wildlife and the conservation of ecosystems have had adverse social consequences on native populations.

A tiger reserve consists of two parts, viz., ‘a core or critical tiger habitat’, and ‘a buffer or peripheral area’. Core is identified as areas of National Parks and Sanctuaries to be kept inviolate for tiger conservation, without affecting the rights of the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers.

‘Buffer’ consists of the area peripheral to the critical tiger habitat or core area, where a lesser degree of habitat protection is required to ensure the integrity of the critical tiger habitat, providing supplementary habitat for dispersing tigers, besides offering scope for coexistence of human activity. The limits of the buffer / peripheral area are to be determined on the basis of scientific and objective criteria in consultation with the concerned Gram Sabha and an Expert Committee constituted for the purpose.

According to the rules, voluntary relocation of people needs to be carried out only in the identified core / critical tiger habitats of a tiger reserve as per provisions contained in the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, as amended in 2006, read with the Scheduled Tribes and Other Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006. 

Since the launching of Project Tiger, till now, 105 villages have been relocated from various tiger reserves over successive plan periods. The draft guidelines, however, specifically said that "relocation must be purely voluntary and must not in any manner use force or coercion". However, in reality the displacement is forced.

Negative impacts of relocation

The relocating of villages from the core area without settlement of rights guaranteed under the FRA lead to violation of the Act. Even under the Wildlife Protection Act, before relocation, scientific studies are required to prove that co-existence between tribals and wildlife is not possible. There seems to be no such research for most of the tiger reserves.

As compensation for displacement, tribals are entitled Rs 10 lakh per family, according to the 2005 recommendations of the Tiger Task Force. The compensation amount has not increased in all these years. Further they have to live under plastic sheets with lack of basic amenities.

The lack of security in land ownership and the erosion of local statute laws have diminished the capacity of communities to stand up to outsiders, like poachers and wood smugglers, and have also contributed to the loss of biodiversity. In India, moreover, communal land surrounding villages is being increasingly privatised, which leads to the dwindling of the little parcels of communal land available to farmers.

This deteriorates their living condition. It creates a kind of 'socio-cultural stress'-relocated populations lose not only the economic base of their survival, but also undergo a "considerable reduction of their cultural heritage, due to the temporary or definitive loss of their behavioural models, their economic activities, their institutions and their symbols". Indeed, they are generally relocated in inadequate areas that provide opportunities for subsistence that are often entirely insufficient for them.

Unfortunately conservation projects and programmes that fail to consider the interest of local residents, undermine existing indigenous management systems, and restrict local authorities in their decision making on resource management, only intensify the loss of biological diversity.

In recent times, concern has been raised on the best practices that can be adopted within protected areas for the sustainable conservation of natural resources.

Way Ahead

The conservative strategy should seek to integrate the indigenous communities into the conservation scheme. The bottom-up management approach will enable communities surrounding protected areas to be actively involved in the management and administration of their regions.

The appropriateness of community-based conservation will depend on five factors: nature of community participation, objectives of conservation, incentive for conservation, community structures, historical and cultural linkages of the adopted conservation strategies.

Further changing the current mentality of conservation authorities would require measures at the institutional level. Developing skills among forest officers to work with communities, enhancing forms of cooperation and facilitating a learning process in a spirit of mutual trust and respect is very important in order to promote effective conservation measures.