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Wildlife Protection: Reintroduction and Relocation
Asmita Kabra
Abstract: Designating national parks and sanctuaries as “protected areas”involves the
elaborate relocation and resettlement of communities once resident within these areas.
However, as an instance of community relocation from the Kuno sanctuary bears out,
resettlement has not led to improved living standards for the affected community; neither
has it afforded a measure of protection for the threatened animals.
Studies on wildlife conservation undertaken in recent years, especially for
megacarnivores like tigers and lions, have frequently been recommending that local
people be relocated from Protected Areas (PAs). This is based on the often-articulated
premise that relocation of local people will create “inviolate spaces” (Report of the Tiger
Task Force, 2005), reduce biotic disturbances and thereby improve conservation
potential of PAs. The argument, however, is not always backed by good science, and the
TTF Report says: “…while there is an emphasis on removing the biotic pressure that
people bring to the tiger’s habitat in most cases, there is little empirical evidence of the
nature of this impact and what can be done to manage or mitigate it, before the option
of relocation is considered.” (TTF Report 2005. p.88). Rigorous social and ecological
studies of the impact of local people on PAs are pitifully few in number anywhere in
India. Thus there is almost no pressure on the state to establish, before undertaking
population displacement from a PA, that the local community is a major threat to
conservation. As a recent report on Sariska Tiger Reserve by some independent scholars
says, the basis for relocation of humans from the PA is marked by “weak foundations,
(but) strong convictions” (Shahabuddin et al, 2005).
Following a series of news reports on the escalating tiger crisis, the Rajasthan Forest
Department is reportedly planning to reintroduce tigers in the Sariska Tiger Reserve
from Ranthambor National Park in the same state (The Hindu, 8 Jan. 2006). In a
meeting with the Rajasthan Forest Department, scientists from the Wildlife Institute of
India, Dehradun (WII) have reportedly set out 3 conditions for successful tiger re-
introduction in Sariska, the first of which was to relocate villagers living inside the
sanctuary. In a similar study of reintroduction of Asiatic lions (Panthere leo persica) in
the Kuno wildlife sanctuary in district Sheopur of Madhya Pradesh, the WII in 1995 had
recommended that before lions are brought into Kuno, all villages situated inside the
sanctuary should be relocated outside (WII 1995). The Lion Reintroduction Project of
the MP Forest Department, supported by the Union Ministry of Environment and
Forests, eventually resulted in relocation of 24 villages from the sanctuary during 1999-
2001. However, to the knowledge of this researcher, who has been associated closely
since 1999 with an NGO working among the displaced families, the basis for this
relocation was not established with any degree of scientific rigour. The WII report, based
on rapid surveys of the Kuno sanctuary, talked about the need to improve preybase in
Kuno to sustain lions, and argued that competition for fodder between wild herbivores
and the livestock of the local community was detrimental to prey-density improvement.
The report also argued for relocating villages from the sanctuary to reduce probability of
conflict between the local community and the reintroduced mega-carnivore. However,
prior to initiation of the Lion Reintroduction Project, no formal assessment, qualitative
or quantitative, was made of the main threats to biodiversity of the Kuno sanctuary, nor
were any attempts made to explore alternatives less drastic than outright displacement
to address the perceived threats.
Relocation - the local community loses
Six long years have passed since the first villages began moving out from their home on
the banks of the river Kuno, during which a saga of lost livelihoods and deepening
poverty has unfolded among the Sahariya Adivasis of Kuno. They have lost fertile, well-
drained lands (to more than 50 per cent of which they held formal title deeds or pattas)
that they had cultivated for decades inside the sanctuary. In return, they have received
compensation under the Beneficiary Oriented Scheme for Tribal Development of the
Union Ministry of Environment and Forests, which is the standard relocation package
that most communities displaced from PAs have been given in recent years. Most of the
displaced households have been given upland farm plots of much lower quality than the
land they held inside the sanctuary, with lower soil depth and very low soil moisture
retention capacity. Many of these plots were judged unsuitable for cultivation by a
committee set up by the District Collector, and have had to be changed later. Most of
these farm plots have no source of irrigation, and while the Forest Department has been
trying to raise resources for providing irrigation facilities, the process is painfully slow.
So far, only about 10 per cent of the households have received funds for digging
irrigation wells, and less than 5 per cent have completed this process.
While these villages had no access to schools, electricity and formal health care systems
when they lived inside the sanctuary, by their own accounts they had enough to live by,
and food insecurity was rare. This researcher’s study of two villages living on the
periphery of Kuno sanctuary, which are very similar to the displaced villages in terms of
social structure, remoteness and livelihood pattern, also comes to a similar conclusion
about food security. The families displaced from Kuno can send their children to school
and take their ill to the local Primary Health Centre, but the quality of state education
and health services in the region is notoriously poor. They have electricity in their
home, but power supply is highly erratic. Women can go to the neighbourhood
electrically powered atta chakki instead of toiling at their manual grinders, and young
and old alike have access to the latest Bollywood potboilers at the neighbourhood
‘cinema hall’ (a jam-packed thatched hut equipped with a CD player, television set and
solar-powered battery). But every year, many more displaced families migrate than
previously, and for much longer periods, to places like Sheopur (as farm labourers) and
Morena (to pull rickshaws).
The incidence of hunger, disease and malnutrition in these villages has increased,
average farm output for rainfed crops like bajra and tilli (sesame) has declined, and the
percentage of households that take two crops from their land has gone down
significantly. Access to a whole range of high value forest produce (which they earlier
collected for their own consumption and for sale) has reduced to a trickle, and the
percentage of people getting into exploitative sharecropping arrangements has
increased. Livestock holdings have come down drastically after displacement and access
to milk and milk products is abysmally low, because of extremely poor availability of
fodder and drinking water at the relocation site. Because of this, the displaced people
had to leave nearly all their cattle inside Kuno sanctuary when they moved out, and in
a stunning and ironical reversal of previous threat assessments, a recent WII report on
preybase for the Asiatic Lion in Kuno cites the availability of almost 2,500 cattle left
inside by the villagers as a ‘buffer prey’ for the lions to be reintroduced in Kuno
(Johnsingh et al, 2005).
Does conservation gain?
While it is relatively better-recognized that relocation of villages has had a negative
impact on the livelihood of the community, it is also not clear that relocation has
resulted unequivocally in improvement of the conservation potential of the Kuno
sanctuary. While the recent WII report on Kuno (Johnsingh et al. 2005) suggests that
prey density has improved and a lion population can be sustained in Kuno, the degree
of protection from poaching enjoyed by large carnivores is suspect. Many villagers
displaced from Kuno sanctuary, in personal communications with this researcher over
the past two years, predicted that once they moved out the frequency of poaching inside
Kuno sanctuary was bound to increase. Their argument was that when villages existed
inside the sanctuary, the risk to commercial poachers of being observed (by shepherds,
forest produce collectors, firewood collectors and others) while moving around in the
forest was quite high. This, according to the local people, was an effective deterrants to
commercial poachers like those belonging to the Moghiya community.
The Moghiya are a local community that traditionally used to be hired by
agriculturalists in this region for protecting their crops from depredation by domestic as
well as wild animals. They are known to be excellent shots, and a number of Moghiya
families living on the fringes of villages around Kuno sanctuary even possess licenced
firearms. Over time, however, there has been a steady decline in the demand for the
services of the Moghiya for crop protection, and commensurately, their dependence on
commercial trade in wild animal derivatives seems to have increased. In fact, according
to a recent news report in a leading national daily, hunters from the Moghiya
community were arrested from village Dhamini (located very close to the Kuno
sanctuary) for their alleged role in tiger poaching in Ranthambor National Park in
neighbouring Rajasthan, where they have reportedly confessed to killing 22 tigers (The
Indian Express, 20 Nov. 2005). While many Sahariya Adivasis themselves admit to
having been avid hunters of bushmeat in Kuno, their kills, anecdotal evidence suggests,
were meant for self-consumption and were generally limited to wild herbivores and
small fauna like hare and partridges. Larger carnivores like tigers and leopards were
usually left alone, and in fact, the presence of the Sahariya in the forests of Kuno could
have been a fairly effective buffer for these animals against commercial poaching.
Over the last 2 years, many people relocated from Kuno have been reporting reduced
sighting of large carnivores during their few visits to the sanctuary after displacement.
There is a lot of ambivalence in the official position regarding the status of tigers in
Kuno. The official census figures of the state forest department showed that the number
of tigers has declined from 7 in the early years of this decade to zero in 2004-05.
However, a recent newsreport indicates that one or two tigers may still be present in
Kuno, where a team of students have reported sightings of tiger scat and pugmarks. In
this scenario, the startling confessions of the Moghiya hunters arrested from
Ranthambor simply reinforce the fear that if there are tigers in the jungles of Kuno, they
face far greater poaching threats after displacement of villages than they did before.
Sanctuaries for whom?
Patrolling by the Forest Department’s frontline staff may not be adequate to control
poaching inside PAs like Kuno. It must be remembered here that the forests of Kuno are
part of the infamous Chambal region, frequented by various gangs of bandits or dacoits,
and this restricts mobility of the frontline forest staff quite severely. This is the “bio-
irony” of PA management that has been highlighted by Greenough (2003), who, in a
study of Indian PAs, observed that “large, depopulated and (barely) protected reserves
…. function as magnets that draw in a range of illegal actors: crimilas, rebels, poachers,
or simply poor people looking for subsistence”. That poachers virtually have a free run
of PAs like Kuno and Ranthambor, as disclosed by the Moghiya hunters arrested from
Ranthambor, is yet another manifestation of this larger “bio-irony” inherent in the
highly exclusionist Protected Area based model of conservation, where the “inviolate
spaces” meant for wildlife are routinely violated by illegal actors, especially poachers.
In this light, it is quite remarkable that inspite of warning signals that all may not be
well with wildlife in Kuno after village relocation, the official and scientific community
continues to champion the exclusionist conservationist paradigm for this and other
PAs. The recent WII report on prey-density in Kuno recommends that two villages
(Bagcha and Jangarh) in the Sironi forest range adjacent to the Kuno sanctuary should
also be relocated by 2007. Once again, no studies have been carried out of the impact of
these villages on the PA, and the recommendations seem to be based more on personal
conviction than facts. Surprisingly, the WII report itself says that the 300 sq.km. of
“habitat without people” that will be released due to this relocation has little ecological
significance, and even after displacing Bagcha and Jangarh, “its contribution to prey
biomass will…be negligible”. The main justification put forward for this displacement is
that “when these 2 villages are removed, the disturbances (including poaching) arising
from these villages… will come to an end helping the build-up of the prey-base”. A
subsidiary justification for this proposed displacement, which is again not informed by
any socio-economic study of the area or intensive interaction with the people, is that
“the villagers are willing to go as they are 15 km from any form of facility, such as
school or hospital”.
Conclusion
The lesson from Kuno, then, is that the most serious threats to survival of large
carnivores like tigers may not always emanate from local people, even though these
communities are known to hunt bushmeat, have large cattle holdings, and may cause
significant ‘disturbance’ to the PA through forest fires, collection of fuelwood and other
minor forest produce. These external threats often emanate from geographically distant
sources like commercial, industrial, mining and other ‘development’ agencies, high-
profile game hunters, and consumers of exotic wildlife derivatives. With well-directed,
site-specific interventions, local communities may be groomed to enhance their existing
contribution as a ‘social fence’ to protect key species from such pressures and threats.
Thus, it may not be an article of faith that relocation of local communities necessarily
and always will improve the conservation potential of PAs. As the ongoing tiger crisis
unfolds, this is a lesson that needs to be debated, instead of giving Forest Departments
across the country the green signal to carry out large scale displacement of local people
in a knee-jerk reaction.
References
Bunsha, Dionne. Left High and Dry. Frontline Vol.22 Issue 11. May 21 – June 3, 2005
Chauhan, Chetan. “Big Cat Sighted Again in Kuno, MP”. The Hindustan Times. January
28, 2006. New Delhi
Greenough, Paul. 2003. Bio-ironies of the Fractured Forest: India’s Tiger Reserves. in
Slater (ed.) In Search of the Rainforest. Duke University Press, Durham and London.
Johnsingh, A.J.T., Qureshi, Q. and Goyal, S.P. 2005. Assessment of prey population for
lion re-introduction in Kuno wildlife sanctuary, Central India. Report submitted to
Government of India and Government of Madhya Pradesh. Wildlife Institute of India,
Dehradun.
Mazoomdar, Jay. “Ten of Us, We Killed at Least 22 Tigers”. The Indian Express. 20
November 2005, New Delhi
Joining the Dots. Report of the Tiger Task Force. 2005. Ministry of Environment and
Forests. New Delhi
Shahabuddin, G., Ravi Kumar and Manish Shrivastava. 2005. Forgotten Villages: A
People’s Perspective on Village Displacement from Sariska Tiger Reserve. Environmental
Studies Group, Council for Social Development, New Delhi.
‘Sariska to get back its tigers’ - The Hindu, 8 January 2006, New Delhi
Wildlife Institute of India. 1995. Survey of the Potential Sites for Reintroduction of Asiatic
Lions: Final Report. Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun
