Report of the Tiger Task Force - PRS

TIGER TASK FORCE REPORT JOINING THE DOTS ■3.9 The fringe agendaWhile the problems of people inside our protectedareas exacerbate, the country remains ignorant of thesituation of many more who live on the fringes ofthese national parks and sanctuaries. Conservationfaces the challenge of working with people inside aswell as with communities on the fringe.Harini Nagendra, a researcher with theBangalore-based Ashoka Trust for Research inEcology and Environment (ATREE), has studied andcompared the war within and outside the Tadoba-Andhari tiger reserve in Maharashtra. Herassessment is clear: the villages outside the park,connected to markets by road networks, have a largerimpact on deforestation and forest fragmentationcompared to the more isolated interior villages. Herprescription for the park is equally clear: instead offocussing on resettling the forest villages, thedemands of forest protection will be better served byworking with these surrounding communities todevelop alternate mechanisms of incomegeneration. 1 She goes on to explain the phenomenonin depth.She and her colleagues have studied changes infour categories of forest cover in the reserve:● Zone 1: In areas within the tiger reserve, far fromhabitations● Zone 2: In the 2-km buffer stretching inwardsfrom the reserve’s periphery● Zone 3: In a 2-km area radiating from the villagesinside● Zone 4: In a 5-km area extending outwards fromthe park peripheryShe clearly finds that the impact on the forest of thevillages outside the reserve is much greater. The 53villages outside, denied rights they enjoyed earlier,now resort to illegal sale of forest produce to nearbymarkets. Comparatively, the six villages insideprimarily use the forest for subsistence alone.There are two issues worth understanding here:1. The sheer number of people on the fringe isgreater than the few who live inside the park.2. The villages on the fringe are connected tomarkets far beyond the vicinity of the park andhave the resources to transfer forest produce tothese markets. Therefore, what they extract fromthe forest is far more than what they need forimmediate personal consumption; in the case ofvillages inside, this is often not possible.Unfortunately such studies, useful in taking carefulconservation decisions, are extremely few. Thus,reliable data related to fringe community practicesand aspects of existence is absent. Such absence isdirectly related to the belief — consistent amongsome conservationists and foresters — that it is thevillages in the interior of tiger reserves that need to beshifted out to enable successful conservation. Thepoint is that while this policy prescription may stillhold true, pressures on the reserve will continue tomount if no rational answers are available for villageson the periphery. Indeed, at times, if the relocation ofvillages is badly done — say, villages areautomatically resettled at the fringe — the problem ismerely transferred from the inside to the outside. Theissue then is to find solutions to the problem ofproviding the people with alternate ways ofsubsistence and livelihood.There is little reliable information on the numberof villages at the periphery of reserves; in particular,information that details their resource use patternsand the consequent impact on the park. But what isavailable shows that in many parks, the number ofvillages within is fewer than those at its periphery. Inother words, here is a problem that demandsdifferent strategies of coexistence.For instance, in Ranthambhore there are 25villages within, with less than 8,500 people. Butoutside, there are 96 villages, with over 100,000people. However, reserve authorities relocatedvillages to the fringe without clearly considering theimplications of this action. Now, these villages havejoined the crowd which is pushing its way into thereserve. Clearly, here the strategy is to engage withthe fringe villages. Relocation from within thisreserve may be vital to isolate tiger habitat, butwithout tackling fringe pressures, the habitat willremain under increasing threat.In Madhya Pradesh, while there are 726 villagesand 60,137 families inside the parks, there are 2,200villages and 1,32,000 families in the periphery. 2Thus it is clear that, given the high dependenceof people on these last remaining forests, humanactivities will impinge on the quality of the habitat.The question is to understand the nature of theintervention and what can be done to mitigate orsubstitute its impact.An interesting study arises out of work done byother researchers in the fringe villages of Bandipurnational park, which forms part of the Bandipur tigerreserve in Karnataka. As M D Madhusudan of theNature Conservation Foundation, Mysore shows, alack of resources and livelihood drove the people toThe way ahead 117