Report of the Tiger Task Force - PRS

TIGER TASK FORCE REPORT JOINING THE DOTS ■that began in 1996. Both projects ran with partfundingand part-grants from the World Bank and theGlobal Environment Facility.The India Ecodevelopment Project had thefollowing basic objectives: 91. Improve protected areas management: This wasto be done to strengthen forest departmentcapacities and increase people’s participation inpark management.2. Village ecodevelopment: This was aimed atreducing negative impacts of ‘local people’ onparks and vice versa. This asked for participatorymicroplanning of activities at the village level, tohelp villages and the forest department decide ona set of reciprocal promises. The forestdepartment would provide alternativelivelihoods and the people would commit tohelp the department in better managing andprotecting the forest. Ecodevelopment alsomeant so-called special programmes, includingthe ‘option’ of voluntary relocation and other‘investments’ to benefit people and biodiversity.3. Generate support for park management andecodevelopment: The project also focussed onenvironmental education and visitormanagement at the parks. More importantly, itpromised funds for impact monitoring and goalorientedecological and social science research.When this project was in preparation in 1991-1992,the Forestry Research Education and ExtensionProject’s ecodevelopment work was taken as amodel. The India Ecodevelopment Project took oneand-ahalf years, and numerous consultations, tocome into being. The Union government hired theIndian Institute of Planning and Administration,New Delhi, to chalk out the ‘indicative plan’, aproposal submitted by the government to the WorldBank to launch formal negotiations, which thedepartment of economic affairs took up with theBank in 1994.The project initially began with eight sites inmind. The one to be finally rejected was Simlipal inOrissa, for the state government had relocatedvillages even as the project was being planned andthe Bank did not want to be associated with a sitethat had relocated people. The government finallyselected and proposed seven sites: all but two weretiger reserves — Gir national park and sanctuary inGujarat and the Nagarhole national park in Karnataka(see map: The India Ecodevelopment Project). Thelatter was later on added to the Bandipur tigerreserve.What is interesting is the way the projectdelineated the idea of fringe. Usually, the impact of afringe radiates out from a park periphery till itSOURCE OF FUNDS FORINDIA ECODEVELOPMENT PROJECTFunding agency US $ (million) Per centInternational Development Agency 28.00 42GEF Trust 20.00 30Project beneficiaries 4.59 7State government 9.06 13Union government 5.36 8Total (for 28 reserves) 67.00 100Source: Anon 1996, Staff Appraisal Report, World Bank, Washingtonbecomes negligible. But even as the projectproponents and the government discussed the limitof the ‘fringe’, what ultimately came to be understoodas a fringe was via a random idea of what waspractical rather than what was necessary. So, in thecase of the Buxa tiger reserve in West Bengal, forinstance, even though the project was aware of125,601 scheduled tribe people working in thesurrounding tea gardens, it finally excluded them. 10Similarly, in Nagarhole national park in Karnataka,the population in the project area was 72,652 (as perthe 1981 census), but the project identified only66,507 people to work with. 11 In other parks, too,people were left out for reasons of ‘practicality’.The project’s funds came from five primarysources (see table: Source of funds for IndiaEcodevelopment Project). At the same time, ‘ projectbeneficiaries’, as people were referred to in theproject framework, had to contribute as well to theproject cost. The idea was to bring in people’s stakein the project, and therefore into conservation, byasking them to pitch in roughly seven per cent ofwhat it would it would cost to launch activitiesunder the project. While this may look minimal ascompared to the overall costs, it meant substantialcontribution on the part of the people. The moneywas to be spent under various heads.In all, the India Ecodevelopment Project decidedto consider 3,715 villages spread around the sevenparks (see box: Fringe villages): it would involve164,786 families and a population of 823,928. Again,one must emphasise this was not the total populationon the fringe of the parks selected as project sites;this was the segment the project decided it couldafford to work with.The idea of ecodevelopmentThe key objective of the project was to reduce thenegative impacts of ‘local people’ on protected areasby providing alternative sources of firewood andincome.The way ahead 121