Report of the Tiger Task Force - PRS

TIGER TASK FORCE REPORT JOINING THE DOTS ■identify other candidates. The first rangers beganpatrolling and submitting monthly survey andintelligence reports in July 2000.Recruitment focused on men known to hunttigers, some more actively than others. In severalcases, men who had recently been caught huntingtigers were recruited into the programme, instead ofbeing prosecuted under the relatively weak forestryregulations.The programme staff carries out regularmonitoring patrols in key unprotected tiger habitats,and collects valuable data on tiger (and otherwildlife) poaching and trade. The staff meetsfrequently with provincial, district and village levelofficials, as well as military personnel.The rangers, it is reported, normally operate inteams and carry a Global Positioning System device.Regional coordinators download the device’smonthly readings to verify ranger patrols. Data isreported to Phnom Penh in monthly narrativesummaries and Global Positioning System datapoints are entered into a Geographical InformationSystems-based system. The survey results aresummarised according to the three regions, andillustrated with maps prepared from the GlobalPositioning System data the ranger teams gatheredand that the field office staff compiled.The project has identified several groups ofprofessional hunters and wildlife traders, broughttheir activities to the attention of the relevantauthorities and negotiated contracts with them tostop hunting and trading.Has it worked?The promoters of this approach say that it has turneda number of professional tiger poachers into assets. 4The hunter-rangers have provided valuableintelligence about tiger poaching and other wildlifehunting and trade. In December 2001, a major tigerand elephant poaching gang was uncovered with thehelp of these rangers.The approach, if illegal hunting is discovered, isto have the rangers and staff negotiate no-huntingcontracts with the poachers. These negotiations areconducted in the presence of district and policeofficials and carry a good deal of weight. Thisprocedure is equivalent to a stern warning, and, sofar, none of the people who have signed suchcontracts with the project have been caught poachingagain, says the report.The project proponents and their reports recordthat poaching has reduced in Cambodia since the1990s 5 , but whether this merely correlates with theprogramme or is actually a consequence of theprogramme is something the Task Force has beenunable to gauge from a distance. But the fact is thatthe programme has used innovative methods andbrought new skills to people who used to bepoachers. It has worked at a low-cost option of localhiring, and intelligently deployed them for surveysand patrolling.Namdapha: can hunter-tribes be protectors?The reserves in the northeastern states of India arevast and inaccessible, low on staff and high on localcontrol. One conservation option here, as elsewhere,is to spread a security blanket around a reserve andprotect it with hard action. This model has beensuccessfully tried in Kaziranga national park, Assam,where a low intensity war has been fought betweeninsurgents and poachers versus the government for aperiod. But even here, the park authorities and thegovernment have worked on reconciling localinterests in protection. But there are other reserveswhere this protection model is not feasible. What,then, are the options?The 2,000 sq km Namdapha tiger reserve islocated in Changlang district, the eastern-most partof Arunachal Pradesh. It was declared a reserve forestin 1970 under the Assam Forest Regulation Act, 1891(first proposed in 1947), and subsequently a wildlifesanctuary in 1972. It was finally declared a nationalpark in May 1983; two months before, it wasdeclared a tiger reserve. In 1986, a 177 sq km area ofreserve forest was added to the tiger reserve and isdesignated as the buffer zone, while the rest (1,808 sqkm) is considered the core zone.The area has a wide altitudinal range, from 200 mto over 4,500 m. The terrain is steep and inaccessible.The old 157 km Miao-Vijaynagar road runs throughthe park, though it is motorable only for 26 km up toa settlement called Deban. The park headquarter is atMiao township, with a single functioning range inDeban. Civil supplies to villages located outside theWWF: NGO monitoring networkIn the mid-1990s, the WWF-India had developed aprogramme for mobilising grassroot support inthe tiger range areas. This was done through thecreation of a NGO monitoring network with thefollowing objectives;a. To develop an advance warning, threat alertmechanism for safeguarding the protectedareas;b. To mobilise grassroot NGOs and othercommitted field based groups who are focalpoints of this network, for elicitingparticipation of the local people in activitiessuch as ecodevelopment as well as forprotected areas management. 6The way ahead 65