Sunita Narain: Let the tiger roam

DOWN TO EARTH

She has never seen a tiger. This is how some conservationists questioned my credentials to chair the Tiger Task Force when it was set up three months ago. It did not surprise me. Cola, pesticide or diesel car-making companies reacted precisely like this to our work.

Discredit the messenger and hope the message also gets dismissed. But it did worry me. Saving the tiger is surely common to all environmentalists. So, was it really so important for me to have seen a tiger to have the expertise for what could be done to safeguard it?

The task was to understand how to secure the tiger's future. Project Tiger began over 30 years ago, amidst international concern and foreign advisors who believed large areas "" reserves "" would have to be set aside just for the tiger.

By the early 1980s, project architects realised it would need innovative strategies to involve people in regenerating lands, so that tiger habitat could expand. Without this, they knew, the "islands" of conservation would be lost over time.

Sadly, this message never went home. Each time a tiger crisis hit headlines, and it did many times in the last 30 years, the response was: more guns, more guards, more fences. Sariska received over Rs 1 crore per tiger over the 25 years of its existence, against the national average of Rs 24 lakh per tiger.

It received over Rs 2.58 lakh per sq km over this period (the average for the rest of the reserves was a little over Rs 1 lakh per sq km). Yet Sariska lost all its tigers. In short, money and infrastructure for protection was not the simple answer.

Our inquiries taught us many things have to be done, simultaneously "" from carefully improving internal management and scrutiny so that defences will not fail to amending the criminal provisions of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, so that the poacher can actually be convicted.

But all this is half the work. In the past 30 years of conservation, we have never really discussed what has to be done about the people that share the tiger's home. We learnt only 80 villages had been relocated from the country's 28 tiger reserves till date; a minimum 1,500 are still inside. Relocation was fraught.

Many of the relocated had returned, or turned against the park. The law provided rights of people had to be settled before a protected area could be notified. In other words, people should have been resettled or compensated before protection began. But this was not done. Relocation did not happen.

People continued to live within reserves, where conservation imperatives became harsher. They needed resources. Extraction continued, illegally and unsustainably. The conflict between people and park authorities grew. Here was a deadly stalemate for conservation.

So it is that we learnt, and have espoused, that there will have to be an Indian way of conservation. Even as we secure inviolate areas for the tiger by relocating people, we will have to accept not everybody can be relocated. We will have to practice coexistence "" sharing benefits of conservation to gain reciprocal protection.

The protection of the tiger needs inclusive conservation. It is clear to me the issue of protecting the tiger cannot happen unless there is scope for dialogue, unless the process becomes much more inclusive.

It is time to put a stop to distrust, and slander. It is time to hear a multiplicity of voices, to converse, and continue to converse. Only then, can the tiger roam.