The 10-year-old tiger – they usually life for 14-15 years in the wild-in Corbett National Park killed Bhagwati Devi of Dhikuli village in the buffer zone of the park on February 6 when she went into the forest to collect firewood. The villagers said the tiger attacked the 50-year-old from behind as she sat collecting wood. Following protests by people, the chief wildlife warden of Uttarakhand issued orders to kill or catch the “man-eater”. The forest department trapped the animal and sent it to a zoo in Nainital on February 10.

Bhagwati Devi’s husband B C Nainwal, however, does not blame the tiger. “It is the policies of the government that made the tiger a victim of public ire,” he said. “The tiger was roaming near Dhikuli for four-five months. The main reason was elephant safaris by resorts here. They are known to throw meat in front of the tiger to increase the sighting of the big cat.”

A forest official admitted the resort operators’ role was suspicious. “They conducted elephant safaris in the area though it is not a tourist zone,” he said. Thirty-six resorts line the state highway in Dhikuli, on the other side of which is the park boundary. The department has now banned elephant safaris in the buffer zone. The forest department says the tiger was observed in the area for more than a year. “We warned the villagers not to go inside the forest but they did not heed the warning,” said Umesh Tiwari, the Bijrani range officer.

It is believed to have been lured out of Deoria forest range in Pilibhit district of Uttar Pradesh in November 2008 while chasing a wild boar, which ran into adjacent sugarcane fields that mimicked the tiger’s natural habitat, grassland. On November 9, it attacked a farm labourer in the sugarcane field in Pareba village when he was cutting sugarcane. The next day it attacked Kishan Pal Gangwal in nearby Dammupura village but the teenager survived. “The first victim was in a hunched position, so probably the tiger mistook it for an animal,” said Pradeep Tyagi, a forest guard in Deoria.

The first incident happened 3 km from the forest and the second one about 5 km. The forest is continuous with sugarcane fields. The tiger was around three years old and was probably trying to set up its territory and found the adjoining sugarcane field a good habitat, said P K Gupta, divisional forest officer, Pilibhit.

The tiger was next spotted in Shahjahanpur, some 60 km from Pilibhit. On December 21, a teenager’s flesh-eaten body was found 150 km away in Barabanki district. This was when the chief wildlife warden of Uttar Pradesh B K Patnaik declared the tiger a man-eater. “The boy had been missing for three days, so it is difficult to say if he was a victim of the tiger,” said an official in the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA). The chief wildlife warden countered this, saying a tiger’s pugmarks were found near the body.

The district magistrate announced an award for shooting the tiger, but the decision was soon reverted because it was against the NTCA guidelines. By now a frenzied mob was chasing the tiger. Four elephants, trackers, forest guards, tranquillising experts from the Wildlife Institute of India in Dehradun and wildlife NGOs from Delhi, were on the hunt. Some NGOs even set dogs on the trail of the big cat. Scared, the dogs hung close to the elephants’ legs.

The tiger wandered around human habitations in Lakhimpur, Sitapur, Barabanki and Lucknow before reaching Rudauli forest range of Faizabad district of Uttar Pradesh. It covered about 300 km. On January 10 and 14, it killed two more people in Kumarganj range of Faizabad. Except for the first kill in Pilibhit, the three other victims were killed inside forest. This shows the tiger did not come to the village to make a kill-a characteristic of a man-eater.

On February 24, it was shot between the eyes by Nawab Shafath Ali Khan, a shooter who came from Hyderabad. NTCA guidelines do not permit a non-forest services official to shoot a man-eater unless the forest department is not equipped to do so. To forest officials’ embarrassment it turned out to be a tigress though all the while they inferred from the pugmarks it was male.

A tiger, not more than two years old, killed its first human prey on January 4 outside the Kishanpur sanctuary in Dudhwa National Park close to the border with Nepal. Since then it has killed four more people and injured one. It claimed its last victim on February 19. The chief wildlife warden issued orders to shoot it.

“It did not eat the first two victims but only the third kill. It had lost the fear of humans. The last time we saw it, the tiger refused to move away when he saw a crowd,” said Mudit Gupta, senior project officer of WWF at a camp set up by the forest department near Kishanpur.

“The tiger was getting used to feeding on cattle carcasses thrown outside villages in the critical tiger habitat. Only once in the past two months it tried killing a wild animal in a wheat field. But the marks of struggle – badly damaged crop – show it was very young not trained in killing a wild prey,” said Anil Kumar Singh, coordinator, Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), a non-profit.

Here also sugarcane fields served as a good habitat for the tiger, where it got enough prey too. “The tiger was weaned early from its mother. When the sugarcane crop was cut, it took to killing humans,” said Anjan Talukdar, a veterinary doctor with the trust who tranquillised the tiger on March 1. The tiger was sent to the Lucknow zoo.

The Uttar Pradesh forest department is still on its toes. A tiger is roaming around Basti in eastern Uttar Pradesh. It probably wandered out of Valmiki sanctuary in Bihar and entered Ghazipur across the Bihar-Uttar Pradesh border.

“It doesn’t seem to be a man-eater. One person it killed was in self-defence. It is a 10-year-old tiger who is probably dislodged from its territory. It may reach Sohelwa Wildlife Sanctuary in Balrampur district,”

said Patnaik. These incidents have provoked a debate among wildlife managers and experts on whether the tigers were man-eaters and what compelled them to kill human beings. “Most of these tigers killed their first human prey in an accidental meeting. None of them considered humans their sole prey and in that sense they could be called problem tigers, but the term man-eater is for a tiger that learns to kill and subsist on humans in an efficient manner. The tiger then almost exclusively subsists on humans and actively seeks them out as prey,” said Y V Jhala, scientist at the Wildlife Institute of India. “None of these tigers fit into this category.”

In the three cases, the first victim was in a hunched position. “If surprised or cornered, a tiger can mistake human beings as a prey species and kill them. This is not man-eating,” Jhala added.

In two of the cases, tigers entered sugarcane fields. According to NTCA guidelines, tigers killing humans in sugarcane fields can be declared man-eaters only when they start living in the fields and attack people regularly. “All big cats venture into fields. This happened in the 1980s too, but then there was no 24×7 television,” said Vidya Athreya, a research associate with the Pune-based Kaati Trust that works on leopard rescue.

The Corbett tiger was captured in a hurry after what seemed like an accidental attack and the Faizabad tiger was chased around, pushed to make attacks, said Jay Mazoomdaar, journalist and filmmaker who broke the news about the absence of tigers in Sariska in 2005.

Hunter-turned-conservationist Billy Arjan Singh said tigers now have to live close to humans because there is no prey left in Dudhwa and forest mafia have destroyed the forest. More herbivores are now found in the buffer area of Corbett than in the core, added Iqbal Hussain, former sarpanch of Dhikuli.

It is not always out of compulsion that tigers move out of the forest. Experts say young tigers are expected to go out. “Usually they come back to the forest but sometimes they go too far and lose track,” said conservation biologist Raghunandan Singh Chundawat. Search for territory is a major reason for tigers moving out of forests. “Most tiger reserves are too small to contain a viable population of tiger for a long period. The prime habitats are occupied by dominant tigers. Sub-adult and old tigers are forced to use marginal habitats or disperse to other forests,” said Jhala.

However, today there are no connecting forests between tiger populations and when tigers disperse, they have to move through human habitats searching for a forest patch to settle in. Not finding any forest, they are forced to kill livestock and humans, said Jhala. “Till the 1960s, there were grasslands between the forest and agricultural fields in Pilibhit. Now the fields have extended up to the forest,” said P K Gupta.

The authorities in Corbett said they were forced by public ire to shoot the tiger or send it to a zoo. Chundawat questions the logic of sending tigers to zoos when there are very few tigers in the wild. “They need to trap the animal and take it back to a suitable habitat. When this can be done in Sariska, why can’t it be done in terai?”

Tiwari of Corbett said it is not easy to rehabilitate every tiger in the wild, especially a male who is not readily accepted by tigers in their territories. But there are forests like Rajaji National Park, which can accommodate tigers.

Wildlife experts also point out it is crucial to take quick action in case of a wandering tiger because if it adapts to eating humans, rehabilitating it in the wild becomes difficult. The authorities are then forced to take extreme steps like shooting. “We need a special team to deal with such situations.

The forest department should start monitoring tigers as soon as villagers report their straying. They do not have to wait for a kill to happen and then people to get angry and the politicians to pressure on them to act,” said Chundawat.

Athreya suggests tracking through GPS collars, though it is expensive-one collar costs Rs 2-3 lakh-and will require capturing tigers. The long-term solution to avoid such conflicts, point out wildlife experts, is better training of forest officials in pugmark identification and arms handling, and better habitat management, like ensuring a gradual, not abrupt, decrease of forest cover.

First the name (there is a lot in the name!)

Why are we “wild and happy”? I was desperately hunting for a good name for my blog and was frustrated that anything I thought about had already been taken. So, there was Rooted.com, wildernessredefined.com, .org, etc, etc, etc. Imagine the dent to my creativity! And then this friend, whom I had asked to suggest me a name, announced that he is starting a blog by the name, “Wild and Happy.” How incorrigible one could be? I asked him to suggest a name for my blog, and there he was, starting his own. This act demanded revenge. And Ladies and Gentlemen, here is our blog: “Wild and Happy.” Don’t worry, this is not stolen, the friend will be a regular contributor here and I have promised to give him another name for his blog (that is when he feels like posting!).

Wild and happy is a lot about environment and wildlife and all the more about personal experiences while dealing with these issues. We are not going to preach about global warming, pollution, save forests…blah…blah…blah. It is more about the people dealing with these problems and learning to modulate to deal with them, about the people who suffer due to them and how easily we have chosen to ignore them, how we have great figures to quote when making a presentation about impact of pollution, etc,etc, but not the faces of everyday life heroes who brave these problems and are happy in their adversity.

And it is about personal experiences that you and I encounter when we go places and look at these problems from the other side. You are all welcome to share really wild experiences, of places and situations where you thought you were really stuck but did come back, alive and HAPPY. Everything that surrounds you is environment, so feel free to share anything and everything you think is important for lives around you to know. Or something they already know but never voice!

Through this, I also want to share my experiences of Indians and the country we live in (I have deliberately put it the other way round) that are mostly based on my travel assignments as an environment journalist besides the stories that I do for my publication.

So, here we go!

Jidemadamma is among the few Soligas, an indigenous community, left in the hamlet. Soligas, literally meaning the bamboo children, are known for their environment-friendly practices and sustainable collection of minor forest produce. But most have migrated in search of livelihood since the government banned collection of non-timber forest produce ‘honey, lichen, amla, soapberry and soapnut’ their main source of income, about two years ago. Same is the story in other hamlets inside the sanctuary in the Western Ghats.

Migration is happening at a time the Soligas should be returning home, for good. The Scheduled Tribes and other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, recognizing tribals rights over forests, was notified on January 1, 2007. We thought once the act is in place our troubles will cease and people will come back, but there has been no change, says C Madhegowda, who works with the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment (ATREE) and is the first post-graduate among Soligas.

The ban on commercial use of non-timber forest produce was introduced in 2004 under the Wild Life (Protection) Amendment Act, 2002, but the Soligas continued collecting minor forest produce under Large Adivasi Multi-Purpose Societies until April 2006 because there was confusion whether the activity fell within the definition of commercial (see Stop trade, Down To Earth, September 30, 2004).

The produce collected by tribals was sold through multi-purpose societies in brt, Chamarajanagar and Hanur to the highest bidder. There are some 16,000 people in the sanctuarys core area who depended on selling forest produce and subsistence agriculture. They are migrating on a large scale.

Uprooted In Puranipur hamlet, 80 of 110 families have migrated. Most of them either work in coffee and pepper plantations or as contract labourers in farms and at construction sites in Kodagu, Wayanad in Kerala and as far as 150 km away in Tirupur and

Once self-sufficient, tribals are migrating to cities in search of livelihood

AGNIMIRH BASU

Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. In Kuntguri village on the foothills, tribals have permanently shifted to contract labour in the farms, says Sidappa Shetty of ATREE who has been working in the area for 12 years.

“Twice a week both my sons pluck weeds on the roadside for the forest department. Other days, they go to Chamarajanagar to work as coolies or construction labourers. Half the wages go in travelling expense. It is only because we have a coffee plantation, which buttresses our earning by Rs 4,000 a year, that we are able to survive, says Bummana Madhegowda of Muthugade Gadde.

Sale of forest produce used to constitute about 60 per cent of our income and a person could earn up to Rs 12,000 a year from it. Agriculture here is only for subsistence, adds C Madhegowda of atree.

Soligas shrugged The Soligas have for years monitored forest resources to determine what, how and when to harvest. They are not interested in it anymore. The adivasi societies and the Vivekananda Girijana Kalyan Kendra (vgkk), an ngo that has been working with the Soligas for 30 years, had evolved a system of participatory resource mapping. The purpose of the participatory system is to keep track of resources over time and space, and to monitor not only available stocks, but also regenerative capacity of trees and potential threats to resources, says Shetty in his study of the region. So during extraction of amla the tribals would remove hemiparasites, plants that partly obtain nourishment from their hosts, from trees. But since it did not happen this year, there were a lot of dead trees.

I cannot move around much. Earlier, all of us stayed together here. Now there is nobody Jidemadamma, Kaneri colony

The tribals have also stopped helping the forest department in checking forest fires and in March 2007 there was a big fire in the sanctuary that took the department about 10 days to douse. The fire was blamed on tribals who wanted to revoke the ban on commercial extraction of forest produce. A case was registered against 28 tribals, says C Madhegowda. According to H Sudarshan, honorary secretary of vgkk, the fire was partly due to lack of vigilance by tribals. The tribals played an important role in controlling big fires. The forest department employs 20-25 of them as fire watchers every year. This year the Soligas did not bother to check fires. Besides, very few people were employed for fire-prevention, he says.

Lack of tribals cooperation is also telling on trees and wildlife. Unchecked lantana has inhibited the growth of kidiya trees, on which elephants feed, and there have been instances of elephants rampaging and destroying whatever small crops people have. My husband Ramegowda has gone to Kodagu for coffee harvest. Here, too, we grow coffee, ragi and bananas. But three days ago, an elephant trampled the crops. Had it not been for our neighbours who alerted us that night, it would have destroyed our hut, says Nanjamma of Kaneri Colony.

Long wait vgkks honey and pickle processing units in the region are not getting enough honey and amla. There have also been instances of villagers selling honey to tourists illegally and we will not be able to control them for long if the ban continues, warns C Madhegowda.

On January 24, about 700 tribals held a protest meeting in Bangalore. The governor assured us that a committee would be formed with forest officers and tribal leaders to set conditions for implementation of the forest rights act, but gave no date, says C Madhegowda. The forest department says it will take some time to implement the act. After notification, it takes time to constitute various committees and decide upon the modalities, says R Raju, deputy conservator of forests, Wildlife Division, Chamarajanagar.

Till then, Jidemadamma will have to stay alone.

“Inventory of existing captive elephants will help us know the facilities they have in terms of health care, nutrition and training. We will then come up with a set of guidelines towards effective management of captive elephants,’

says Raman Sukumar, the founding trustee of Asian Nature Conservation Foundation (ancf). ancf along with the Bangalore-based ngo Compassion Unlimited Plus Action (cupa), initiated the study.

After the study, a manual has been prepared in Karnataka. It contains body measurement, dung circumference and weight, details of space, water, bath, interaction, training, behaviour and veterinary doctor’s availability for 158 captive elephants in the state along with their mahuts and their socio-economic status, Suparna Baksi Ganguly, vice president of cupa, said.

“The social status of mahuts is very low. The government doesn’t want to build infrastructure for them. We need to raise their standard of living so that they take interest in the animal,’ says Sukumar.

The three main aims of the project are to arrive at the total number of captive elephants in India, sample them to assess their status and management and then explore different models of elephant keeping and develop a concept to initiate care centres, says the cupa annual report.

The global population of elephants is 55,000, of which 15,000-16,000 are in captivity.

“A cultural association has always existed in temples and festivities. For instance, it’s a matter of prestige to own an elephant for the Namboodri community in Kerala,’ Sukumar said.

Activists say elephants should not be made a showpiece, but Sukumar says they can’t be wished away as it is very difficult to put elephants back in the wild as there is just no habitat.

“According to present regulations, somebody owning an elephant cannot sell it even if he can’t take care of the animal. This is not realistic,’ he added.

The second phase of the project will study health assessment of all captive elephants to know the common diseases afflicting them. “Elephants are very social animals. In captivity, most of them are afflicted with stress, aggression and tuberculosis. We are thinking of designing guidelines for their health next,’ says Ganguly.