Term Progress Report

1 ANNUAL REPORT ST ST 1 APRIL 2002 to 31 MARCH 2003 While it is important that the Tiger survives inside Ranthambhore National Park, let us not forget that it is equally important for local people to coexist in harmony. Help us help them find alternatives Lekharam Meena until As more and more people recently spent most of his benefit from the community time illegally grazing conservation work the safer the cattle or cutting wood future of the Tiger in inside the Park. Today he Ranthambhore will become. has decided to have only Smaller families, better one child and his son education, fewer cattle and Roop Singh Meena gets a alternate energy are all aimed at free education at our reducing pressure on the Park school. He is today the and its resources. In the long- strongest advocate in his term it encourages a village for environment partnership between the Park conservation. He has PRAKRATIK SOCIETY and the people. An absolute long since forgotten the RANTHAMBHORE SEVIKA necessity if the Tiger is to bitterness he had when he VPO : SHERPUR KHILJIPUR survive. was wounded by a DIST : SAWAI MADHOPUR gunshot fired by forest RAJASTHAN—INDIA guards trying to stop him PIN : 322 001 from cutting wood. TEL : 07462 220286, 252009. FAX : 220811 Email: [email protected] 2 Why Community Conservation is the Only Guarantee of the Long-term Survival of the Tiger in Ranthambhore I came to Ranthambhore in 1971 when my father Fateh Singh Rathore (who worked for the Rajasthan Forest Department) was transferred to Ranthambhore as its newly appointed Game Warden. A little over fifty thousand people lived around the Reserve. Official estimates put the Tiger population at less than 15. My earliest memories are of driving with my father into the park on a small road that turned into a dust tract soon after leaving the Sawai Madhopur town. As people in sixteen villages still lived inside the Park, every drive into the park encountered teams of people on bicycles, bullock carts and foot along the dusty roads of the park. Every few kilometres there was a village with people ploughing their fields, and the park was full of buffaloes and cows that belonged to the people that lived inside the park. All the lakes had been drained of their water, and local people used the land to grow their crops. Rarely did anyone ever see a Tiger or any other wildlife for that matter. Even the few Sambar and Chittal Deer were very skittish and ran into the forest at the first sound of a vehicle. The only way to see tigers in those days was by tying bait at particular locations where hides had been constructed for people to sit at night and wait for them. Every night my father would sit in these hides waiting for a Tiger to come and kill the bait, which was usually a male buffalo calf. On many occasions I would also accompany him. As soon as a Tiger would appear and kill the bait the spot lights would be turned on and sometimes one would see the Tiger clearly if it wasn’t frightened away by the lights. Many times all one would see was a pair of eyes shining through the bushes when a spot light was trained on the animal. In 1973, our late Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi launched what would become one of the most ambitious conservation projects ever undertaken. It had her unwavering patronage and International support of organisations like WWF and individuals like David Shepherd. Together the combination ensured that the Project was implemented fully. Ranthambhore became one of the lucky Parks to become a part of this Project and my father was entrusted with the responsibility of implementing it. At the time the conservation fraternity across the country shared a common belief that the best way to save the Tiger was to remove all human presence from inside Parks and then to keep it out. My father was no exception to this and went about his job whole-heartedly. He tentatively started a dialogue with the inhabitants of the 16 villages inside the Park to voluntarily relocate to a site outside the Park. It took over three years of persuasion when 13 villages agreed to relocate outside. In 1976 one of the most successful relocation efforts was completed. Following this my father, like his other colleagues across the country, set about the task of enforcing the Park boundary and keeping it as inviolate as possible. By 1980 because of strict enforcement the habitat in the areas where the villages used to be started turning wild creating rich grasslands providing enough fodder for the ungulate population in the park to thrive. With prey density increasing and poaching under control the Tiger population also started increasing. The old lakes below the fort were once again dammed and helped create vital ecological 3 zones for all kinds of wildlife to thrive. For the first time Tiger sightings in Ranthambhore began to increase dramatically and eventually even baiting was stopped. With reduced human interaction the animals became more comfortable in the presence of people as long as they were confined to a vehicle. Soon, Ranthambhore started providing glimpses into the secret life of the Tiger hitherto unknown to the world. Rearing of family, mating, hunting and other rare visual glimpses of the natural life of Tigers began to be seen by the rest of the world through the books published by Valmik Thapar and my father. For all practical purposes, Project Tiger became one of the most successful projects ever undertaken to save a species from total extinction. However, what no one had accounted for was the new threat that was emerging in the form of a staggering increase in population of the local people that still continued to live along the periphery of the Park in 96 villages. In 1973, when Project Tiger was launched this population was less than 70,000 people. There was enough grazing land and tree cover along the buffer of the Park to meet their requirements for fuel wood and fodder. With little effort from anybody to manage this resource in the buffer it soon vanished because of over grazing, deforestation and illegal encroachment. With the forest and grasslands improving inside the Park the people outside began to illegally enter the park on a regular basis to collect wood, grass or to graze their cattle. Park vs. people conflicts began to increase with each passing year culminating in 1982 with a brutal attack on my father, which left him hospitalised for months. Fortunately at the time Project Tiger still had the full backing of Mrs. Gandhi and things were soon brought under control. Although this incident did provoke interest in involving local people in conservation and in helping them find alternatives, unfortunately, nothing much was done about it. With the transfer of my father from Ranthambhore in 1987 and the subsequent assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, both enforcement at the local level and political patronage at the top level suffered. By 1990 rampant poaching was going on and Tigers were disappearing. However, it was only after the local police apprehended a poacher after a tip off organised by my father, that the Government finally acknowledged the issue. Census figures involving local NGOs estimated the Tiger population to have reached an all-time low of fewer than 20 Tigers in Ranthambhore. This was later disputed and the Tiger population was put higher. Meanwhile, the human population around the park had grown to 120,000. Following the incident when illegal graziers attacked my father in 1982, I became convinced that if the Tiger was ever going to survive in Ranthambhore it would need the local people to be involved in its protection. At the time I was entering Medical school, and with each visit home during holidays I became increasingly aware of the staggering increase in the human population that was taking place in the region. With a little over 6000 children being born along the periphery of the Park each year I was convinced that no matter how hard one tried no effort at encouraging environmental sustainability in the region could keep up with this increased demand. By the time I graduated from Medical School in 1989 I was committed to coming back to Ranthambhore and finding ways to help the local people and by doing so helping the Tiger. 4 The opportunity arose in the form of the Ranthambhore Foundation, an NGO which was set up by Valmik Thapar. I was made Field Director of this organization and began working with local people with the aim of reducing their dependence on the Park’s resources. One of our first projects was a mobile medical service, which visited 40 villages weekly, providing much needed primary health care to the local people. Many people have since asked me the question: How would this help the Tiger? It helped us accomplish two very important things. First, it provided us an opportunity to interact with the local people, which helped us assess their needs and their perception of the Park and its future. This helped us formulate future projects that were more directly related to helping save the Tiger—like afforestation, income generation through promoting local skills, animal husbandry and dairy development, education and alternate energy, legal aid and mobilising political and public support. Secondly and more importantly, it provided us with the best opportunity of dealing with the greatest threat, the staggering human population growth. In 1994, I established the Prakratik Society, which took over the projects from the Ranthambhore Foundation.

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