MOOKNAYAK MEDIA BUREAU | Novmber 15, 2024 | Jaipur: Indian law specifically protects Adivasis’ (tribal peoples’) right to remain on their ancestral homelands. But these laws are not respected. Many tribal people are living in constant fear of being imprisoned, tortured, beaten or shot just for carrying out their daily activities. Forest Officers subject them to racism, violence, and abuse.

Indigenous people continue to pay the price of Tiger Reserves

The big conservation organizations are supporting this and claiming the relocations of tribal people are “voluntary.” It’s a con. Evidence proves that, in many cases, these relocations are in fact forced evictions. But the forest and the tribes cannot survive without each other. Steal the forest from the tribes and their way of life and extraordinary knowledge are annihilated. Remove the tribes from their land and, as they tell us themselves, the forest will also disappear.

More importantly not all villages are in core areas as per NTCA data. “The government has given data for the core areas but relocations have taken place in buffer areas as well,” says Professor Ram Lakhan Meena. The Wildlife Protection Act, 1972 clearly mentions that the voluntary relocation of people needs to be done only in the identified core or critical habitats of a tiger reserve. Professor Meena also  says his documentation across 26 tiger reserves reveals that wherever relocations took place no compensation has been given, even though according to the Act, a family is supposed to receive up to INR 1.5 million (USD 18,300) in compensation.

In 2006, the same year the Indian government amended the Wild Life Protection Act, it also passed the landmark Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, usually only referred to as the Forest Rights Act (FRA).

The law was supposed to grant rights over forest lands to the 100 million indigenous people in India. In practice, the passage of the Act has done little to change the historical legacy of denying forest dwelling communities right to access the land they have inhabited in order to protect endangered animals.

“FRA is implemented just in 5-10 of [tiger] reserves and that too in some areas only,” Professor RL Meena tells to MOOKNAYAK MEDIA. Customary forest rights and individual forest rights under the FRA, which would have allowed forest dwelling communities to gather wood, medicinal herbs, and aromatic plants from within the traditional boundaries of their villages, have largely been ignored.

Professor Ram Lakhan Meena, a professor at the Central University of Rajasthan, GandhinagarAjmer tells MOOKNAYAK MEDIA, “Any form of wildlife conservation through the protected area model has a human cost, especially paid by those living in and around these protected areas, who are often very marginalised, poor and with no bargaining power. While we celebrate the success of Project Tiger, we must acknowledge the social cost of the indigenous people and revisit the conservation model.” Indigenous people in India continue to pay a price for tiger reserves, including:

• Forced evictions: Indigenous communities, known as Adivasis, are being forcibly removed from their ancestral lands to make way for tiger reserves. These evictions are affecting nearly 400,000 Adivasis.
• Loss of rights: Adivasis are losing their rights to visit their lands, temples, and collect honey from the forests.
• Cultural erasure: Adivasis are being denied their traditional practices, such as tribal tattoos and long hair.
• Outdated conservation model: Some critics say the conservation model is outdated and that engaging with communities is the way forward for protecting wildlife.
• Illegal evictions: The evictions are illegal and destroy lives.

Here are some examples of the impact of these evictions on Indigenous people:

• Jenu Kuruba tribe: The Jenu Kuruba tribe is one of the 75 tribal groups that the Indian government classifies as particularly vulnerable. The tribe’s primary source of income is honey, which they collect from beehives in the forests.
• Baiga tribe: Thousands of Baiga tribes people have been forcibly evicted from Kanha tiger reserve, even though they do not hunt tigers and have lived in the forests with the animals for centuries.
• Khadia men: Some Khadia men were thrown off their land after it was turned into a Protected Area and lived for months under plastic sheets.
• Mina / Meena tribe: Hundreds of thousands of Mina / Meena tribes people have been forcibly evicted from Ranthambore and Sariska tiger reserves. Although this process was intended to reduce the impact on livelihoods (since farming is the primary economic activity), in practice the newly assigned plots had lower productivity due to poor soil conditions. More importantly, a ban on access to the new reserves impinged on the local communities, who had previously visited the forest frequently (on a daily basis for over half the respondents) to collect goods such as timber for building, fi rewood, fodder and honey.

Could community conservation areas be the way forward?

Critics of the current way that Project Tiger is being pursued, like Rajkamal Goswami and Ambika Aaiyadurai, argue that the government has failed to consider that there are examples in India of forests managed by local communities where tigers have thrived without people losing rights over their ancestral land. A case in point is the healthy tiger population in Arunachal Pradesh’s Dibang Valley which may host as many as50 tigers. The valley is a wildlife sanctuary – which, unlike a tiger reserve, does not limit the entry of people in ‘core areas’.

Aiyadurai explains that the Mishmis look upon tigers as their elder brothers, and killing a tiger is seen as a grave crime unless in self-defence. Applying such taboos, the Mishmis have been protecting their forest under a community conservation model, and it was officially recognised as a wildlife sanctuary only in 1988. Recently the government has suggested that it might establish a tiger reserve there.

Read Also : Tribals Get Out from Indian Tiger Reserves, Tourists Welcome

This has stoked concerns among the Mishmis of being cut off from their ancestral lands. Aiyadurai argues that the current model is already benefitting the tiger. “Community Conserved Areas [CCAs] are one of the possibilities to move beyond the state-controlled protected area model. The rise of CCAs, especially in northeast India, has reshaped conservation by challenging the power structure from the state.” Unfortunately, she tells The Third Pole, “Rigorous studies on their ecological and social impacts have been scarce.”

बिरसा अंबेडकर फुले फातिमा मिशन को आगे बढ़ाने के लिए ‘मूकनायक मीडिया’ को आर्थिक सहयोग जरूर कीजिए