Justice, Endangered Species

Posted online: Monday, August 08, 2005 at 0000 hours IST
Indian Express

The news of the local extinction of tigers from the Sariska Tiger Reserve has led to typical knee-jerk responses from the government. The Reserve management’s first instinctive reaction has been to step up protection measures around the Reserve. The second response has been to push through an antiquated and ludicrous relocation plan for eleven villages located in the Core Zone, which are considered to be the primary stumbling block in effective wildlife conservation in Sariska.

In a democratic society, questions of how priorities for improving protected area management are decided without involvement of experts or local people are extremely critical. However, even more important in today’s context is how village relocation plans are formulated without any degree of people’s participation or expert involvement.



Most of the people about to be relocated from Sariska, found out about their impending fate only when the beneficiaries’ lists were being drawn up. The relocation package itself is exceedingly shabby. It actually might make entertaining reading if the issue was not about people’s lives. A meager cash compensation of Rs 16,000 and a ‘disturbance allowance’ of Rs 7000 is supposed to take care of each household over the transition period when the Gujjars will be forced to change their primary occupation from livestock-grazing to cash-cropping in a new environment. A house, a cattle-shed and fences will be built in a sum of Rs 40-54,000 per family. The inadequacy of the relocation plan is revealed by the fact that an entire village of 19 families is proposed to be moved in a total budgeted amount of Rs 18.38 lakh which comes to less than a lakh per family, a figure that includes establishment of basic infrastructure on what is essentially a wasteland now.







The land available at the proposed relocation site, Badhod Rund, about 222 ha in area, is also much less than the amount required to resettle 129 households with 2.1 ha each (271 ha), as is proposed in the first phase. And this calculation is without including land provision for community facilities, such as a school, a hall and cattle-ponds, as required by the state guidelines. Part of the land at the relocation site is rocky even to the untrained eye and another part of it is already encroached upon, further reducing the net availability of agricultural land for the oustees.



The relocation plan does not even touch upon provision of drinking water resources, let alone irrigation facilities. Conversations with adjacent villagers in the proposed relocation site reveal that considerable investment is required in borewell facilities in this area (about a lakh of rupees per drilling) because the water table is as deep as 400 feet due to water-intensive cultivation of wheat and mustard. Lack of groundwater facilities will be a particularly serious issue in the drought-prone region of Alwar in which Sariska is located. Apart from problems with the package, there is no guarantee that basic village amenities will be in place before the oustees are relocated, a condition which has been found to be critical for successful rehabilitation in numerous other instances.



The people being pushed out of Sariska, while certainly living on the edge as far as household economics is concerned, at least have access to water, fuelwood and livestock fodder right now. Right now they are looking at an uncertain future even with respect to these basic amenities of life that they now benefit from, being inside Sariska. If the Sariska relocation plan is implemented in its current form, another marginalised community will be condemned to destitution. There is need for transparency, technical guidance and involvement of oustees in deciding on relocation for villages, preparing relocation plans and their implementation.



In the recent past there have been some positive examples of relocation from wildlife sanctuaries such as Corbett Tiger Reserve and Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary in which the socio-economic condition of the oustees reportedly improved after relocation partly due to substantial and consistent engagement with the needs and aspirations of the oustees during the process of land allotment and infrastructure development. The Sariska management would do well to understand and emulate the process and policy adopted in these instances if a just relocation process is to be implemented.



The writer is an ecologist and a Fellow with the Council for Social Development, New Delhi