Dionne Bunsha

Essay written for 'The Best in the Indian News Business 2006-07, The Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism award winners', (2009), Roli Books, India

Dionne Bunsha
May 2008

Almost every month, I get a call from a friend called Kallan. We don’t go much beyond ‘hello’ – because we don’t speak the same language. He doesn’t know English or Hindi. And I don’t know the Sahariya language, Khadi. But, whenever, he gets the chance, Kallan calls from a phone booth in a town two hours away from his village to say “Namaste”.

Inevitably, he will ask, “When are you coming here again? The situation is very bad. We are starving.” Everytime, I try to get more details, hoping that I can call forest officials to try to get something done. But the language barrier gets in the way.

It’s difficult to describe where Kallan lives. His village has shifted so many times - not by choice. It’s now called Naya Pipalbaodi (new Pipalbaodi). The old Pipalbaodi was on the banks of a stream in Kuno forest in the Chambal Valley, north west Madhya Pradesh. Pipalbaodi is one of 24 Sahariya Adivasi villages that were relocated to make way for a lion sanctuary. It was part of a new wildlife conservation idea to translocate five of the last remaining Asiatic Lions from their only habitat in the Gir forest in Gujarat, and have a ‘second population’ in Kuno. This would ensure the survival of the species in case an epidemic hit the Gir lions.

So, 1,545 families were shifted to make way for five lions... that have still not arrived in Kuno. Sounds absurd? Well, it’s just the beginning.

The Gujarat government refuses to send any lions outside its boundaries. It wants the Asiatic Lions to remain uniquely Gujarati. So, the lions are still thriving in Gir. While people in Kuno have lost everything - their land, their livelihoods and some lives. And, Kuno remains a ghost sanctuary.

The story of how I met Kallan starts not in Kuno, but in Gujarat. I had gone there to research an article on the Asiatic Lions in the Gir forest. I thought it was an ironic wildlife conservation story. Most wildlife articles are about species dying out, few remaining. Here, it was the reverse. The population was growing and the Gir National Park was not big enough, so lions were straying out – as far as the coast. Strangely, you could sometimes find lions on a beach.

As I explored further, the lion translocation story seemed even more bizarre. I realised that the story about Asiatic Lions would not be complete without going to Kuno to see what had happened to the people who had been cleared out for the lions.

Finding them was far more difficult than finding the lions. Telephone connections here are erratic, and after much trying, I managed to get in touch with the only NGO that works there.

The road to Kuno was rough, if you can call it a road. It was a roller coaster ride over the dry, craggy terrain of the Vindhyas, the mountain range that divides north and south India. My first trip was like any other assignment – packed with as many interviews as possible – with people who didn’t get land, people who aren’t happy with their land, and people who abandoned the resettled village and moved back to their old village.

Pipalbaodi had moved back to their old village, close to the boundary of the new lion sanctuary. The forest guards pointed us in their direction. That’s when I met Kallan. He was with his family – part of the crowd that had come out of their mud huts to tell us their stories. Later, I bumped into Kallan again at the office of the NGO, where he was laughing with embarrassment as he and his friends watched a home video of a recent village festival where he was dancing in a drunken frenzy.

When I returned to Mumbai, I got a fax and desperate calls from the NGO office telling me that the forest guards forcibly evacuated Pipalbaodi. People had been beaten up, dragged into jeeps, kept in illegal detention for a few days and then dumped at another location. No one knew where this other location was. Two men managed to jump out of the jeep while at Agraa village and went to the NGO to tell them what happened. The lions would have received better treatment. But these are adivasis.

I immediately started calling up forest department officials, hoping that pressure from the media would ease the pressure on the villagers. The deputy forest conservator told me that ‘they were not harassed but they were asked to leave the forest for their own good’. “We allowed them to grow the mustard crop in the forest. But now they have no work. It’s better if they come outside so that we can provide them some employment.”

Next, I called the forest minister. He was disarmingly open and asked me to bring the villagers to meet him. Excited, I called up the head of the NGO (who was now back to HQ in Delhi with no clue what happened after the urgent fax she sent me) and told her the good news. “Do you expect us to take them to meet him? That is too much to ask of us,” was her reply. Stunned, I asked, “Why?” Her answer: “It may endanger their existence in the area where they are working. And besides, we have tried this in the past and the villagers are too scared to speak in front of the officials.”

It totally bewildered me. Why would an NGO working on this issue and claiming to be a ‘third party’ in the re-settlement process not want to take this chance to make sure the villagers get a hearing? Why didn’t they know what had happened to the villagers? “If we went there, it would endanger their safety further,” was their excuse. “Let us know when the forest minister wants to meet and we can come and give him a presentation.”

A few days later, I asked the NGO head if I could take the village folk to the forest minister since she was not willing to take them? She couldn’t say no.

I had no idea where to start. How do I find where they are now? How do I go there without putting them in any danger of further retaliatory attacks by the forest department? How do I get the villagers from Kuno to Bhopal?

I had to find locals who knew the area. The closest I could get was a farmers’ union in Sheopur, the district capital, six hours away. So, we set off in search of Kallan’s village. Back on the roller coaster road - both literally and metaphorically.

I realized that my new-found friends at the farmers’ union may know the roads, but once we hit the dirt track, they were clueless. So, I had to return to the NGO office. No one was there except Rakesh, the keeper of the chicks. The NGO raises poultry and distributes chicks to villagers as part of the UN’s ‘Livelihood Program’. Rakesh had no clue what had happened to Pipalbaodi. They could have fallen off the map, for all he cared.

We asked around, took a local with us in the jeep and headed for the old village. We parked behind a tree before the sanctuary’s entrance gate and made him walk to see if the villagers were there. Not a soul in sight. So, he took us to the new village. On a very long, rocky dirt track - very hot, dusty and bumpy.

Finally when we reached, there was just a small settlement of families dumped in the midst of this dry, barren landscape. I asked them if they would be afraid to speak to the minister. There were so many willing to come with me to Bhopal that they had to go through a process of elimination. Only three could fit in the back of the car, but they wanted to squeeze in four. Then, there was a scramble to find clothes. They went through each house, looking for pants they could borrow to wear for the meeting.

While I waited for them to get ready, the others showed me around the ‘resettlement site’. It was arid and hard stone. Nothing could grow there. There wasn’t even enough drinking water, and the little that existed was contaminated. The village was so far from anything that they had to migrate to find work.

The tyranny of the forest department was even worse than I had imagined. They kept the villagers illegally at Pohri forest headquarters and let two people back to the village, threatening that only when they made sure that the entire village had evacuated the forest would they release the others in custody. The villagers had no choice. They had to leave. The NGO did not do anything to help. Not even a few chicks were thrown their way.

Back on the road. This time a long, 12 hour drive to Bhopal, the state capital. When, the forest minister met us, Kallan and his friends explained the problem to him clearly and without hesitation. The minister then instructed the chief conservator of forests to listen and take action. As we left the office, and I said goodbye at the bus stand (it was their first trip outside their village), I started wondering if this crazy journey was really going to help them.

Luckily, the next week, the bureaucrat was in Kuno to take stock of the situation. The villagers demanded fertile land, but the official said that there wasn’t any better land available. Instead, the forest department would try to improve the soil quality of the land by digging through the rocky terrain. Access to a new school was assured. Neither worked out. The state can’t even give them what was promised in the rehabilitation plan. There isn’t enough fertile land in the region. Did anyone think of that in the hurry to get them out?

Funnily enough, the Kuno project was considered one in which there was ‘successful rehabilitation with the consent of the oustees’. Sanctuary, India’s premier wildlife magazine even gave the forest officer in charge of the rehabilitation an award for ‘Earth Heroes’ at the Sanctuary Wildlife Awards 2002. Well, he got rid of the people, didn’t he? Mission accomplished.

Doing this story has been like watching a theatre of the absurd unfold over several years across varying landscapes with the most bizarre twists. It was a lesson on how wildlife conservation works on the ground – beyond the pages of government reports and glossy wildlife magazines. It’s a world we have inherited from the British sahibs who created protected forests and outlawed adivasis from their own lands. Our brown sahibs continue the tradition. The laws and decisions are made by people from the cities. They call the adivasis who have lived in and preserved forests for centuries ‘the encroachers’- who are ‘illegal’ and have to be ‘removed’.

Regardless of the kind of forest/landscape or the peculiarities of each individual situation or region, a uniform law is applied to all. It’s a rigid approach that doesn’t help conservation, because it doesn’t consider the complexities of each situation and doesn’t involve local people in the planning process. So, it inevitably leads to the deprivation and alienation of people.

India has more than 600 protected areas (PAs), occupying almost 5% of the country’s land area. Around 3 to 4 million people live inside these PAs and several million more in adjacent areas. Their lives are intricately linked to the forest and they depend on natural resources for their basic needs. Precise figures on the number of people evicted from PAs are not available (itself an indication of the casual way in which this has been treated by state and central governments), but research by environmentalist Ashish Kothari estimates that it might be around 100,000. But are they really the ones destroying our forests and its wildlife? Or is it the poachers, mining, quarrying, logging, power projects and tourist resorts catering to the greed of the city slickers?

Is it possible to preserve forests without destroying the people who are part of it? Does it have to be one or the other? A small, influential wildlife conservation lobby clings on to the old dogma. But the world has moved on. International organizations like the UN and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) believe in community conservation, that people are an integral part of conservation. The concept is as old as the hills in India. We have a wealth of ancient sacred groves and lakes that are guarded, regulated and preserved entirely by communities, who have an intimate knowledge of their environment.

In the last decade, the forest department has started involving communities in forest management. In most cases, it has been far more successful than total state control. For example, in Periyar Tiger Reserve in Kerala, a few enlightened forest officers involved local communities in starting an ecotourism programme where locals are the trekking guides. This has curbed smuggling of timber and poaching, and there has been an increase in wild animal populations. Moreover, the women formed a voluntary “Vasant Sena” (Spring Army) to patrol the forest. Their motivation: “We do this for our children…if the forest does not survive, how will we?”

Sadly, these are the exception, not the norm. Most forest dwellers in India are considered outlaws in their own land. Several are denied access to collect even berries, fruit and other minor forest produce like tendu leaves (which is their only source of income). That’s why their tribes and cultures are dying with the forest. The Sahariyas (meaning ‘residents of the jungle’) are one of India’s oldest and poorest tribes, and live in the most remote interiors of the country. The resettlement made their distress even more acute by depriving them of their only means of income – gathering forest produce. In 2005, several children died of malnutrition-related illnesses in some of the ‘re-settled’ villages. But no one batted an eyelid. If a lion dies in Gir, it’s national news. When children die in Kuno, it rarely touches the media.

Kallan’s survival is on the line. The last time he called, he told me, “There’s a wedding in the village. Hum log dhoom macha rahe hai (We are partying). When are you coming?” I haven’t gone back. It wouldn’t change a thing. The change will come from people sitting in air-conditioned offices (and rarely venture outside) who decide his fate. That’s why Kallan keeps calling me. Hoping that I can get through to them. To try to make sure he doesn’t remain a voice in the wilderness.