Image used for representational purposes only
Image used for representational purposes only

Increasing man-animal conflict is a sign of disasters waiting to happen

In the last eight years, wildlife attacks in Kerala have claimed nearly 950 lives. And the state doesn’t even top the list. Odisha, West Bengal and Jharkhand are the top three.
Published on

I am writing this from my farm in Wayanad as the villages around me are in the grip of terror of wildlife incursions. There have been three tiger attacks where two women have succumbed to a man-eater, a few wild elephant attacks that have claimed a life, and a leopard has maimed another, all in the last two days. The fear among the locals is palpable.

For most of the year, I stay in the safe confines of my highrise apartment, and the world looks different from there than how it looks from where I am now. In my Mumbai apartment, where I have no fear of being stomped to death by a wild elephant or becoming fodder for a ravenous tiger or a pack of wolves, I had found it easier to pontificate on animal rights and feel enraged about the pesky humans who can’t love animals as much as I do.

After all, I don’t earn my living foraging the forest for honey like the tribals do or practice sustenance farming to feed my family. Why should I care about the wild boars that come in droves through a carefully tended farm of a marginal farmer and wreak havoc on his livelihood? I am not riding through winding jungle roads, alone on a bike, through biting cold and mist at midnight after my shift as a watchman in a distant estate. So why should I care about the lurking tiger or leopard at the next turn?

But the moment one spends a few weeks in such places, the reality shifts. No place looks safe anymore. In eight years, wildlife attacks in Kerala have claimed nearly 950 lives. And Kerala doesn’t even top the list. Odisha, West Bengal and Jharkhand are the top three, followed by Assam, Chattisgarh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. The majority of the victims are poor, and hence, such deaths rarely become news.

The loss of livelihood of people living on the margins isn’t accounted for properly. Depending on one’s ideology, it is easy to place wild animals or poor humans living in the forest periphery as victims and aggressors or vice versa, but it would be like missing the forest for the trees. There is a real culprit hiding behind these escalating man-animal conflicts—the way in which we ‘manage’ the forests.

That the forests can be managed, like a public park, itself is a laughable proposition. This stems from the colonial era view that the world is meant to be conquered, exploited and used for the comfort of humans and humans alone. The forest department is still in the hangover of a colonial legacy. They are mainly in the business of managing monoculture plantations rather than wildlife.

Thousands of hectares of pristine forests have given way to teak, sandalwood or eucalyptus plantations managed by the forest department. For example, the recent CAG report that covered the period from 2017 to 2022 in Kerala found that 21.81 per cent of Kerala’s declared forests are plantations that are not suitable for wildlife. Also, huge tracts of land have been leased to electricity boards, plantation corporations, and private ownership. Most plantation crops are not even native to the tropical forests of India, which creates enormous ecological damage.

They often fragment the forest lands, cutting off elephant corridors and tiger territories and wreaking havoc on an ecosystem that has grown over millions of years. In Wayanad district alone, there has been a reduction of 947.49 sqkm in the last 75 years. The forest cover has halved in this period. Political parties had competed with each other to run ‘Pattayam Melas’, a political stunt to cater to vote banks by regularising the encroachment of forest lands by powerful communities.

An explosive cocktail of religion, caste, votes and commercial interests has stripped the pristine Western Ghats of most of its diversity. At first sight, Kerala’s forest may look pristine and dense green from above, unlike the barren hills that illegal mining had left behind in Himachal or Uttarakhand, but this greenery is deceptive. Most of it is cardamom plantations, made after clearing the natural undergrowth.

The tall trees are left behind only because they are needed for cash crops and are privately owned by those who can manage the political parties and local administration. For any development projects, forest lands are the first to be acquired as one need not give compensation to animals. Alternate land is sometimes allocated to compensate for forest land acquisition for any development as if one can replace a billion-year-old tropical forest with a few teak trees planted many hundred kilometres away.

Such unmitigated avarice will always have consequences. Unfortunately, the victims are the marginalised humans and the animals with their fast-shrinking habitats. It is high time that we have a proper forest management policy. First, the monocultures should be stopped, and these places should be allowed to be returned to nature. The private leases need to be revoked, and the massive tea, coffee and cardamom estates that conglomerates run in lands received during the British era shouldn’t receive renewal of leases and should be allowed to be reforested.

In Kerala, there needs to be a policy of compensating the marginal farmers who got farmlands during the infamous ‘Pattayam Mela’ period, and they should be relocated away from forest boundaries. If we continue with the colonial-era mentality that the world is for the exploitation of humans, nature will show us soon who is the master. The increasing man-animal conflict is just a symptom of catastrophic disasters waiting to happen.

Anand Neelakantan

Author of Asura, Ajaya series, Vanara and Bahubali trilogy

mail@asura.co.in

X
The New Indian Express
www.newindianexpress.com