RANCHI: Taking an initiative to deal with forest fires at Palamu Tiger Reserve (PTR), Forest officials will resort to agro-net. According to the officials at PTR, they have successfully experimented with this and will try to implement the same next year.
Forest officials in PTR are finding it difficult to deal with forest fires caused deliberately by local villagers for ‘mahua’ picking and poaching of animals.
According to the officials, more incidents of forest fire were reported this time than the last year as locals have started adopting the easier way of setting dry leaves on fire for making it convenient for them to locate ‘mahua’ dropped from the trees.
‘Mahua’ is a major cash crop for most of the tribal households across Jharkhand, where they eat the flower, barter it for grains and sell it for cash. Though the income from the daily collection is typically lower than the minimum wage, it is crucial as ‘mahua’ picking season in March-April, coincides with the lean season in agriculture.
Forest officials said that at least 35-40 incidents of fire in the PTR area are reported every year, causing significant damage to the flora and fauna in the region. Once the forest catches fire, it engulfs at least 1.5-2 acres of land. If it catches in the daytime, it is less intensive but when it catches during the night, it makes an impact on a larger area.
Therefore, PTR officials have found a new way to deal with this problem. “Under this initiative, agro-nets will be spread under the trees so that the ‘mahua’ fruits, dropping from the trees, get collected on it which may be claimed later by the forest dwellers. It does not require the villagers to put the dried leaves on fire which, most of the times, gets spread over a larger area, damaging the flora and fauna in the adjoining forest areas,” said PTR Director Kumar Ashutosh. He, however, said that it is at a very initial stage, but the
experiment has already been done and the initiative will be implemented next year with the onset of ‘mahua’ season, he added.
According to PTR director, the idea needs to be spread among the villagers so that more and more people adopt it on their own. PTR Deputy Director Mukesh Kumar also asserted that the experiment has been quite successful in some of the villages in Garu East Range of PTR, which needs to be expanded to other regions also.
“This is an excellent initiative to protect forest from fires. The villagers are also being made aware of this technique from time to time so that they adopt it on their own,” said the deputy director. Notably, PTR is spread over 1129 km having more than one lakh ‘mahua’ trees with 206 villages in it.
According to forest officials, fire incidents in PTR are shrinking animals’ habitats with burning of shrubs and insects, which are food for several animals. Birds are also compelled to leave the area due to an increased temperature around their habitats, they said.