The debate over the culling of wildlife in India requires more than just sound and fury
The lack
of research on the topic is stark. The situation is complex and one that
warrants time and attention from multiple stakeholders.
A few months
ago, the Union environment ministry asked states to submit proposals if they
wanted to declare as vermin certain wildlife species that were causing harm to
crops, property or human life. Declaring theses species as vermin would allow
state and forest authorities to kill these animals without attracting penal
provisions under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972.
Subsequently,
three states were given permission to designate as vermin species that were
proving to be a nuisance to humans. These were wild pigs in Uttarakhand, nilgais and wild pigs in Bihar and rhesus macaquesin Himachal Pradesh.
A species can be
declared vermin under Section 62 of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. Once
this happens, the species moves to Schedule 5 of the Act and loses protection
under the law.
The recent mass
killing of nilgais in Bihar and the spat between Women and Child Development Minister Maneka
Gandhi and Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar over the culling have not
only highlighted the issue, but also raised further questions.
Javadekar
clarified that the culling was being permitted for a reason. TheIndian
Express quoted him as saying: “I will not react on who said
what. But as per the law, we must help the farmers whose crops get ruined. The
state government sends us a proposal and only then we initiate a step for a
specific region and for a specific period of time keeping the scientific facts
in mind.”
Little research on the subject
But the question
here is: are the farmers asking for culling?
While the
intensity and nature of this conflict varies from landscape to landscape, the
bottomline is that famers are indeed suffering from damage caused by wildlife.
However, farmers want a solution to the problem, and haven’t specifically asked
for culling. As no other alternatives have been put forth, culling seems to be
the easiest, or the only, option.
India’s decision
makers and influencers (including conservationists and researchers) have failed
to come up with a policy to address this man-animal conflict in the long run or
suggest models that could be tried out in the short term.
Conservation
organisations have been largely silent too.
Is that because
they are unwilling to take a stand on a topic as pressing and complicated as
this, or have other priorities?
A member of the
Bihar State Wildlife Board once said how the state government had written to
large conservation organisations for assistance on the subject a couple of
years ago. Each of these organisations, which receive a major chunk of their
funding for the conservation of tigers and other species, had either expressed
their inability to act, or did not reply on the issue of herbivores proving to
be a nuisance to farmers, which has resulted in the culling of large number of
tiger prey today.
The lack of
research on the topic is stark. This research is essential as it feeds policy
and helps shape future actions, as opposed to research that results in
publications or fuels academic debates at conferences.
Image downloaded (on 14th June 2016) from and acknowledgements due to: http://art.thewalters.org/detail/26511/single-leaf-of-a-nilgai-2/
Enter the hunter
Then, is this
move to cull certain species driven by the hunter lobby?
How can people –
who are happy to pose with guns, who travel across the country to hunt animals
– proclaim to be conservationists?
That they are
well connected with those in power is apparent from the fact that some of these
hunters have been invited from as far as Hyderabad to Shivpuri – the Madhya Pradesh district with one
of the highest gun licenses in the country. In Maharashtra, where culling is
allowed in select districts, the killings by this group was stopped after the
chief wildlife warden publicly expressed his disagreement and displeasure in
the manner in which they were taking place.
In Telangana,
where hunting has been permitted across the state, a list of people sanctioned
to shoot is in place, and the forest department staff have been directed to
assist them with regard to their stay in forest guest houses and local
transport. Most of these people are members of the Indian Rifles Association,
and at least one is an accused in a hunting case in the state.
By permitting
culling, are we saying that wildlife needs to be confined to protected areas
and reserve forests?
The problem is
that our protected areas have themselves not been drawn based on conservation
needs, and large chunks of our reserve forests have been either degraded or
severely damaged by development infrastructure, or have simply disappeared. In
addition to this, we continue to lose our common lands to market forces and
make major changes to our cropping patterns – both of which further shrink the
available habitat for wildlife in village lands.
Human actions
have thus ensured that carnivores like jackals and wolves that were not
uncommon near villages even two decades ago are missing today. We now want to
use the pretext of their absence (lack of natural population control measures)
to remove the herbivores from these landscapes.
Scientific culling?
What is the
process to be followed before a species is declared vermin?
Can a state send
a request to the Centre based on the few applications it receives, or is it
mandatory for the state to first carry out surveys and consultations to
understand the ground situation? Should the state try out mitigation measures
before writing to the Centre asking for species to be declared vermin?
Replies to Right
to Information applications on the topic have revealed that most states have neither
conducted any surveys prior to sending culling requests to the Centre, nor do
they have in place a strategy to address the human-wildlife conflict.
So, when does
this culling stop?
In context of
the recent nilgai killings in Bihar, is there a threshold after which we say
that the numbers are at an acceptable level? But for this, we first need to be
aware of the numbers (close approximations) of these species in different
landscapes.
The situation is
complex and one that warrants time and attention from multiple stakeholders. It
has been in the making for long and there are no solutions available that could
be placed in bullet points – if they were, we would not be reading this today.
This could be the last opportunity we have to move beyond our comfort zones and
get our act together for landscape-based wildlife conservation. Else, this
could also be the first step to reducing our protected areas to glorified zoos.
Published at http://scroll.in/
on 14th June 2016.
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posts on the topic
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