The Hindu Business Line : The silent scream

A FEW hours spent in a forest or a beach or a mountain stays with one for long. It is two weeks since one returned from a trip to Tadoba and Melghat and yet one cannot shed the images of the Tadoba Lake. In some ways, it is better than looking at the camera shots taken by my friend Nishikant Kale as one can switch on anytime the thought process to wheel back into Tadoba.

On a walk round the lake, in the morning, Nishikant and myself watched lesser whistling teals grouped together and as we approached them they took wing with shrill calls to settle down in the centre of the lake. They are small pale brown, maroon chestnut coloured ducks and when calling together produce delightful whistling notes. We were keen on spotting a pair of grey-headed fishing eagles as a tourist had sighted them near the lake. We saw a big, stick platform atop a casuarina tree near the edge of the lake but it looked like an abandoned nest. In the evening, along with Kishor Rithe and Ashish Fernandes, one did a second round of the lake and we did spot a pair of grey-headed fishing eagles with one of them flying over our heads. Maybe it is their easy flight styles or their sheer size, which makes one chase raptors.

From somewhere, a sambhar and a spotted deer voiced their presence followed by the notes of the common nightjar and Franklin's nightjar and they seemed to form a perfect sentence, which the best editor could not touch upon. One lay down on the forest floor to look up at a sky slowly getting spotted with stars. The evenings in Tadoba pause and wait before turning a deep dark when it becomes hard to see each other.

At the Raipur range in Melghat, my favourite spot, we heard the mottled wood owl hoot and when it got dark we tried to spot the fellow, throwing torch beams on old neem, mango, and peepal trees but to no avail. In the morning, trekking to the water hole at Chiklam, we heard the forest owlet and Kishor was mighty happy. Towards the end of the trek, one has to climb down rocks to be at the quiet water hole under a tent of old mango and banyan trees at Chiklam. From somewhere, water flows into the rocky depression and is a favourite resting spot for tigers. We did not see any but sitting on a rock in Chiklam was enough.

Walking the forests one heard of a proposal to de-notify a portion of the Panchmarhi reserve to help the hotel lobby. Seemingly the M.P. Government would like to shrink its forest reserves to offer land for building hotels. Then one heard some good news. The Maharashtra Government is pushing the idea to create in Konkan the Sahyadri Tiger Reserve by combining the Chandoli and Koyna sanctuaries and the corridor connecting them. It is also trying to rehabilitate some villages in Tadoba and Melghat as the Korku and other tribals living there cannot anymore live off the forests without denuding the forests and its animals. One is not for driving them out; rather providing them all the modern facilities outside the forests as it has happened in Melghat with the Nature Conservation Society, Amravati, taking the lead.

Sukhlal, Phaltu, Babu and a few other tribals, who are trekkers earning a paltry Rs 1,800 per month, are my good friends and will never hack the forests or its animals. But that rule does not hold for others.

Now, New Delhi has come up with the Scheduled Tribes & Forest Dwellers Act, 2005, offering permanent residence to tribals in forests. If this law is passed there will be tribals and no forests. A sampler is the intro to the Act: "An Act to record and recognize the rights of Scheduled Tribes and Forest Dwellers in forests and to provide for a procedure for verifying and recording of the rights of members of the Scheduled Tribes on forest land as these rights were not verified, recognized or recorded during the consolidation of the forests and settlements during the colonial period as well as in Independent India resulting in historical injustice to these communities and rendering them as encroachers.

The Act also seeks to endowing title on holders of leases and pattas on forest land (and on those in possession of pre-1980 encroachments on forest land) and endowing title to land and homesteads to residents of forest villages and other old habitations on forest land."

For the purposes of this Act forest land means "forest of any description including village forests, protected forests, reserved forests, deemed reserved forests, protected areas including national parks and wild life sanctuaries." If nothing else, this Act will shut out corporates keen on opening mines in the forests of Orissa and Chattisgarh as the tribals will protest. But that is poor consolation, as it does not offer a living chance to the silent constituency of forests and its animals.

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