The Hindu Business Line : To whom does the land belong?

A FILM show was on as we touched at about 7.30 p.m. Malur village from Harisal in the Melghat Tiger Reserve. On the village path, some 50 children, along with adults, were watching a film, beamed from a mobile van, in which a tribal kid becomes a friend of a crocodile. It described the ways of crocodiles and the need to be their friends.

Dr Claudio Sillero, founder of the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, UK, Kishor Rithe and Ashish Fernandes got busy clicking the show as one moved around with Sanjay Rithe, managing the van. "Inko, tiger ka film chahiye (They want films on tigers)," Rithe told me as we moved around the village. It was a Wednesday (market day) and the crowd was thin. "Otherwise there is a bigger crowd," Rithe informed me.

There are about 100 houses (600 families) in Malur village, with a school running classes till Class 4. In the many villages outside Melghat Tiger Reserve, the Duda (Forest Owlet) educational van of the Nature Conservation Society, Amravati, has become a hit. It is something the villagers crave for.

The van, fitted with a TV set and strong batteries, tours the villages spreading the message to conserve forests and its animals. The show ends around 9 p.m. when Rithe and his team get talking to the villagers and fill a form detailing basic statistics of the tribal population.

The following day, they take the kids on a forest trek. During the weekend, the team selects five elders each from five villages to discuss their problems, such as lack of jobs. "We try to get the Forest Department to look into the demands, so that they can utilise government funds available for various tribal development programmes. If we do not get the village population living outside the Melghat sanctuary on our side, our efforts to save the Melghat tiger reserve will fail," explains Kishor Rithe. Villagers need to be impressed of the need to avoid sending their cattle into the forests to graze; they have to be told of the dangers of felling trees or setting the forest on fire as then there will be no forests or water to sustain them.

The Duda experiment could be the template of an effort funded by the Born Free Foundation to hold on to tigers and other wildlife in the 10,000-sq.-km Satpura range in Central India. This writer sat in day-long discussions on the first experiment to keep Satpura (including its corridors) inviolate at the guesthouse in Tadoba. Under the initiative of Dr Claudio Sillero, Born Free has committed Rs 1.22 crore over three years to fund a Landscape Programme run by five parties: the Bombay Natural History Society with an educational van, Life Force (working in Panchmarhi, Bori Satpura Tiger Reserve), the Satpuda Foundation (Pench Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra), Tract (Tadoba Tiger Reserve) and the Nature Conservation Society, Amravati (Melghat).

Moving around in Malur village, one heard Dr Sillero querying Kishor Rithe: "When will my education van (nicknamed Tiger Van) get operative?" It should be any time now as the tiger van is ready to tour the reserves spread across the Satpura range. In about a week's time, a health van will be readied to hand out basic health amenities to the tribals. The five will decide on a rota to deploy the two vans in the villages and get the tribals on their side. It is not going to be easy.

While at the meeting one read an essay by Peter Jackson in a collection styled Riding the Tiger. Peter says: "If tigers are to be conserved, local people's feelings and needs must be a paramount consideration. Unless they support conservation, the tiger is doomed. They are not necessarily hostile to the tiger; they have greater problems with deer and wild boar, which ravage their crops. A local tiger can even be seen as a protector against these pests. But people resent being excluded from forests and grasslands, which have been set aside for tigers and other wildlife, and could provide them with basic necessities such as firewood, building materials, fruits and medicinal plants, and grazing land for livestock. These necessities have been so over-exploited elsewhere that they are in short supply. When people invade reserves, it becomes the unfortunate task of forest and wildlife guards to act as unsympathetic policemen to protect the tiger and its ecosystem. If people's hostility is to be eliminated so that they can co-exist with tigers and other wild animals, they must be ensured of the resources they need from land outside reserves. At the same time the need for conservation of natural areas and their wildlife as a support for the well-being of humans must be explained to them."

Balu is a Korku tribal living in the Raipur range of Melghat reserve and was with us on a morning trek to Chiklam. He earns Rs 1,800 a month as a chowkidar and his two sons study in an Ashram school, with the government bearing the expenses. His friend Sukhlal, the best trekker in Raipur range, is in trouble, with his father admitted in a Nagpur hospital for cancer. "Sukhlal kaisa hai (How is Sukhlal?)," one asked him. We were walking along when Balu told me that Sukhlal had sold his cattle and has not been to the village for quite some time.

At a shop in Semadoh one asked a shopkeeper about business and he replied it was not good as most tribals had no jobs. They may turn poachers or raid the forests in sheer despair. Will the Landscape Programme make it?

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