A Losing Battle

Brave forest officers try their best to save Indian wildlife from poachers. But even that could prove too little, too late.

Flanking the busy temple town of Haridwar is the dense but fragile forest of Rajaji National Park. Like the better known Corbett National Park, it is located at the Himalayan foothills, and like Corbett too, it has been in the news for something that should make our hair stand on end—the poaching of wildlife. The illegal hunting of big cats.

It must be stopped forthwith, says civil society, and the Government, the media and forest rangers echo these words in grave tones. But, for all the hand wringing in high places, all the finger wagging in rarefied spaces, the crime continues.

The terrain of the lower Himalayas makes it a special challenge. Rajaji is three-fourths hilly while Corbett is a large park with great ravines. But what makes it scary is the fact that poaching in India is not what it used to be. From the odd shot-in-the-wild of the small timer, it has turned into organised crime. This means a different scale of operations, and for those hot on the trail of poachers, an entirely new level of engagement.

Devender Rawat from the Uttarakhand special task force considers himself up to the task. Posted at Haridwar, he has no illusions about what he’s up against—a forest mafia. He wants to squash it. But how realistic is his ambition?

He is a man of many parts, Mr Rawat is. He is a tough guy with a finger not too far from his 9 mm. “You need to be armed, the poacher inevitably is,” he says, “It’s an organised effort, this poaching. What’s more, there is a clear chain of command. Usually local villagers do the killing and then processing of the skin. After that, it’s in the big cities that deals are clinched. The next step is to get the skin out of the country, and this is where the international mafia comes in.”

There’s big money involved and it’s a nasty business. In a recent encounter, a poacher in Haridwar who had two leopard skins with him escaped by putting a gun to the head of Rajendra Aggarwal, an activist of the Wildlife Protection Society of India. “Over the years, the animal skins’ trade has become lucrative, and poachers are inevitably well armed,” says Aggarwal, “In that raid, the operation was touch-and-go.”

And it was hardly an isolated incident. On several occasions, armed poachers have fired at forest guards across India’s wildlife reserves. If that’s not bad enough, forest guards often also have to worry about drawing the ire of tourism operators, as happened in Corbett recently when guards trying to restrict taxi permits to the park found themselves under illegal house arrest.

It’s a tough life, but there’s a job to do. Rawat and his team have been instrumental over the last three months in seizing tiger and leopard skins along with deer and bear contraband. Often, their methods include subterfuge. “We arrange money, say Rs 20,000 odd, and pretend to be buyers—in places like Haridwar or Rishikesh. We tuck in our guns and there have been times where I have morphed into a sadhu or Chinese trader or even a hotel owner looking for tiger skin,” says Rawat, “Sometimes it feels unreal.”

Apart from all the play acting to catch poachers offguard and red-handed, Rawat has to play listener, and a good one at that. Anti-poaching operations depend on information, and that often comes from mukbirs (informers). The local police, too, has a role. Says JP Jubal of the Haridwar police, “You have to be in touch at the grassroots level with Gujjars in the jungle and the locals. They know the forest. They know who comes and who goes. Over the years we have set up a chain of informants from the jungle villages down to Dehradun pawn shops and Tibetan bazaars.”Knowledge matters hugely. Once a leopard or tiger is taken from the wilds, it requires 45 odd days to smoke the skin dry. Between the time of the kill and sale of the skin, there are many points at which the cops can intervene—given a tip-off. There are only a few places between the forest and the city where such deals can be carried out.In the past one month, the Uttarakhand task force has upped the anti-poaching ante: ten leopard skins, two tiger skins and a lot of other animal contraband has been intercepted (such as ivory and sloth bear remains). Plus, ten poachers have been arrested, and a recent law amendment makes it hard for them to get bail, so information on their wider operations can be shaken out of them that much easier now.

Police sources speak of a dangerous new alliance, confirmed by independent observers. “In India, there is a growing partnership between drug smugglers and wildlife smugglers. The pattern that emerges is of criminalisation of the poaching activity beyond the jungle,” says Dr Richard Thomas of Traffic, an anti-poaching advocacy headquartered in London.

Admirable as anti-poaching operations are, a closer look also reveals how badly the odds are stacked against their success. Take the problems at two vital ends of the wildlife spectrum—the forests themselves and the porous borders of the country across which the contraband reaches foreign destinations such as China and the UAE.

“There is a crisis in wildlife management,” says Aditya Singh, the noted wildlife photographer from Ranthambore, “and despite the Prime Minister’s intervention, nothing has moved on the wildlife protection front, especially when it comes to the recruitment and training of wildlife guards, the foot soldiers in the battle to save India’s flora and fauna.” And he is right. While Corbett and another park are in the process of raising a special wildlife protection force, the rest are in disarray. Rajaji and Ranthambore have a long and gaping list of vacancies for forest guards. In some parks, armed Maoist insurgents make life tougher still for the wildlife staff.

The average Indian forest guard is pushing 50, while the typical poacher is a gangly youth of 20 something. And there’s a lot of forest to guard. By an estimate, there is just one guard for every 20 sq km of territory. This gives poachers a near free run during the monsoons, when patrolling by foot or on elephant back (the main modes) is constrained by rainy weather. Indian forests spring to life during these months, but it is a time of grave danger for India’s big cats.

Technology has been a help, sure. Several parks have jeeps with searchlights and GPS systems, but these operate on tight fuel rations, typically spending half the month idle. News that their petrol has run out often leaks from nearby villages, and that’s when poachers go into overdrive.

Also, it goes without saying that Indian forest guards remain poorly armed. Only a couple of guards per range have firearms at all, and these are old shotguns or antique .315 rifles. In contrast, poachers carry 9 mm pistols and Kalashnikovs.

On the borders, the news is worse. Haridwar, Pitthoragarh (both in Uttarakhand) and Siliguri in West Bengal, apart from Mumbai, remain the conduit points for land and air transfer of wildlife contraband to China, according to Traffic. The Indian customs department remains apathetic to wildlife smuggling. Combine the presence of officials who don’t know their tiger skin from their Pashmina shawl with the rumble of trucks going back and forth unchecked (a little bribe is all it takes) across the Indo-Nepal border, and the extinction of the tiger looks scandalously imminent. “It’s a fact that animal contraband is not as high as gold or electronic items [on our priority list] while checking, especially at the Nepal border,” admits a customs officer under anonymity, “We are more concerned about what comes in from China than what goes out from here.”

Tiger killings sometimes have another motive, one that isn’t often spoken of. This is because it seems so unlikely to urban dwellers who make easier sense of crimes of commerce than of passion. The motive in question is revenge.

There are those who think that the only good tiger is a dead tiger. At least two tigers in Corbett over the past one month and two more just last week in Ranthambore have been killed by anonymous villagers. They wanted to get back at the cat for killing their livestock.

Some four decades after India adopted its Wildlife Protection Act, that such killings should occur at all is a shock. But then, educating villagers on the finer aspects of Project Tiger would take too long; policing is needed, and right now. Wildlife fans say that such killings can easily be stopped if the state forest officers have the will. Aggrieved villagers could be compensated for their livestock loss to tiger drag-aways. “This should be done without bureaucratic delay,” says Kartick Satyanarayan, co-founder of Wildlife SOS, a non-profit group, “India is spending crores on the relocation of villages from tiger parks. A fund of about Rs 5 crore a year will ensure that farmers don’t have any revenge motive. After all, a buffalo costs about Rs 25,000 and a goat Rs 5,000. These are not big sums for the Government but mean everything to the villager.”

Even if the compensation plan results in some misuse—as all cash giveaways do—it’s a small cost for a measure that could save the last of these great cats. Joint forest management committees, at which villagers and forest officials sit together, already exist and should be assigned the task straightaway.

This year, ironically, could yet worsen chances of saving the tiger. The poacher in Bandhavgarh may never have heard of Barkhor Street, but that is where his catch could end up. This is in Lhasa’s market square, and while China is a large market for Indian tiger skin, it is local Tibetans from Lhasa who also buy a lot of illegal skin. This year, their demand is expected to be especially robust.

Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister, had recently gone to China to discuss how to control the tiger trade. He ran into a wall. The Chinese are doing nothing to curtail consumption of tiger and leopard body derivatives. If anything, they are running as many as 20 tiger farms on which big cats are raised (an estimated 6,000 cats are in such captivity already), though grand stories are being put out by their PR machinery on their ‘efforts to repopulate the Chinese wild’ with tigers.

Belinda Wright of the WPSI has pointed out that the lifetime cost of rearing tigers outweighs the cost of acquiring poached cats. So, if the real intent of the exercise is to satisfy demand for tiger parts (old-wives’ tales of aphrodisiacal effects haven’t gone yet), it would still leave Indian tigers vulnerable to a voracious cross-border appetite.

An average poacher is estimated to get Rs 200 per sq ft for tiger skin, while the same may cost the end consumer over Rs 4,000. This is an incredible 2,000 per cent mark up. It’s so lucrative that incentives to kill the animal remain as high as ever, and that is a crisis in itself.

The scant regard shown by China to the Union environment minister’s plea on the tiger represents a stark failure of Indian diplomacy. Add to this India’s own poor policing record, and the nightmare of customs, and you have a big cat’s death warrant written in an Indian language with Chinese characteristics.

About The Author

Ninad D. Sheth