Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve - The Legend of a park under Siege
Tadoba - a blip on the map that evokes a thousand stories of India’s famed wildlife, a park that has achieved international significance as the capital town of wildlife sightings of India. A park that has emerged as one of India’s favourite tourist destination with hordes of people thronging its gates at Moharli, Khutwanda, Junona, Dewada, Agarzari, Madnapur, Pangdi, Zari and Kolara. With more than 125 gypsies entering this 1700 sq km verdant landscape of undulating hills and vast grasslands, just south of the large central Indian town of Nagpur, tourism has brought Tadoba into an unprecedented limelight of international significance.
And so, inadvertently change has come as well. With hundreds of tourists visiting daily and much of the economy increasingly dependent upon this source of economy, tourism has come to stamp its authority on all aspects of life in Tadoba. And with it has come a lot of good and a few bad things too. About 25 resorts and more than 50 home-stays have brought badly needed resources to the western portion of the park. Almost all families have at least one member who works in some capacity in one of the many resorts that adorn the park like a garland. The seasonal stress due to lack of good agricultural produce has reduced. Even firewood collection has reduced as the result of the recently launched Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Jan Van Yojana which has attempted to divert pressure from the forest by providing alternative livelihoods, solar fencing for croplands and providing LPG gas connections to families living in border villages. As change should come, so has come the awareness that the real benefit of the local population lies in the protection of the forest.
However, there are negative developments as well especially with regards to the steady erosion of the local culture which is getting assimilated by the homogeneity being imposed by the unapologetic tourists. Major languages have come to dominate most of the discourse and local languages such as Gondi have become marginalised. Waste management has become a serious issue and one look at Moharli village makes one cover his nose in an urgency. The proliferating stay options have minimal planning and most of the waste ends up stagnating just outside the view of the rich tourist. As a local researcher mentioned, Moharli looks like an oversized mela at night that has little compunctions about maintaining its old culture. Above all, tourism has led to a magnified importance of money and the cash economy. Guides, shopkeepers and local home-stays are often oriented towards earning as much as possible without caring for all the prescribed rules of the forest. Currently, tourism in Tadoba looks like the proverbial double-edged sword which has the potential to cut the arm of the one who holds it and there is an urgent need for a course correction to control the overwhelming desire to do Tiger-Mining-Tourism always.
But Tadoba’s problems are manifold and improperly managed tourism that pays only the barest minimum lip service to the principles of ecotourism is only one of the lesser problems the reserve faces. The bigger threats lie outside the public eye and has started to silently gnaw at the reserve from all sides, as vigorously as an insatiable virus would do to a human body. Roads rank high in this list of woes with widening and new projects being planned almost on a daily basis. A basic look at the map of Tadoba will clearly show that the reserve is being boxed in a road-construction rectangle that will essentially reduce the landscape into an island. The projects on Naghbid-Mul road on the east, the Hinganghat-Mul road to the north and east, Chandrapur-Allapalli road to the west and south will effectively do what years of poaching and deforestation could not do, they will effectively cut all the corridors and leave the inmates of Tadoba to serve out the rest of the time in a giant zoo.
The reserve which at the time of its creation was the third such wildlife sanctuary created in the year 1955 and gradually becoming a critical tiger habitat in the year 1993 faces yet another threat and unsurprisingly from another of the government’s intervention. Coal mining which is considered absolutely necessary for the country’s growth has run into a hurdle at Tadoba where pitched against each other are activists who are fighting tooth and nail to protect the forests and mining interests which have managed to divert more than 2500 hectares of nearby forest land in the last 15 years and which continuously seeks to divert more land. These mines have irrevocably damaged corridors to the south and south-east of the reserve which previously connected the local population to Bor, Indravati, Navegaon-Nagzira and Chaprala forests. Tigers are under new threats emanating from these mines on a daily basis. On a lighter note, an activist noted that the tigers of Tadoba could be the first tigers in the country who may suffer from asthma and other lung related diseases in the future.
While the forest department in its relatively isolated organisation structure has managed to reduce anthropogenic pressures on the forests and is continuously attempting to relocate villages inside the forest, it remains to be seen how much of their voice will be heard in the government setup which has traditionally regarded the forest department as an obstacle to development.
With most of Tadoba having a healthy prey base, cases of tiger-man conflicts are relatively less as opposed to other parks in the vicinity and this factor itself adds to the rather strange problem of tigers spilling over to the nearby reserve forests and farmlands. As more areas will get cut off by mines and roads, tigers will seek to travel to search for abundant prey and as is urgently visible in other parts of the country, this will in all likelihood lead to increasing conflicts with mankind.
It is as if conditions for fresh conflict is being sown by the powers to be which may benefit from increasing reportage of conflict and the resultant fear and anger in the minds of the local communities. Each news about a farmer killed by a leopard or a tiger adds up to a feeling of disquiet which often manifests in violent revenge killings that are often accompanied by celebratory recording of such events. And with a large number of tigers living outside core tiger habitats in Maharashtra and other tiger states, these statistics could see a spike in the future, especially as more and more tigers spill out of the inviolate tiger reserves.
The great forests of Tadoba which were once ruled by the Gond Rajas of Chandrapur and which got its name from the tribal god Tadu who fought against a tiger is currently fighting another war – that of its very own survival. And as each day passes and the threats loom close, it remains to be seen whether the gods and the forests have the resilience to stand up to its mortal enemy manifested in many forms - as mankind, as road and power projects and continues to survive into the next century as the tiger capital of India.
