Prevention of red sanders smuggling seems to be a Herculean task to the police, forest and the Task Force officials in the targeted six districts of Andhra Pradesh, with a plethora of technical problems coming in the way of achieving the goal.
Though red sanders smuggling had been going on for four decades in the Seshachalam biosphere in Chittoor and Kadapa districts and the adjoining wildlife sanctuaries in Kurnool, Prakasam and Nellore and the vital transit zone of Anantapur, the magnitude and seriousness of the crime surfaced in 2013 with the brutal killing of two forest officials, allegedly by a mob of woodcutters in the thickets near Tirumala.
During the last two years (2015-16), the police and the Task Force had booked 970 cases against 11,723 people, belonging to A.P., Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and northern States.
Of these a remarkable number of 7,187 were arrested and among them 7,164 were remanded in jails with terms of one month to six months.
As many as 6,745 accused came out of jail on bail. By June end this year, only 442 accused were lodged in jails as undertrials. Alarmingly, the conviction rate is just one per cent.
Senior police officers pursuing the cases deplored that nearly 1,000 warrants had remained pending since two years. When the A.P. Forest Act 2016 (Amended) came into effect, the police and the forest officials went agog with statements that it would prove to be an effective deterrent to the smugglers with enhanced punishments for the guilty and extension of remand periods for the accused.
This Act also enabled the officials in the ranks of Divisional Forest Officer and Deputy Superintendent of Police to process the attachment of the properties of the accused based on the findings of their investigation. But, in reality, the picture proved otherwise.
Staff crunch
Not only police and forest officials, but judicial and forensic labs officers observe that red sanders smuggling is a highly specialised crime and it definitely required separate law-enforcing modules. The regular staff in the police and forest wings working for red sanders protection are not a match to the colossal spectrum of the crime and its perpetrators.
For instance, the Red Sanders Task Force has fewer than 150 personnel against its regular strength of about 500.
Though it has a police station to run by itself, shortage of staff made its functioning slack and pursuit of the cases ineffective.
The regular civil police are mostly confined to the plain-area crimes, protocol and bandobust duties. The forest wing personnel are left with no option but to depend on the police for escort in combing operations and filing of cases.
A couple of senior police personnel said going after the elusive accused with fake addresses in the hilly areas of T.N. districts and crisscrossing the hamlets of the Jawadi Hills was like going on a wild goose chase.
Except for some statistics of the accused, their arrests and bail, neither the police nor the forest departments hold any mechanism for maintenance of scientific data of the crime.
The departments lack coordination and instances of meetings for evolving combined strategies are rare. The departments are also handicapped in the absence of any foolproof management to record the details of the accused, including their photographs or fingerprints.
The pursuit against red sanders smuggling is further bogged down as the officials could not initiate any effective talks with their T.N. and Karnataka counterparts in seeking their cooperation. Despite the gravity of the crime, the officials do not move beyond their radius to approach the State-level or Central agencies looking after the environmental and ecological concerns.
It is also observed that it had become a routine that thousands of accused are remanded but let off on bail. Instead of looking at the jails as centres of correctional opportunities, the perpetrators in most cases are reportedly making them the breeding grounds for red sanders smuggling, luring other inmates who are not smugglers.