Dr Anish Andheria, conservationist, scientist and wildlife photographer with a unique background in chemistry, is the president of Wildlife Conservation Trust (WCT), a not-for-profit organization that works in and around 160 protected areas (PAs) and several important wildlife corridors across 23 states of India 21% of 770 PAs and 82% of 50 tiger reserves. Andheria, a naturalist at heart, has invested nearly two decades of his life in fighting conservation battles. His immense knowledge about natural history and terrestrial ecosystems helps him build strategies to achieve a win-win for both people and wildlife.
TOI talks to him on various issues plaguing wildlife. Excerpts from the interview...
Q. What’s the role WCT playing in saving tigers and conserving wildlife?
A. We believe that landscape-level conservation of forests and the socio-economic uplift of local communities, living in and around these forests, will only be possible through a holistic approach that places equal emphasis on safeguarding the existing forests by strengthening protection mechanism of forest departments, regenerating degraded forests, delivering quality health care to our frontline forest staff, building up the capacity of marginalized communities through quality education and livelihood programmes that guarantee them dignity while reducing their dependence on the forests resources and importantly, mitigating the rising human-animal conflicts that threaten to erode the age-old inter-relationship between people and forests. All the above need to be based on sound science and social justice, both of which should determine on-ground wildlife management policy. We seek to enhance our impact by leveraging our strengths by collaborating with the Central and state governments, educational institutes, credible NGOs, even multilateral agencies and corporates.
Q. What has changed over the years in conservation?
A. In the early 1980s, the key emphasis was on securing forests by declaring them as national parks or sanctuaries. Protectionism-ruled forests were being protected by evicting people. Large mammal conservation was the order of the day. Wildlife research was largely species-based with an emphasis on behaviour, distribution and life-histories. The biggest perceived threat to wildlife was considered to be hunting for subsistence and poaching for international trade. Currently, given India’s rising human population and dwindling wildernesses, a landscape approach has been accepted as the strategy of choice, with an emphasis on coexistence between people and the forests. Increasingly, researchers have started studying the impact of the human footprint on wildlife and habitats. Ecosystem-based conservation has taken centre stage. Conservationists have also started focusing on forests outside PAs. ‘Corridor’ has become the buzzword.
Q. Are electrocution and roads emerging as major threats than poaching?
A. In addition to influencing rapid urbanization, forest fragmentation and resource depletion, roads have always acted as barriers to animal movement. Countless big and small wild animals die in road accidents every year. Electrocution too has emerged as one of the most severe threats to large mammals in the past decade. As more and more villages get electrified, villagers are resorting to this technique to kill both herbivores and carnivores in large numbers. Hunters and poachers too have started tapping electricity lines (11 kV lines) passing through corridors to kill wild herbivores for bush meat trade or kill tigers/leopards for skin and bone trade. A lot of electrocuted large carnivores are being sold to black magicians within India.
Q. Who should be held responsible for tigers dying in electrified fences?
A. No single stakeholder can be blamed, the problem lies with all concerned constituencies — the farmer and the hunter who tap electricity lines — one to protect his own livelihood and the other trying to utilize a freely available common pool resource for trade. Forest departments create artificial oasis by building a large number of waterholes inside PAs to increase wildlife populations beyond the natural capacity of the habitat, but do not invest funds to develop robust human-wildlife conflict resolution strategies. Many NGOs and self-proclaimed conservationists over-sympathize with wildlife at the expense of livelihoods of marginalized people. It gives rise to a feeling of alienation among local communities. Electricity boards do not give enough importance to this threat and show disinterest in bringing innovations to make tapping difficult or detection easy. The energy ministry shows no interest in ensuring that no new power lines will cut through forests or retrofitting devices to existing lines to deter people from electrocuting wildlife.
Q. It’s a vicious circle. Any solutions?
A. There are solutions to all problems including the one facing tigers — some are symptomatic that look good to the eye but are counter-productive to the larger purpose of conservation and some that are capable of changing the situation on the ground but need inputs and effort from all stakeholders. I suggest moving towards renewable power; create awareness about the ill-effects of killing wild animals; innovations that will make transmission lines more animal-friendly. There is need to change electricity distribution. If forest villages get all their supply during the day, when it is most needed for agriculture, electrocution instances will drop drastically.
Q. Despite scientific monitoring of tigers by collars and camera traps, why aren’t we able to save them?
A. We may be losing tigers to poaching, poisoning and electrocution, but without doubt, among all 13 tiger range countries, India is the safest place for tigers. Nearly 65% of all wild tigers are found in India. This is possible only because the government has taken concrete steps over the past 45 years to protect tiger habitats. Camera trapping is used to understand tiger population dynamics and distribution across relative large landscapes, while radio-telemetry helps understand behaviour and movement of an individual tiger at a finer-scale. While these techniques provide vital information about the species, they cannot ensure protection of an individual on an hourly basis. Tigers are highly mobile. In a relatively well protected tropical habitat with healthy population of wild herbivores, male tigers may have a territory of 50-60 sqkm but their range could be 200-300 sqkm.
Q. Questions have been raised after three collared tigers died in Vidarbha in electric fences and Bor’s Bajirao dying in road hit in the recent past.
A. The inherent survival rate of tiger, even in an undisturbed forest, is low as there is steep competition for food, mating, denning site and territory. Now to all the existing threats if one adds two more — electrocution of tigers and their prey and road accidents due to the ever-expanding road network — the future of the tiger seems bleak. Unless necessary mitigations measures are put in place to nullify the ill-effects of roads and power lines, several smaller tiger populations within India will be doomed, faster than one can imagine.
Q. After iconic tiger Jai, his son Jaichand is also missing from Paoni (Umred-Karhandla) for four months?
A. As mentioned earlier, tigers have a large range. From camera-trapping and radio-collaring studies we know that they can disperse over great distances. Most dispersing tigers that move outside or are born outside PAs are exposed to humans and therefore to some degree of poaching pressure. Also, contrary to popular belief, tigers are very shy and elusive and hence several popular young tigers dispersing out of tourist destinations such as Tadoba, Pench, Kanha, Bandhavgarh, Corbett etc can disappear for years before resurfacing somewhere else. This means that all young tigers that have not been sighted for months aren’t dead. Jaichand could be alive in a distant forest patch that could be as far as 200-300km from Umred-Karhandla, where tiger monitoring is not as intense as in Maharashtra, and hence has remain undetected.
Q. There may be many such tigers going missing? So is collaring all young dispersing tigers a solution to keep track of them?
A. Radio collaring is meant for understanding tiger behaviour and movement pattern and not for protecting an individual on an hourly basis. Additionally, the method is extremely expensive and suited only for scientific research of a small proportion of animals. Just the hardware cost of collaring one tiger will range anywhere between Rs14-16 lakhs. Post collaring, for a round-the-clock monitoring of one tiger, the forest department will have to deploy huge manpower. Besides, one will have to add cost of vehicle, fuel and salaries of six people for as long as the collar stays active, which could be over six months. It is clear that the cost of radio collaring every dispersing tiger of India is financially unviable and should not even be suggested. Instead, by investing 1/5th of that amount on improving the living conditions, training and patrolling facilities of the frontline forest staff, much better results can be achieved.
Q. Is conservation of every tiger important than species as a whole?
A. Tiger conservation is not about saving an individual tiger, it is about sustaining an ecologically healthy population of tigers and their prey across a large landscape that comprises tiger reserves, other smaller PAs (that act as pit-stops) between these large tiger reserves and most importantly, a complex maze of corridors that allow free movement of dispersing tigers and their prey between protected areas. Many years of research and mathematical modelling has shown that for a tiger population to be sustainable over a long period of time, it needs to have at least 100 tigers with at least 20 breeding females.
Q. With pace of ongoing linear projects in tiger landscape, can India’s tigers be saved?
A. From extensive camera trapping exercise by WCT, WII and forest departments, it is clear that none of the tiger reserves in the Central Indian landscape meet these criteria, and hence the only way these tiger populations can be sustained over a long period is by maintaining a good network of corridors that connect tiger reserves with each other. We know that corridors are vulnerable to rapid rates of development and hence to safeguard these vital lifelines, disturbance due to linear infrastructure projects should be reduced to bare minimum. This can either be done by taking an alternate alignment that completely circumvents the corridor, and in cases where this is economically prohibitive, ensuring that infrastructure projects are built with adequate mitigation measures based on an in depth scientific study by a competent agency.
