Foresters’ door-to-door campaign helping curb man-animal conflict

Nagpur: In a major initiative to curb the flared-up man-animal conflict, the Nagpur Circle has reached out to over 79,000 people under its four forest divisions in Nagpur, Wardha, Bhandara and Gondia districts.
The death of a 21-year-old youth in a tiger attack in Wardha division in November last triggered the drive. “A life was taken away prematurely and post this incident, we issued a circular in December directing foresters to reach door-to-door to make people aware about the dos and don’ts to avoid interface with wildlife,” says P Kalyan Kumar, chief conservator of forests (CCF), Nagpur.
Apart from several awareness programmes, this is the first such consolidated drive to reach out to all forested villages. The number of households covered in each division includes Gondia (26,519), Nagpur (23,522), Wardha (15,175), and Bhandara (13,658).
“Our field staff is handing over pamphlets to each household and is interacting with them on the issue. Our target was to reach over 1 lakh households in four months but due to Covid-19, the drive has been given a break. These households will be revisited after lockdown relaxations,” said Kumar.
The senior forest officer said the basic idea is to bring permanent behavioural change in people by enforcing self regulations. Most of them are following the instructions and in many families, the young generation is pursuing the seniors not to venture into the forest.
In Nagpur and Wardha divisions, the results have been encouraging with not a single human death in wild animal attack in the last five months. In Gondia and Bhandara, there were few cases in select pockets only.
In Nagpur Circle, in 2017-18, 13 people died in wild animal attacks followed by 6 in 2018-19 and 9 in 2019-20. Overall, in the last three years, 28 people died in conflict and 541 were injured. The figure doesn’t include Chandrapur district where 14 people have died in conflict in the last 5 months.
Another reason for reaching out to people is to find out their frequency regarding venturing into the forest to find out their dependence. The awareness also helped us during collecting of tendu leaves in the region with not a single incident.
During the tendu season, despite the Covid-19 pandemic, the four districts created employment of 4 lakh man days, generating a wage earning of over Rs11 crore for tendu pluckers. “Here, too, awareness among people helped to contain conflict with wildlife,” said Kumar.