by M Krishnan
Here is a fair sample of the most reliable official statistics available, provided by a knowledgeable senior officer of the Indian Forest Service, Mr P.O. Stracey, in the course of a newspaper article published less than a year ago:
‘The total forest area in this country, on the basis of 22 per cent of the land area, is about 78 million hectares, of which about 75.4 million hectares are broadleaved and 2.6 million conifers. The total commercial forest area is about 45 million hectares. About 17 per cent of India’s total land area is wasteland and remains unutilized.’
An analysis of these figures is interesting. Obviously, the 17 per cent of the total land area that is unutilized waste is not included in the 22 per cent of the total land that is forested (and in the charge of forest departments). One might think that the broadleaved forests, comprising 96.6 per cent of the total forest area, consist mainly of tree forests, as the 3.4 per cent of Himalayan coniferous forests do. This is not so. Mixed tree forests, deciduous or evergreen in the main but always mixed, with their undershrub much varied, meadows, belts of tall grasses and bamboos, swamps, nullahs and ravines, hilltops and slopes clad mainly in herbaceous vegetation, streams, rivers and lakes all go to make up the total area.
It is this diversity of biotopes that makes the forests of peninsular India such valuable and versatile homes for the wild animals, for they provide habitat suited to all seasonal and other changes and needs. And these natural forests have, for over a century now, been felled selectively for a few species of timber trees, clear-felled in coupes for fuel, cleared for roads and settlements, cut down by wood-poachers and encroachers, hacked and hewed by forest-side villagers who have established, or arrogated to themselves, the right to collect small timber and fuel and graze their cattle in them, worked for minor forest produce such as bamboos and thatching grass, and converted into plantations of exotics and a few indigenous softwoods and timber trees, without any successful attempt to re-establish the natural vegetation lost by all these operations; and exotic weeds have colonized large tracts of them in the past thirty-five years.
Taking 1935 as an arbitrary point of time for comparison, we had roughly 75 million hectares of broadleaved forests then, too, and for obvious reasons they were then much less denuded and even quite primordial in large tracts. How much of the natural tree forest and scrub jungle, swamps and grasslands, valleys and nullahs that we had thirty-five years ago do we have left now? We do not know, and the official statistics available cannot give us a fair idea of the extent of loss of habitat to the wild animals over these years.
Plantations, it will be seen, constitute quite a large part of the total forest area; actually much peripheral wastage and clearings for roads have not been taken into account in reckoning the total area of plantations. A few of these are plantations of indigenous softwoods, such as Ailanthus excelsa or Ceiba pentandra or of timber (almost entirely teak); these are usually sited in the heart of natural forests, which are clear-felled to provide space for the plantations. For instance, in the Anamalais, where some of the finest mixed deciduous montane forests in the country have already been ravaged by the setting up of the Parambikulam hydroelectric project in their midst, both on the Kerala and the Tamil Nadu sides of the forests vast tracts have been clear-felled for the sake of stump-planted teak.
The great majority of departmental plantations, however, are of exotics, eucalyptus and wattle species and casuarina from Australia, cashew and rubber from tropical America, and others. The forest department of one state went so far as to try out planting pineapple, and in Tamil Nadu the forest department has taken up tea. None of these exotics (in particular the most widely planted of them, eucalyptus) has any value as fodder or cover for the wild animals, and they only serve to deprive them of territory. How such plantations are reckoned as part of the forest land is a mystery that no one so far has solved.
Perhaps this is the place to mention the most overlooked major depletive factor applying to the wildlife of the country, the constant disturbance that the animals are subjected to in their homes by men: even in sanctuary areas, this factor is very much there. In forests where men are busy working on forestry operations, or collecting produce, or grazing cattle, or doing some of the many other things that they do, the animals leave the area (often for less suitable surroundings) unable to bear the disturbance, or else the diurnal animals turn into apprehensive, fugitive creatures of the night.
I must add that it is not as if no one foresaw until recently the effect of sustained exploitation of the natural forests or of converting them into plantations. Writing as far back as 1910, S. Eardley Wilmot, who had just retired as the inspector general of forests, devoted an entire chapter in a book of shikar memoirs to the disastrous consequences of exploiting the forests of India to meet public demands. F.W.F. Fletcher says, in his Sport on the Nilgiris and in Wynaad (1911): ‘The grand indigenous sholas have been cleared to make way for interminable forests of ugly eucalyptus and wattle … over the portals of modern Ootacamund … let there be written Sic transit gloria (Ootaca) mundi.’
Trustworthy faunal statistics are much harder to find than figures for flora. They involve population counts of free-ranging animals, sometimes of shifting populations, and counting gregarious animals in the forests of India is often an impossible undertaking. Further, the rapid diminution of the more exposed communities has to be taken into account. In the early 1940s I would see many herds of blackbuck, some over a hundred strong, around the Tungabhadra Dam (where Mysore and Andhra Pradesh meet in a hydroelectric project); by the 1950s every last little buck in the area had been snared or shot to death by professional meat-hunters and amateur ‘sportsmen’.
Currently, some faunal counts are being made in some sanctuaries: these will yield fairly reliable figures over a course of years. In the past, the only significant counts attempted were limited to important species threatened with extinction, in areas where the animals were localized, such as the lions in the Gir Forest, the great Indian rhinoceros in Assam and north Bengal, and the hard-ground barasingha in Madhya Pradesh. Doubts have been expressed over some of these figures, but it should be remembered that what a faunal census seeks to achieve is a near approximation to the truth and not mathematical accuracy.
In assessing the decline of India’s fauna, it is customary to list the species which are on the brink of extinction or quite extinct in the country, such as the cheetah, the pygmy hog, the hispid hare, the two lesser species of Asiatic rhinoceros, the pink-headed duck, Jerdon’s courser, and the Great Indian Bustard. A better and more indicative way would be to point out that in most places where they were familiar creatures till recently, even common animals have become locally extinct or else quite rare.
The animals of the open plains, being most open to dispossession and harassment by humanity, have fared much worse than the animals of the hills. The plains forests have virtually disappeared in the south, and in many parts of the north, and the denuded land has been occupied, cut up, and otherwise exploited by men to such an extent that in most areas the animals have vanished. Typical of the plains country is the blackbuck, exclusively Indian, arrestingly beautiful, and the fastest longdistance runner on earth. A hundred years ago, it roamed the plains in vast herds, and was the commonest wild animal of the country even around towns and cantonments; thirty-five years ago, it was still to be found in its old haunts, but in sadly depleted numbers; today it is locally extinct over most of the country, and survives in small herds in a few areas. The blackbuck is the best example of an Indian animal whose decline is due entirely to hunting. Even after men crowded the plains country, it was there in large numbers, but the nets and snares (some of them horribly cruel) of the professional meat-hunters and the rifle of the ‘sportsman’ finished it off in most places.
The wolf, a plains animal in the peninsula, is now extinct in the south and rare even in the north. Other animals of the scrub jungles and open forests, common till recently and now uncommon or rare, are the chinkara, t
he nilgai (extinct in the south) and the dinky little Indian fox; among birds, the Great Indian Bustard and the florican may be mentioned. The seasonal slaughter of waterbirds at large waters where they assemble in great numbers, as at Chilka Lake in Orissa and Tada in Andhra Pradesh, goes on unchecked. Migratory duck and geese, resident duck, flamingos, herons, even pelicans, are killed for the table.
Among the animals of the tree forests and the hills, the dramatic decline of the tiger in the past five or six years has attracted the most attention. It is true that the poisoning of cattle kills by villagers has accounted for quite a few tigers, but it is the hunter’s rifle that has been the main cause for the decline of this grandest of all the cats, so long and intimately associated with India. Till very recently, tigers were regularly shot all over India, by licensed and unlicensed hunters—except for a negligible percentage, there was not even the excuse for their destruction that they were maneaters or confirmed cattle-lifters. In Mysore, Hyderabad and elsewhere in Andhra Pradesh, all over Orissa, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, tigers were shot for ‘sport’—in the Kanha National Park of MP there is a tree from which dozens of tigers have been shot on licence. Being a slow breeder, the tiger has not been able to cope with such sustained shooting down.
In my opinion, the leopard is also on the decline, for the same reason. Other forest animals which are now uncommon in their old haunts are the sloth bear (so peculiarly the bear of India), locally extinct in many areas where it was common a generation ago, the fishing cat and the rusty-spotted cat over their somewhat limited ranges, gaur in some of their long-held homes, the hard-ground subspecies of the barasingha in Madhya Pradesh, the lion-tailed macaque of the southern hill forests and the Nilgiri tahr in places. Himalayan and sub-Himalayan animals, with an entity of their own, are not specifically mentioned here.
Local populations may exhibit marked fluctuations, but no animal, not even the pig and the chital, shows an overall increase; most have dwindled considerably.
It may be thought that while this is the position outside sanctuaries (which term is used here to include all national parks in the country, however constituted), within them conditions are very different. Unfortunately, this is not so. It is difficult to give a figure to indicate the total extent of all sanctuaries in the country, because some are in the making, but allowing for this the total sanctuary area is only about 3 per cent of the total forest area, and even so all the causes of faunal decline that operate outside them obtain within the sanctuaries, too.
It is true that it is mainly in the sanctuaries that one can see many wild animals, and that the incentive of the protection accorded does keep them there to some extent, but in all sanctuaries wood and flesh poachers are a problem, particularly on their periphery. It may be argued, with much force, that this is a problem common to all sanctuaries in the world, but in the present precarious state of India’s fauna it assumes a magnitude and a lethal potency it did not formerly have.
With two exceptions, in all Indian sanctuaries forestry operations of all kinds are freely indulged in, perhaps the greatest single cause of constant disturbance to the wild animals. Village rights are recognized in almost all of them, and in all cattle are grazed. The Mudumalai and Bandipur sanctuaries of Tamil Nadu and Mysore, adjoining each other and forming one wildlife unit, though territorially distinguished, are the finest stamping grounds of gaur to be found anywhere in the range of these most magnificent of wild oxen over South-east Asia. A devastating epidemic of rinderpest, which spread from cattle being driven through both sanctuaries, killed off a great many gaur here and drove the survivors right out of the area; with luck, the gaur should return to Mudumalai and Bandipur in a few years.
The presence of private pockets of land and human settlements within the sanctuaries, the recognition of the rights of villagers to collect fuel and produce and graze their cattle in the preserve, and the ever-present threat of politically motivated changes that might further affect the preserve inimically, are wildlife problems peculiar to India.
In considering these influences, two other factors peculiar to the country should be remembered. Neither at the level of the illiterate poor nor among the educated people is there any popular feeling for wildlife in India today. I believe it is in sincere ignorance of the permanent damage they are doing to the country’s wildlife that the ministers and other elected authorities in many of our states are so willing to placate the ‘landless poor’ (whatever that means—I find it difficult to imagine the ‘landed poor’ from whom they are obviously distinguished) by ceding rights, privileges and even territory inside the reserved forests and sanctuaries to them. The second highly relevant factor is that as the Constitution of India stands each state has sovereign rights over its forests, and the Centre cannot prevail upon a state to adopt a more conservationist attitude towards its wildlife.
The setting up of hydroelectric and other national projects inside a sanctuary (as in Uttar Pradesh, where the Ramganga project will drown the best developed area of the Corbett National Park) or on its borders (like the Moyar project which adjoins the Mudumalai and Bandipur sanctuaries) leads to tremendous devastation of the natural forests and, by opening up the cover with clearings and roads, renders the animals accessible to poaching and constant disturbance. Industrial plants and projects in or around a preserve have much the same effect: the dangers of pollution that they bring in have not yet been studied in India.
The position, as outlined might seem pretty bleak, but it is far from hopeless. What gives one hope is the wonderful innate richness of the country’s wildlife and the fact that we have achieved real feats of wildlife conservation in the recent past. Making every allowance for the decline set out above, the fact remains that even today India is in its flora and fauna one of the richest countries of the world. And although exotic plants have invaded, and been nurtured in, the land, to the detriment of its wildlife, we have not made the mistake that other countries have of introducing exotic animal species into India. Compare India’s faunal integrity with that of Australia, where the English rabbit, the Asiatic camel and the domesticated Indian water buffalo have run wild and are major threats to life and wildlife, or with that of England which is the only place on earth where the Indian and Chinese muntjacs interbreed in the wild.
Consider, besides, the taxonomic richness and highly individual character of India’s fauna. We have more cats (taking the lesser and greater cats together) than any country in the world, and more species of deer; further, quite a few animals with a distribution over South-east Asia attain their best development here, such as the sambar, the gaur and the elephant (Elephas maximus); furthermore, we have a number of animals that are peculiarly our own, such as the bonnet monkey and the liontailed monkey, the black langur, the Nilgiri tahr, both subspecies of the swampdeer or barasingha, the chital, the blackbuck, the chowsingha or four-horned antelope, the nilgai, and the sloth bear (the sloth bear of Ceylon is taxonomically assigned to a subspecies).
The feats of preservation referred to are the saving of the Asiatic lion in the Gir Forest of Gujarat, and the great Indian rhinoceros in Assam and north Bengal. The Asiatic lion is the lion of the Bible and of Omar Khayyam, and had a wide range over Persia and neighbouring countries, and north India; it was saved only in the Gir forest, thanks to the conservationist wisdom and zeal of princes, and the subsequent efforts of the state government. The saving of the rhino in Assam in the face of heavy odds was an even greater achievement, but the story is so well known that it need not be told here.
All wildlife conservation is solidly based on the fact that given Lebensraum, nature can always maintain its own balance, as between the flora and the fauna, between predator and prey species, and against the upsetting influences of population fluctuations, droughts, floods, epidemics, fires and all other such catastrophes somewhat impiously termed ‘acts of God’.
All wildlife preservation is only preservation of nature against the intended and unintended consequences of
human actions. Granted adequate natural habitat and efficient protection from human influences (mainly against hunting and disturbance), India’s wildlife is assured of a long and great future.
In some countries, such as North America, the forest space needed has been no problem, but in India, because of public and departmental demands upon the forests, and the politically motivated willingness of changing administrations to satisfy at least a part of the public’s demands, real, undisturbed sanctuary space for the fauna is a problem at present.
The growing interest of foreign and international bodies in India’s wildlife might help, but not very much, I think, considering that the ultimate fate of our wildlife is in the hands of diverse and changing administrations. But if we can somehow tighten up protection and prevent further depletion for a decade or so, I believe public interest and pride in the country’s wildlife will develop sufficiently to assure its future. The next ten years, I think, will decide the future of India’s wildlife.
1970
61
Ecological Patriotism
In recent years there has been a notable volte-face in government thinking on the great decline in our wild vegetation. Right till 1970 governments turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the visible and voiced devastation of our native flora. It was in that year that the representative of the Planning Commission on the Indian Board for Wildlife sternly condemned, as a wild exaggeration, the statement in the Expert Committee Report (commissioned by the IBWL) on the large-scale depletion of India’s wild flora within the previous fifty years. He asserted that there had been no decline at all in our forest cover. Being responsible for that statement and knowing it to be true, I went to the offices of the Planning Commission to check the statistics on which his assertion was based. And there I learnt that what he meant was that, subject to territorial adjustments during the formation of the states, the areas held by the forest departments of diverse states had remained largely unaltered, irrespective of the loss of their vegetation, or their invasion by roads, plantations, human settlements and projects. In other words, the earth’s crust had not shrunk materially since 1920!