Who Let These Cats Out?

Two villagers have been killed in the last month by hand-raised leopards released in the wild by the Mysore royalty and an NGO. Jay Mazoomdaar writes on a ‘rehabilitation experiment’ gone horribly wrong

TEHELKA, 14 July, 2011

MASINAGUDI/GUNDLUPET/BANGALORE, KARNATAKA

It was almost noontime. Inside the Bandipur Tiger Reserve, five Jenu Kuruba tribals were walking silently within one another’s earshot, scanning the branches overhead for beehives. Traditional honey-gatherers, these tribals collect wildflower honey in the early monsoon. Over generations, Kurubas have learnt that the forest is a safe place, as long as one stays away from rogue elephants and temperamental bears.

But on 1 June, the five men from Lakkipura, a Kuruba village at the edge of the tiger reserve, were in for a cruel shock. It was Rama Kuruba who spotted the leopard. He stood still, waiting for the cat to walk away. Instead, it came pouncing and knocked him down. Kampa Kuruba was the first to rush to Rama’s rescue. The leopard let go of Rama, who by then had given up the struggle, and turned on Kampa.

As a desperate Kampa held the cat at arm’s length by the radio-collar around its neck, it started pawing his face and the head. By then, the other Kurubas were creating a ruckus and hitting the leopard with sticks. But the cat would not let go. Eventually, a powerful blow on the spine made it back away. By then, Rama had stopped breathing. The leopard was still alive, growling in pain at a distance. Unnerved, the Kurubas scampered, carrying a profusely bleeding Kampa, who would spend the next 10 days in hospital.

In Lakkipura, the initial response was of disbelief. Kurubas never considered leopards a threat because the spotted cats avoided them and never attacked except in self-defence. Now, they were faced with a leopard that targeted people to kill and did not back away even from a group of men, challenging a thumb rule of survival in the wild. They did not know that the leopard that tore open Rama’s throat and nearly killed Kampa was not a wild cat.

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Deputy Conservator of forests (DCF) KT Hanumanthappa has brought down the humanelephant conflict in Bandipur by 70 percent in just two years, by digging up trenches and laying service roads for maintenance of electric fences. “We are here for conservation work,” he says. “But managing conflict used to take up all our time. Now that headache is gone.”

He got a fresh headache on 5 June 2010, in a letter from his top boss, Karnataka’s chief wildlife warden (CWLW) BK Singh, permitting him “to rehabilitate the leopard cubs in Ojimunti of Bandipur National Park with the assistance of Smt Vishalakshi Devi, Bangalore”.

In fact, it was Vishalakshi Devi who sought permission on 8 May 2010 for “rehabilitation of leopard cubs”. The CWLW could not have legally authorised a person without any scientific credential to carry out such an exercise. Instead, he granted the DCF a permission he never sought, possibly because he could not refuse a princess.

Maharajkumari Vishalakshi Devi is the scion of the Mysore royal family. Her father, the late maharaja Jayachamaraja Wodeyar, was the first chairman of the National Board for Wildlife (NBWL). Vishalakshi and her husband Gajendra Singh own a resort-cum-residence in Bandipur and are avid “animal-lovers”.

In her letter to CWLW Singh, Vishalakshi claimed that she had “successfully rehabilitated a leopard in Bandipur National Park”. That story goes back 13 years when she and her husband received two “abandoned leopard cubs” from the forest staff and brought them up at their Bandipur property. Bully and Baby were released in the forest when they were about two years old. While the male, Bully, was gored to death by a sambar stag within days of the release, Baby survived and produced a few litters. No scientific monitoring was conducted to substantiate this claim.

Fast forward to 2009 when 12 so-called abandoned cubs were at different forest department facilities. Two one-year-old cubs, later named Shadow and Light, were sent to Vishalakshi’s Bandipur resort in April 2010 from the care of Vasudeva Murthy, range officer of Mettikuppe in Nagarhole Tiger Reserve. Incidentally, this transfer of cubs from one wildlife division to another also required the CWLW’s approval. Soon after, Vishalakshi got another one-year-old cub, later named Colour, from Bandipur Range Officer AA Khan who had been raising it in a small cage.

This February, eight months after the DCF was “granted permission” to entertain the princess’ request, the three leopards were shifted to an electric-fenced enclosure in Bandipur’s Gopal Swami Betta range. In March, the power supply to the fences was switched off but the leopards continued to hang around the spot where the royals visited them daily with food.

Wary forest staff stopped patrolling the area on foot. But keen to avoid any scrutiny, neither the royals nor the forest department cautioned the villagers living on the reserve boundary. Sometime in April, say field sources, Vishalakshi decided to cut down on the hand feed, hoping the cats would finally start hunting. On 1 June, the experiment backfired.

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Two deaths were not enough for the royals or the forest department to come clean. The Kurubas were warned that they would face charges of trespassing and killing a leopard if they claimed compensation. The gullible tribals did not realise that booking them would have also revealed Bandipur’s dirty secret. Soon enough, the dead leopard was declared the victim of a tiger attack and the administration pretended that no leopard ever touched Rama and Kampa.

But the medical records at the Gundlupet government hospital do not lie. Chief Medical Officer Dr R Srinivas confirms from his files that Kampa (in-patient number 1360) was admitted during 1-10 June with 12 injuries on his neck and face “sustained due to attack by a panther”.

Fearing arrest, Kampa fled to a small tribal colony across the border in Kerala soon after he was discharged. Once the 22- year-old agrees to talk, he is inconsolable. “My father Kullaiah was a forest guard at Bandipur and yet the forest department is treating me like this,” he says. “The leopard would have killed me had I not held it by its collar. And now I am on the run.”

Sub-inspector at the Gundlupet Police Station, Laxmikanth Talawar, however, says the case is closed. “A leopard killed a man, an unnatural death,” he says. “The leopard was also killed and our officers found the two bodies close to each other. No case of wildlife crime has been lodged.”

In Lakkipura, Rama’s single-room house remains bolted. Rama was long estranged from his wife and lived alone. Basama, his aunt and neighbour, laments that her nephew took care of her and now she has no one to depend on.

While DCF Hanumanthappa refuses to go on record, Vishalakshi says one “can’t fault the (rehabilitation) programme because the leopard did not go out of the forest to attack anyone”. In any case, she says, it was the forest department’s responsibility to warn the people. At Lakkipura, Karia Kuruba, who was with Rama and Kampa when they were attacked, says her sister-in-law works for the royals and the princess had blasted her, saying the Kurubas killed her cat. On record, Vishalakshi maintains a tiger killed the leopard.

In his Bengaluru office, CWLW Singh says he has no sympathy for the Kurubas: “No question of compensation. What humanitarian ground? They light so many forest fires.” He says tribals have no right to harvest forest honey under the Forest Rights Act (2006) inside a tiger reserve.

Asked if the administration was within its rights to permit such reckless experiments, putting lives of “trespassers” at risk, Singh fumbles. Within two weeks of the Bandipur disaster, he had allowed release of another three captive leopards in Bhadra Tiger Reserve.

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SS Lingaraja, former divisional forest officer (DFO) of Bhadra Tiger Reserve, had five “abandoned” leopard cubs in his custody at Bhadravati in 2009. He found an ally in Bengaluru-based NGO Vanamitra that “strongly believes that cubs lifted from nature can be released back into the wild”. Together, they brought up the cubs — Bheema, Shiva, Rama, Lakshmana and Parvathi — in a squalid, small garage.

As DFO Lingaraja’s tenure ended in Bhadra, three cats were released in the third week of June. As in Bandipur, no wildlife biologist was engaged for a risk assessment of the Bhadra experiment. Soon after their release, the leopards spread panic in the Tarikere taluk. Then, on 6 July, a young man paid with his life.

Vishwanath, a 20-year-old student at Tarikere Government College, was returning to his village near Upparabiranahalli. It was evening and he was attacked on the road that skirted the boundary of the tiger reserve. The leopard dragged Vishwanath’s body some 20 yards inside the forest and pounced on Somanath when he went looking for his brother. It also injured another man, Subrahmanya.

This time, the forest department could not blame the villagers for trespassing inside the reserve. As an angry mob torched a forest vehicle, the victim’s families were assured of compensation, and two trap cages set up. On 8 July, one of the released leopards attacked the forest staff while they were shifting a cage. They opened fire, killing the cat.

Meanwhile in Bandipur, more than a month after the Kuruba encounter, the princess’ other two leopards are still in the wild. Worse, one cat moved to the adjoining forests of Mudumalai Tiger Reserve in Tamil Nadu. As of 7 July, despite two young men dead for no reason, the Karnataka forest department did not deem it necessary to warn their Tamil Nadu counterpart to alert their guards who patrol on foot.

On 8 July, asked who would be responsible if the leopard wreaked havoc on the other side of the state boundary, CWLW Singh said he would “immediately get in touch with the department in Tamil Nadu”.

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Leopards leave their cubs at safe places and go hunting. When villagers chance upon these unattended cubs, they mistake them as abandoned and hand them over to the forest department. If not returned soon enough, the cubs are not accepted back by the mother. DCF Hanumanthappa says that villagers must be made aware of the ways of cats to prevent the “rescue” of so many cubs that become liabilities for a lifetime.

Meanwhile, the key players have started passing the buck. Vishalakshi claims the forest department wanted her to release the cubs and she never sought any permission herself. While she did not furnish “the proof” she claimed she had, TEHELKA has a copy of her letter to Singh. In Bhadra, KN Suresh Kumar, founder trustee of Vanamitra, claimed his NGO followed “expert advice”. He did not name any.

Singh admits to learning on the job. “I was misled by too many opinions,” he concedes. “Now I realise that rehabilitation of hand-raised leopards is risky.” But will he own up responsibility and order a ban on such experiments? “I am telling you we will never do it again. I will write an essay on this in our departmental journal soon.”

With four potential killers still out in the forests, and more lined up for release, it will require more than Singh’s musings to put a permanent end to the deadly games the rich and powerful play.

Where The Forests Have No Trees

Of the total 60,000 claims filed under the Forest Rights Act in Assam, nearly 30,000 came from a single district. Little wonder, then, that the administration controls less than a third of Sonitpur’s forests. While no political party minds legalising this mass encroachment in the Bodo heartland, the fate of the wilderness hangs by a 2009 High Court order.

Open, 25 June, 2011

BHALUKPONG/KAMENGBARI, ASSAM

Tene hole ki hol? Ahomoyot gutei prithibikhon tu jonghol asil (So what? At one point of time, the entire world was a forest).

It’s hard to say when you’ve entered a forest in Assam’s Sonitpur district. The green marking on official maps is not what you see on the ground. Charduar reserve forest is no exception. The east-west Rangapara-Rangia railway track forms part of the southern boundary of the reserve. But on both sides of the track, the landscape is identical.

Instead of the moist deciduous forests you might have expected, open fields stretch into the faraway horizon with only a few scattered hamlets and patches of cropland breaking their dull monotony. The residents are not apologetic about the transformation; instead, they are demanding denotification of the forestland status since the forests have long been lopped off.

The magnitude of the loss can rattle even hardened officials. Last December, within months of taking charge as the state chief secretary, Naba Kumar Das made a visit to Sonitpur. When he reached Batashipur, the virtual disappearance of Charduar forest—more than two-thirds of it vanished in 20 years—made him ask a few locals, admonishingly, how they felt about cutting down the last trees in the area.

“So what?” replied a villager nonchalantly, reminding the seasoned bureaucrat that even the big city he belonged to came up by destroying forests. “Why single us out for something that has been happening for ages? In the beginning, wasn’t the entire world a forest?”

Das and the officers accompanying him had to change the subject.

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Forests have historically given way to habitations but Sonitpur could boast of some of India’s best wilderness even 20 years ago. From what is now Sonai-Rupai wildlife sanctuary (WLS) in the east to Behali RF in the west, a continuous network of tropical moist deciduous and subtropical evergreen forests made Sonitpur one of Assam’s greenest districts.

In this vast wilderness along the northern bank of the mighty Brahmhaputra, stretching till the hills of Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh, elephants roamed in abundance, tigers were not rare, and a host of other significant wildlife, such as pangolins, bison and wild dogs, flourished.

Then, something went terribly wrong.

A wave of insurgency movements rocked Assam in the 1980s. The Bodos, the largest tribe living in the Assam plains, also demanded autonomy. The movement for an independent Bodoland was formally launched in 1987 under the leadership of All Bodo Students’ Union (ABSU). The Bodo Security Force, a militant outfit, was already formed in 1986. In the mid-90s, it renamed itself as the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB). Around the same time, another rebel outfit, Bodo Liberation Tigers Force (BLTF), also joined the movement.

Ostensibly to stop the takeover of tribal land by Bengali settlers and the native Assamese, Bodo insurgents claimed hundreds of lives over one-and-a-half decades till the Bodo Autonomous Council was conceived in 2003 through a pact between the state and the BLTF, with ABSU’s support. Isolated and depleted after the Indian Army struck its forest camps in Bhutan, a section of the NDFB announced ceasefire in 2005 in favour of peace talks that is yet to take off. The anti-talks faction of the NDFB still continues with its doctrine of guerrilla violence and extortion in strongholds of Sonitpur and Kokrajhar.

Since the beginning of insurgency in the late 1980s, the Bodo leadership encouraged its people from all over Assam to shift to the proposed Bodoland areas to ensure a Bodo majority. During this insurgency, many tribal and non-tribal families became victims of ethnic clashes and some of them also moved to Sonitpur. Together, the migrants tore down the district’s forests and settled down.

Large-scale deforestation and encroachment started in 1990. In the decade that followed, all 81 sq km of Naduar RF was wiped out. Biswanath RF suffered 70 per cent loss of habitat and Charduar RF 60 per cent. Balipara, Sonai–Rupai and Behali were fortunate to lose only 40, 30 and 10 per cent, respectively.

An alarmed Supreme Court did impose a ban on clear felling of trees in 1996 across the north-east. Like most blanket orders, this ruling adversely affected livelihood in many states, such as Meghalaya. But in Sonitpur where the ban could have safeguarded the forests against mass felling, the administration simply did not risk implementing it.

At the same time, taking advantage of the near-total breakdown of the law and order machinery, many Bodos and other insurgents started using their guns to make easy money through extortion, illegal felling and poaching. Corrupt elements in the administration found it convenient to facilitate the loot for a share of the booty.

“It was anyway very risky to take on those gun-toting militants or those who had their support. So most officers remained silent,” says a forest officer, who served in the region in the mid-1990s, on condition of anonymity. “Some even became part of the racket. It’s like ‘if you anyway can’t stop them, why not join them?’ Even today, there are simply too many guns in these areas.”

For example, Manas national park, a biological hotspot and a world heritage site, lost all its rhinos to the insurgents. In Sonitpur, lakhs of trees ended up at timber markets. As insurgents made the forest their safe house to dodge the security forces, the administration was left with little access and no control.

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The worst is perhaps over, but peace treaties and ceasefires have not changed too much on the ground. In Sonitpur, fear of abduction and extortion, if not summary execution, is still very real: real enough to keep senior officials away from the field and make people wary to get photographed or go on record.

Satya Prakash Vashishth, divisional forest officer of Sonitpur (east), is a rare exception. Driving through Misamari where, as recently as in last November, Bodo militants gunned down eight passengers after pulling them out of a bus, Vashishth would rather discuss an Army firing range inside Sonai-Rupai WLS. “Elephants are sensitive animals. They don’t enjoy gunshots. Besides, how can one allow firing inside a sanctuary?”

Even as insurgency bled Sonitpur, the Army and the Air Force had to strengthen their presence in the area, anyway strategic (it’s close to the borders with China) from a security perspective. Large tracts of forestland were converted into cantonments, airbases and camps. Facing an uphill task of flushing out the insurgents, the military here has little regard for green laws. So supply of firewood is usually supplemented from reserved forests. But maintaining a firing range inside an elephant forest, particularly when there are options to shift it to barren ground nearby, is surely asking for too much even in the national interest.

At an abandoned forest office (now turned into a fortified Army camp) in Kamengbari on the Arunachal border, Vashishth does not answer why the Arunachal forest department was allowed to build an office in Assam in the first place. “It would have helped protection of these forests had they not fled,” he chuckles, adding that the fear of insurgents is usually just “in the mind”. So is the worst over? Vashishth points out that even if there has been no significant influx of migrants recently, the remaining forests are not any safer than before.

Since selling timber has always been the primary incentive for felling trees in Sonitpur rather than clearing land for cultivation, there is no indication that the existing encroachers will stop eyeing fresh forest tracts for extraction. But under Vashishth, the forest staff has regained some control.

The effect is starkly visible. The narrow road leading to Kamengbari cuts through Sonai-Rupai sanctuary. Encroachers had already cleared the southern parts of the road by the time the forest staff reasserted control. So while the northern side of the road is a reasonable healthy forest, there is not a single tree standing in the open ground across the road.

With the first sign of weakness from the department in Sonai-Rupai, the axes will cross the road. In August 2006, when locals were informed that the sanctuary was being brought under the wildlife division (meaning stricter protection) of the forest department, local settlers cleared 2 sq km forest in just five days before the change in command took place.

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An amateur green activist, Bidhan Bora teaches botany at the Darrang College in Tezpur. Growing up in Sonitpur, he has seen his world change around him. As a student, Bora frequently drove to Bhalukpong on the Arunachal border with friends for “jungle dayouts”. In those days, he recalls, the road from Tezpur to Bhalukpong was virtually walled in by dense forests on both sides. Once they crossed Balipara, animal encounters were frequent.

“There was not a single human settlement on either side of the road. If we got late, evening drives used to be scary. Elephants lorded over that road. Deer and wild boar were aplenty. Even tiger sightings were not rare. Most animals have disappeared now with the forests and the Army is busy widening the road for its supplies to Arunachal,” rues Bora.

The only forest Bora gets to see now is construction material for the road—boulders and soil—being taken away in dumpers from the adjacent buffer forests (Balipara) of the Nameri national park. A short stretch of “model road” is laid out like a smooth runway, offering a feel of the speed vehicles will enjoy throughout. Even if the forests recover magically, the habitat will be sliced off for good.

As reminders of the past, an elephant gate stands on the road near Gamani and a few signposts mark an elephant corridor where all one spots are hutments and sawed-off stumps of trees. “It was amazing how fast these Bodo settlements mushroomed all over Sonitpur. Even today, they are felling trees, smuggling out timber and increasing their land holdings. A lot of benami sale of encroached land is also going on,” claims Bora.

Little wonder then that out of the 60,000 claims filed under the Forest Rights Act (FRA) in Assam, 30,000 came from Sonitpur district alone. What is more, in the absence of any administrative scrutiny of or political opposition to Bodo rights, most of these claims are likely to go through. In fact, this mass encroachment would have been legalized by now but for a Gauhati High Court order in October 2009.

In two petitions, 25 Bodo tribals and 17 victims of ethnic clashes sought the status of forest-dwellers under the FRA. In its order, the HC termed both groups as encroachers, observing that “in such a situation, the [question of] recognition of their rights…does not arise”.

In January 2010, the state forest department asked its officers to follow the HC verdict while deciding on claims under the FRA. Most claims from Bodo encroachers resemble the conditions stated in the petition before the HC and do not merit land titles. So officers like Vashishth have not processed any. But a few others, allege local conservation activists who will not be named, are baulking under pressure and distributing pattas to “encroachers”.

The Bodo leadership, however, has always denied the encroacher tag. Urkhao Gwra Brahma, former president of the ABSU and former Rajya Sabha member, repeatedly attacked the state for not allowing “creation of new forest villages after 1980” to accommodate displaced Bodo people, claiming that land where Bodo migrants settled down was already degraded due to wanton felling by timber mafia in collusion with corrupt forest officials. The Bodo leadership also warned against giving land to “other forest dwellers” as that would amount to “loss of tribal land”.

Most non-tribal forest villages in the district were established much earlier than the Bodo settlements. But even the earliest non-tribal settlers, who had carved out their forest villages in the 1950s, do not meet the FRA eligibility clause that requires non-tribals to stay in the forest for 75 years prior to 2005. A denial of land rights, either on technical grounds or due to Bodo opposition, may drive the non-tribal population into a fresh ethnic conflict here.

“Bodos never had any dependency on forests whatsoever. They are only interested in chopping down trees and grabbing land. But they are taking advantage of the FRA. For tribals, the Act fixed the cut-off year (for showing land occupation) at 2005. If it (the cut-off) were fixed at 1980 as originally proposed, most of these encroachers would not qualify,” protests Bora, claiming that no other place in India has suffered such loss of forest cover in such a short period of time.

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Bora might be right. The astounding scale and rate of deforestation apart, what is shocking is the fact that such rampant felling is not so much to free land for shelter or agriculture as it is to simply monetise timber.

Between 1991 and 2001, in the entire north bank landscape (north of the Bramhaputra river) of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, loss of forest cover was just 2.38 per cent. But in the Sonitpur elephant reserve area, it was a staggering 24.48 per cent. Surprisingly, both areas have recorded a similar growth (about 8.60 per cent) of agricultural land in that period. Clearly, 24.48 per cent forest was not destroyed to make way for agriculture. It was just cut up and sold off. A comparison of the growth of degraded forests (result of heavy felling) in the two areas clinches the case: just 1.56 per cent in the entire landscape and 21.29 per cent in the Sonitpur reserve.

On paper, Sonai-Rupai RF (a sanctuary since 1998) covers 220 sq km. By 2001, it lost 7 per cent of its forests. After mass felling over the next five years, only 128 sq km (58 per cent) of the sanctuary remains forested. The story is the same in Balipara RF (190 sq km). It lost 27.59 per cent of forest cover but corresponding growth in cropland was just 11.97 per cent.

In 1991, 18.44 per cent of the Sonitpur district was forested, including 1.58 per cent of degraded forest. In 2001, it still had 18.22 per cent forests but out of it 7.60 per cent was degraded. Clearly, the district lost more than one-third (37 per cent) of its quality forest in just 10 years. In actual terms, one study puts the overall forest loss in Sonitpur at 232 sq km between 1994 and 2001.

The enactment of the FRA in 2006 clearly emboldened the encroachers. On one hand, they claimed legal ownership of “tribal land” they had already cleared. On the other, they started extending land holdings by felling more trees. The biggest mass encroachment was attempted at Behali in March 2009 when hundreds of trees were chopped off.

Not that the forest department did not try to hold onto its ground. In 1993, five persons were killed when forest personnel opened fire after being attacked by encroachers. Then, between 1994 and 2002, the department carried out 33 anti-encroachment drives, demolished 4,117 huts, arrested 49 encroachers and reclaimed 7.39 sq km. In recent years, Vashishth himself has foiled several attempts at encroachment in a persisting battle of nerves.

But, evidently, that has not been enough.

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Adding to encroachment and the deadly encounters of security forces and insurgents, the forest department has yet another conflict to deal with. Rapid loss of tree cover has unsettled the largest inhabitants of Sonitpur’s forests. If human settlements on their traditional migratory routes were not enough, disappearance of forests where they foraged pushed the hungry elephants to raid croplands.


The raging conflict has partially subsided since a WWF-India team started work here in 2003, the year that recorded 32 elephant and 20 human casualties. Since then, retaliatory killings by poisoning have become rare. But the space crunch makes frequent face-offs inevitable. Between 2007 and 2009, conflict claimed 8 elephants and 20 people.

Vashishth has just finished debriefing his field staff on the whereabouts of a huge tusker that often intimidates even the soldiers stationed at nearby Lama camp. For the first time, he looks despondent: “There is little hope for the elephants here. Big animals need more space. On paper, we have large swathes of forests. But not even one-third of it is intact.”

In official records, Sonitpur district has more than 1200 sq km of forestland. But what is standing on ground and under the department’s control accounts for less than 400 sq km—200 sq km of Nameri NP, 128 sq km of Sonai-Rupai WLS and about 60 sq km of Behali RF. The rest is either degraded or has just disappeared.

At an average actual holding of 2 hectares per family (though the FRA allows a maximum of 4 hectares), Sonitpur’s 30,000 claims require around 600 sq km of forestland. Custodian of the bulk (328 sq km in Nameri NP and Sonai-Rupai WLS) of the surviving forests, Vashishth knows he is fighting a losing battle in the district and, sooner or later, all these claims will be granted under the FRA. Tired of a long vigil and ready to move on, he offers a “compromise solution”.

“Always hungry for timber, the encroachers have cleared far more forestland than they actually occupy or have filed claims for. All these tiny settlements are scattered across the forest landscape. If they are given titles for equivalent land (total 600 sq km) in clusters rather than all over the place, we can still carve out a couple of hundred sq km to regenerate the forest. The stumps and the rootstocks are all still there,” he says wistfully.

Given the political compulsions in this insurgency-ridden district, regenerating hope, let alone forests, seems a tall order.

The Great Iron Ore Heist

The Posco project in Odisha is not just about violation of human rights or an ecological disaster. It is a brazen example of how the country’s high and mighty are shifting goalposts to favour a powerful foreign multinational corporation.

Open, 18 June, 2011

DHINKIA/NUAGAON, ODISHA


Under a scorching sun, children of Govindpur and Dhinkia villages in Odisha (formerly Orissa) lie on roasting sand in a semi-circle to block approach roads. A hundred metres behind them lie the women. These human rings are the first line of defence against the administration’s acquisition of land for the Rs 52,000 crore Posco project. On 2 May, Union Minister of Environment & Forests Jairam Ramesh reversed his nine-month-old order banning land acquisition, and on 18 May, revenue officials backed by policemen marched in.

After compensating those “willing to hand over land”, the team ran into stout resistance. Unable to persuade defiant villagers, on 11 June, they sneaked in from the seaside. The daily bulletin proudly proclaimed that the government had taken over 24 betel vineyards. What went unreported: villagers put their vines back up the next day, and women and children returned to take turns under the sun in defence of their land.

It has been six years since the Odisha government signed its much-flaunted Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the South Korean steel giant for setting up a huge integrated power-cum-steel plant and captive port, allowing it to mine 600 million tonnes of iron ore in the state. On paper, the government has cleared the plan for the port and plant, but that means little on the ground.

As the battle of nerves intensified in Govindpur, villagers moved a PIL in the Orissa High Court (HC) on 20 May for a stay on the land acquisition (the next hearing is on 20 June). National Board for Wildlife member Biswajit Mohanty also moved the HC against the state for allotting ports to private parties through direct negotiation, without inviting public bids as mandated by the Centre; while the petition will be heard again on 21 June, an interim order on 30 May barred the state from signing any MoU for private ports without the court’s permission—in effect, stalling Odisha’s plan to ink a fresh MoU with Posco (the one signed in 2005 expired last year).

THE PLANNED LOOT

While India pats itself for having netted its single-largest foreign direct investment, Posco is poised to make many times its investment from iron ore alone. The 2005 MoU allowed the South Korean company to extract 600 million tonnes of iron ore over 30 years. Odisha’s 2004 MoU with Tata Steel allowed extraction of just 250 million tonnes of ore for a 6 million tonnes-per-annum (6 MTPA) steel plant at Kalinganagar. Posco, with a proposed plant of twice that annual capacity (12 MTPA), has been allowed 100 million tonnes of extra ore.

Why does Posco need so much iron ore? Because Posco, as it made clear during its MoU discussions, plans to export 10 million tonnes of ore per year; the 2005 MoU allows it to ship out 30 per cent of the ore it extracts. In fact, the MoU also concedes that Posco may source an additional 400 million tonnes of iron ore from India for its steel plants in South Korea through supply arrangements from the open market. There is a fat margin between the domestic open market (average Rs 4,400/tonne) and the international price (average Rs 7,400/tonne) of iron ore. For 400 million tonnes, it adds up to Rs 1.20 lakh crore at today’s prices.

Posco gets this deal at a delicate time, when the national consensus—of the Government, Judiciary and Indian industry—is moving towards limiting iron ore exports to help the domestic steel industry. India is the world’s largest iron ore exporter after Australia and Brazil. But in terms of per capita reserves, India has only 21 tonnes against Brazil’s 333 tonnes and Australia’s 2,000 tonnes. Various studies have estimated that business-as-usual will exhaust India’s iron ore reserves anytime between 2025 and 2040.

Karnataka banned iron ore exports in 2010, Chhattisgarh is considering the option, and Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s own Steel and Mines Minister Raghunath Mohanty floated a similar proposal this January. Even Ramesh, while issuing the final clearance to Posco on 2 May, hoped that ‘the new MoU would be negotiated by the state government in such a way that exports of iron ore are completely avoided’.

Exports apart, the financial implications of subsidising 600 million tonnes of iron ore for a multinational are grave.

State governments earned a paltry royalty of Rs 27 per tonne till the Centre fixed it at 10 per cent of the domestic market price in 2009. But with global prices ruling as high as Rs 7,400/tonne, after accounting for royalty (about Rs 440/tonne) and operating costs (about Rs 750/tonne on mining, freight, etcetera), an extracting company enjoys a margin of around Rs 6,200/tonne on out-shipped ore. So, if Posco bought the allotted 600 million tonnes of ore in the international market, it would have to shell out an extra Rs 3.72 lakh crore at current prices.

That, at the very least, is India’s gift to a South Korean steel-maker in competition with Indian companies. Ore is not getting any cheaper; its price has risen by over 500 per cent in the past 30 years.

All in all, it represents a generosity of scandalous proportions. Indian buyers, meanwhile, will have to pay global prices for steel from Posco’s Odisha plant. Besides, in 2006, the Posco project got an in-principle approval as a Special Economic Zone (SEZ). This means tax sops that will result in the Centre and Odisha government forfeiting a bulk of the projected Rs 89,000 crore and Rs 22,500 crore, respectively, that they would otherwise have gained in revenues from the project.

Moreover, Posco’s SEZ status (read: free export zone) and the captive port will make it very difficult for the authorities to keep a tab on how much ore Posco ships out from its exclusive facilities. Since the government levies no export duty in SEZs, it will also be much more profitable for Posco to export its steel produce from Odisha than to sell it in the domestic market.

Few emerging countries dump their national interest so casually. Posco tried the same deal in Brazil in 2004 when it inked a pact with Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD) for setting up a steel plant at the port city of Sao Luis and sourcing cheap ore from the Carajas mine. But CVRD not only insisted that Posco buy ore at the market rate, but also hiked the 2004 price of ore by 71 per cent in 2005.

So Posco shifted focus to Odisha.

THE DEVIOUS PLOY

Aware of India’s strict green laws, Posco methodically broke down its mega plans into segments first, and then downplayed each component to obtain clearances. The company’s controversial acquisition of 4,004 acres is only for the port and power-cum-steel plant. The project requires another 8,100 acres: 6,100 acres (mostly forest) for mining, and 2,000 acres for two townships (around the steel plant and the mine).

The proposal for the power-cum-steel plant itself is misleading. The application for environmental clearance mentions a 4 MTPA steel plant, not the 12 MPTA one scheduled to come up in six years. The environmental impact of the power plant was considered for only 400 MW installed capacity, not the entire 1,100 MW that would follow.

The primary need, though, is iron ore. Posco is yet to get permission to mine 6,100 acres of lush forest in Kandadhar Hills to extract those 600 million tonnes of ore. On 14 July 2010, the state HC cancelled the out-of-turn allotment of a mining permit to the South Korean firm. In October, the state government moved the apex court against the HC order, and the matter is sub judice.

The second key requirement is water. It is not clear if the approval for fresh water use of 10 million gallons daily (MGD)—slashed from the original approval for 16.5 MGD—is meant for the 4 MPTA production level or the full 12 MPTA level. In 2006, Posco got permission to draw 125 cusecs of water from the Jobra barrage. Following protests by the Mahanadi Banchao Andolan, backed by the BJP, the state asked Posco in September 2010 to draw water from the Hansua River instead. While the company has commissioned a fresh feasibility study, the issue remains unresolved.

Without any certainty on securing ore and water, Posco has frog-leaped itself to acquire land for its plant. The final component—a port to ship its output—was the first unit it got cleared; but again, not without doctoring facts. The captive port was proposed as a minor port to escape the stringent reviews that major ports attract. But the Posco port will construct two massive breakwaters, one 1,070-metres-long to the north and another 1,600-metres-long to the south, to control turbulence. There will be a 13-km-long approach channel, with a minimum width of 250 metres, to allow 170,000 DWT (deadweight tonnage) ships, among the biggest in the business.

Clearly, Posco’s plot is larger than the sum of its parts. Getting started with the port and plant before obtaining rights to ore and water is an attempt to force a fait accompli, a phrase Ramesh himself uses liberally to describe the Navi Mumbai airport, Jaitapur nuclear plant and coal blocks across India.

Not that everyone was blind. In November 2007, the Supreme Court’s (SC) Central Empowered Committee (CEC) in its report noted that ‘instead of piecemeal diversion of forest land for the project, it would be appropriate that the total forest land required for the project, including for mining, is assessed and a decision for diversion of forest land is taken for the entire forest land’. In fact, the SC’s in-principle approval in August 2008 of the diversion of 3,093 acres of forest land for the Posco plant shared these concerns. But the Ministry of Environment & Forests (MoEF) was not listening.

THE TWISTED ‘PLANT’

Nandigram, Singur, Noida or Jaitapur, land acquisition for industrial use has been a highly sensitive issue in India. Posco’s case in Odisha is even more complex. Since 3,097 hectares of the 4,004-acre proposed project area is classified as forest land, Posco required environmental clearance for land diversion. However, there is no trace of wilderness in the Posco project area. What was ‘dense deciduous forest’ in British records in the 1920s has disappeared since. Betel vines, arguably the country’s finest, and paddy fields have taken over. But the Forest Rights Act (FRA) came into force in January 2008, empowering forest dwellers to determine the nature and extent of forest land use.

Community resistance, however, started snowballing soon after the Odisha government signed the controversial MoU in June 2005. By 2008, the project got a few in-principle green clearances. Then, Ramesh took over the MoEF in May 2009, and, within three months, ordered that no forest land be diverted for Posco without the consent of the affected gram sabhas.

In a volte face five months on, Ramesh granted the ‘final clearance’ for land diversion on 29 December, in violation of his August order. Again, unable to defend the somersault, he had to issue a clarification in 10 days flat. On 8 January 2010, he wrote to the state that ‘final clearance’ was ‘conditional’, depending on the settlement of rights under the FRA.

What followed was surreal. Odisha claimed that there were no tribals or traditional forest dwellers in the project area. In the next few months, two Centre-appointed committees—under NC Saxena and Meena Gupta—nailed those lies. Following the first report, the MoEF stopped land acquisition in August 2010. Based on the second report—that called the state’s claims ‘false’ and‘fabricated’—the Ministry’s Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) on 19 November 2010 recommended temporary withdrawal of the forest clearance.

But Ramesh offered yet another ‘conditional’ final clearance on 31 January this year. The project was on if Odisha could give an ‘assurance’ that there were no ‘eligible persons’ under the FRA in the area. In its ‘assurance’, the state government repeated all the claims earlier trashed as ‘false’ by government inquiry panels. Then, on 29 April, it deemed the gram sabhas ‘illegal’ and the resolutions ‘fake’.

On 2 May, keeping “faith… in what the state government says”, Ramesh gave a ‘final approval’ for land diversion.

THE PARTIAL ‘PUSH’

Ramesh’s apparent leap of faith is not out of sync with the alarming alacrity shown by his predecessors in the green ministry in pushing the Posco project. But were they under pressure from their bosses and colleagues in the Government?

Consider the following:

l In 2007, a file noting on 8 May shows that the Finance Ministry sought an update on the Posco project. The next day, a letter from the Director of Disinvestment wanted the status of the Posco proposal to be sent to the Finance Ministry by

18 May, as the then Finance Minister P Chidambaram was meeting members of the Investment Commission on 24 May.

Within days, a few hours before he relinquished the MoEF to take over the Telecom Ministry on 16 May, A Raja issued Posco’s port its environment clearance, perhaps the last of the 2,016 green clearances he granted in just 36 months.

» Again in 2007, a letter dated 4 June from the Finance Ministry sought the status of the Posco applications by 11 June, for a review meeting on the project’s progress scheduled for 16 June. The MoEF Expert Appraisal Committee (EAC) cleared the plant at its meeting on 20 June. The Meena Gupta inquiry committee majority noted that ‘the proximity of dates between the letters from the Finance Ministry and the hasty processing of the approvals by the MoEF and EAC, despite the serious shortcomings and illegalities, is more than a mere coincidence’ and ‘the brazen interference of the Ministry of Finance into [the] functioning of another Ministry is most unfortunate, highly improper and against public interest’.

» Meena Gupta took charge as MoEF secretary on 1 June 2007. Since Raja had already moved to telecom, the MoEF was effectively under the Prime Minister’s Office. Posco had applied for port clearance in September 2006, and it took Raja eight months to okay it. The application for environmental clearance of the Posco plant was filed on 27 April 2007. Under the PMO, Gupta issued the clearance on 19 July, in less than three months. Again, when the Odisha government sought clearance for diverting 3,000 acres of forest land for the plant on 26 June 2007, Gupta promptly obtained an in-principle nod from the ministry’s FAC on 9 August 2007.

» Could it be a coincidence that Ramesh handpicked the same Meena Gupta to head the four-member fact-finding committee in 2010? Unsurprisingly, Gupta was the lone dissenter in the panel and found nothing wrong with the clearance for land diversion that she had issued herself.

» Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, along with Odisha CM Naveen Patnaik, assured South Korean President Lee Myung-bak of the speedy clearance of Posco’s project when the latter was in New Delhi as chief guest for the Republic Day parade last year. Minister of Steel Virbhadra Singh even offered a six-month deadline for the handover of land to the Posco delegation that accompanied the South Korean President.

Dr Singh repeated the assurance at the 17th Asean summit at Hanoi last October. At the G-20 summit at Seoul last November, India’s Ambassador to South Korea SR Tayal said there was “a common desire on both sides to see the project through” and “every effort is being made by all stakeholders”.

It is surprising how such personal commitments were issued on an issue to be decided on its legal merit. It seems the pressure on the MoEF to clear the project before the G-20 meet was enormous. After failing to meet the deadline, Ramesh blamed the FAC for delaying its report and assured the who’s who in the country’s power circles that “the decision will be taken within a couple of weeks”.

Eventually, it took Ramesh a few months to mock the FAC and sundry committees of his own making to clear Posco with a lofty justification: “Beyond a point, the bona fides of a democratically elected state government cannot always be questioned by the Centre”. But can the bona fides of a democratically elected gram panchayat be questioned any more than that of a state government?

For the villagers of Dhinkia, it may be too late for an answer.

Can't Get The Act Together

The Left Front has been the biggest advocate of the Forest Rights Act (FRA), but its own former rule in home state West Bengal saw its worst abuse as well. Forest villagers dependent on tea garden jobs are indifferent to the Act. Families inside the Buxa tiger reserve are keen to surrender their rights for Rs 10 lakh each. But away from tea gardens and outside the tiger reserve, forest communities have bigger demands than the FRA allows. And a desperate forest department twists the Act to retain control.

Open, 11 June, 2011

JAYANTI/CHILAPATA, WEST BENGAL



Jodi ekta bado hotel na koirte pari, patta-y ki labh (Of what use is this land title if I can’t build a big hotel here)?

Not far from the forest office at Rajabhatkhawa in the buffer of the Buxa tiger reserve, Gopal Sharma walks across his paddy field. Pampoo Basti got its name from a long abandoned pump house. The 19 families settled here during the Raj for forestry work have now multiplied to 44. Today, Sharma and his two brothers cultivate less than 3 acres in a forest fold. A minor change of course by a neighbourhood stream cost them some land in 1993. Among them, the three brothers have eight children.

Sharma is a reasonable man. He walks, pointing out copious elephant droppings in wide clearings of damaged crops, and pauses for a photograph or two. He does not hate the herds. But the forest department, he points out, could have maintained the electric fencing.
Villagers here have heard of the Forest Rights Act (FRA). But there is little excitement. Sharma explains they have no future with such limited land holding and routine elephant raids. Daily transport for good education and healthcare is expensive. So if the forest department extends the Rs 10 lakh per family resettlement scheme to the buffer areas of the tiger reserve, he would take the money and move on.

But why would he risk a new beginning when he is about to get his rights? For the first time, Sharma sounds impatient: “What rights? I will still be tilling the same field, fight the same elephants and stay in this hutment. How can we make a decent living in this forest? Yes, tourists do come here. But I can’t even lease my land for a proper hotel.”

In neighbouring Bamani Basti, Darbahadur Karki describes an aggressive herd of 80-odd elephants that gored two villagers a couple of years back. The jumbos, he says, even raid their houses. All 16 families here are eager to resettle if they get the Rs 10 lakh package. “We have rights. We collect firewood. Our cattle graze in the forest. We get compensation if leopards kill livestock. But is this a life?”

It is the same refrain in Dalbadol, another forest village in the Buxa buffer. Firewood apart, says Subir Chhetri, there is nothing much to collect from the forest. Annual flooding drowns the fields for at least three months, leaving layers of gravel on the soil. The villagers might still break their back ploughing, laments Chhetri, were it not for routine elephant raids. Soon, putting a cricket match on hold, the village youth debate their chances of getting the resettlement offer anytime soon.

Clearly, these forest villagers do not think that the FRA will change their life and Rs 10 lakh is a lot of money when their average monthly family income does not exceed Rs 3000. But, with so many villagers so eager to move out, how many has the Buxa management resettled so far?
Not a single one.

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Before conservation became a priority, one could take a train to the Bhutan border. Jayanti was a busy railway station transporting dolomite and limestone. Now it is a large village inside the Buxa core that appears larger with a paramilitary camp and a forest department campus. All that remains of the railway station is the canteen, since converted into a dhaba that serves jawans, forest staff and the occasional tourist.

In 2008, the forest department conducted a survey here for resettlement. By then, some villagers had set up rudimentary tourist lodges on their properties. Quite a few vehicles and guides were conducting jungle safaris around Jayanti. Barring these few, the villagers were willing to move out.
But a gradual realignment of the Jayanti river has been threatening the very existence of the village. Gravel flushed down has almost filled up the riverbed. Each year, the monsoon surge shifts the river towards the village. Eventually, people here would have no option but to move out.
Before that could happen, Jayanti became a political battleground.

Villagers describe the flashpoint as a face-off between the “proxy-Left” forest department and the local guides’ union that declared allegiance to Trinamool Congress, the Left’s main political opposition. Ostensibly to teach the guides’ union a lesson, the Buxa management flashed an advisory from the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) for a gradual shift of tourism activities in all tiger reserves from core to buffer areas. The forest roads around Jayanti were closed to tourists. The guides and drivers became jobless overnight. The lodges lost significant business.

What could have been a smooth resettlement has since become tense, with a section of the village leadership maligning the forest bosses who, in turn, have denied even routine concessions, such as for boulder collection, to the villagers. The build-up to this atmosphere of mistrust, however, began in 2009 with complaints of political partisanship.

In the Left manifesto for the 2009 general elections, the ruling parties claimed credit for backing the FRA in its present form. Even so, Bengal was among the states where implementation of the Act was the most lackadaisical. The Left government in the state needed a face-saver before the polls.
So party functionaries in North Bengal made the administration distribute some land titles in a hurry, without following the mandatory democratic verification process. Not surprisingly, most of the pattas (land titles) were doled out in Left strongholds among party sympathisers, many in tea garden areas.

For example, all 287 families, mostly Ravas, in North Khaerbari got land titles, 7-9 bighas each. Pukar Pradhan’s is one of the few Nepalese families in the village. He says elephants do not venture out to damage crops in this area (where forests are mostly degraded) and the villagers are allowed to collect all the firewood they need. Like Pradhan, many in North Khaerbari work at Hashimara tea garden. Pradhan’s neighbour Gopi Rava says they also get work under the government’s 100-day job scheme. Forest rights have not made much of a difference to their life, but of course, it is a “good thing to have land titles”.

Villagers at Jayanti, however, are not interested in pattas. Under the FRA, non-scheduled tribes (non-STs) are required to furnish proof of 75-year-residency (a tough ask anywhere) to claim rights. More than 90 per cent of Jayanti’s population is non-ST. They would rather move out immediately if the Buxa management offers the resettlement package to all of them and if the money comes in a maximum of two installments instead of the proposed five.
RP Saini, field director of Buxa tiger reserve, says the forest department is waiting for a 100 per cent consensus: “The process is on hold due to the elections. But unless an entire village is shifted, the exercise will be futile. There are some elements who are trying to mislead people. So we want the willing majority to convince those few who are still in two minds.”

Unless the political one-upmanship intensifies, it seems only a matter of time before villages from the Buxa core are moved out. Even the villages in Buxa buffer may be offered the resettlement deal in the near future. But thousands of forest villagers outside the tiger reserve will never have that option. And not all of them have access to tea garden jobs.

So they have other ideas.

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Organisations such as National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers (NFFPFW) and North Eastern Society for Preservation of Nature and Wild Life (NESPON) are mobilising forest villagers in this region to seek community control over forests under the FRA. Such control, they argue, will give them the powers to manage and use forest resources in a sustainable way, like their forefathers did, without any intervention from the forest department.
Forest villages, such as Kodal Basti in Chilapata, put up signposts in 2008, declaring the area as community forests. Subsequently, villagers locked up the forest department’s timber yards, stopped clear felling of trees, and decreed that the forest department had no authority to act without their permission. The department retaliated by demolishing the signposts and arresting a few villagers.

While the flare-up has somewhat eased in the past few months, the tension, and a few questions, remain. Just how did the forefathers of these forest villagers manage the forests? And do such practices guarantee sustainable use of forest resources today?

Across North Bengal, British foresters established forest villages since 1910 as forced settlements of local communities such as the Ravas, and outsiders Nepalese and Jharkhandis. These villagers carried out forestry work, such as plantation and felling, without any wages but were provided with homestead land and cultivable plots. Their rights included collection of NTFP and firewood, grazing cattle, cultivation of vegetables through inter cropping in the plantations, fishing and regulated hunting.

Thus, forest villagers here completely lived off the forests till they started earning wages in the late seventies. Around the same time, the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 and the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980, came into being and many of their rights were compromised.Over the next few decades, wages became the prime source of livelihood. Today, minimal forestry work means there is little opportunity to earn regular wages. Moreover, if the villagers intend to control all work undertaken by the forest department, irrespective of the legitimacy of the demand, a hostile administration is not likely to create jobs for them as firewatchers or guards.

Besides, few traditional livelihood practices seem viable if 242 forest villages are to depend on the remaining patches of forests. Hunting is banned and fishing restricted. According to NFFPFW, growing focus on clearing natural forests and commercial plantations over decades led to the disappearance of much of the NTFP. This also caused food scarcity for wild animals and pushed elephants to raid crops more frequently. So leave alone vegetable inter cropping in the plantations, cultivation around the homesteads is not really an option anymore.

Lal Singh Bhujel, who represents NFFPFW at Buxa, sums up the purpose of the “long struggle”. Once the communities have control over these forests, they will shift the focus from commercial forestry and sustain themselves by restoring and conserving natural forests. But this lofty pursuit finds no echo on the ground.

Less than 100 km from Buxa, Chilapata wildlife sanctuary is a tiny green patch in this fragmented forest landscape. One late morning, at least 50 people are seen carrying green branches within a 5 km stretch. A thunder storm brought down many trees the previous night. Otherwise, claims one of the fearless axe-wielders, there might not be half as many.

In Chilapata, about 230 families in Andu Basti, Kurmai Basti and Bania Basti are waiting for land titles. Last year, four families in Andu Basti got lucky. Outside the youth club, Santosh Rava complains that a government survey has placed all the families in these forest villages above poverty line (APL). This, he points out, when routine elephant raids do not allow anything more than a single crop of paddy and NTFP means only some fruits and saplings.

Rava explains that villagers will apply for bank loans once they get land titles: “With cash, one can try different options. We need good irrigation and protection from elephants. Crackers and electric fencing do not work. Irrigation canals may work as ditches. But there are so many restrictions here. I could make about Rs 20,000 if I was allowed to cut down one of these,” he points at a few surviving old trees inside the village. But what happens when the trees are gone? “We know all that… but we have to get by,” Rava walks away, mumbling.

Formation of Forest Development Corporation (FDC) in the mid-70s made forestry operations very lucrative. But already since the 1960s, collusion between a corrupt administration and the timber mafia had cleared large tracts of forest in this region. While some villagers made small fortunes on the fringe of this illegal economy, many others were left out and have since been awaiting their turn.

Till a few years ago, many tea gardens here served bush meat to guests. In 2004, deer delicacies were still available at a few hours’ notice inside Buxa. Now, the impact is visible. Since nobody hunted bisons for meat, they are spilling out of pocket forests on the highways. But it is difficult to spot deer in these forests.

Though commercial poaching seems to be under control now, the timber mafia has not given up yet. In 2008, two villagers died inside Buxa when forest staff opened fire on groups who were allegedly felling trees. In this part of Bengal, where people and institutions never cared much for wildlife and forest laws, an interpretation of the FRA in terms of complete community control over forest resources for sustainable use does not sound too reassuring.

On its part, the forest department is desperate to retain control. Forest villages here came under the Panchayat system in 1996 but the forest department got to control the development funds. Today, the department promptly suspends all development work in villages that challenge its authority. When it came to settlement of rights, the administration did not even bother to convene a single gram sansad meeting and violated provisions of the FRA while selecting members for forest rights committees (FRCs). In December 2008, the state even issued a new circular on joint forest management, restricting forest rights to “usufructs” controlled by the forest department, that too outside Protected Areas.

When NGOs, such as NFFPFW, objected to these violations of the FRA, the administration dubbed them as “disruptive forces” and branded local rights activists as Maoists. In 2010, top officials of Buxa tiger reserve warned this reporter, who had met local NFFPFW functionaries, that the administration tapped all phone conversations of those who “entertain anti-national elements” as evidence.

Amid such administrative paranoia, the political parties are mostly silent. Even during the state elections this April, while all local candidates had a lot to promise the tea garden workers, a huge constituency that can swing results, no outfit, not even Akhil Bharatiya Adivasi Vikas Parishad, talked about implementation of the FRA.



In the nearest town, Alipurduar, says a young timber merchant on condition of anonymity: “Whichever political alignment holds power, it is unlikely to upset the traditional equations. Kono change paba na (you will see no change). Today, the mafia keeps the (forest) department and one set of political bosses happy. Tomorrow, they might be paying another set of politicians and, if this new Act really rolls out, some community strongmen.”

Caught in this political blind spot between the administration and the activists, most forest villagers here are wary of their future. Sitting in his rickety, wooden quarter, Dhanbahadur Chhetri does not understand the fuss about a new Act that will soon make Pampoo Basti a revenue village. Under which law, wonders the octogenarian, did Station Para become a revenue village when a few retired railway staff set up the colony in 2005 right inside the Rajabhatkhawa forest?

“Rules and laws are for the powerful. So everyone is fighting for power. There is no middle ground here, no future for the poor,” says the old man, retiring to his room. His time is up, but Chhetri will not stop his two sons if they get enough money to buy some land away from the forest.