Sunday Economic Times, 20 Nov, 2011
June, 2005. Dhikala was abuzz and under evening curfew. A few months ago, a tigress had given birth to four cubs in neighbouring Sarpduli. Mother and cubs had subsequently moved along the Ramganga river to Dhikala and made for easy sightings. Soon, over-enthusiastic tourists started combing the Sambar road with elephants to pin down the family of five.
Dumps of canteen leftovers invited a good number of scavenging herbivores to the tourist complex boundary every night. The mother tigress stalked those easy preys to feed the family. The arrangement worked reasonably well till a sub-adult cub made an error of judgement. In the last week of May, a canteen worker was mauled outside his quarter late in the night.
As the news spread, the tourist tide swelled further. Sambar road was closed to tourists after the mishap. With curfew on, nobody, including the canteen staff, was allowed to venture out after 7.30 in the evening and dinner was served early in the room. But behind windows, people stayed up long hungry nights for that glimpse of a lifetime.
5 TIGERS, 1 BULL ELEPHANTOn the last day of that tourist season, the sky was sulking since afternoon. Soon after the vehicles and elephants returned from the evening safari, the wind gained strength, and a storm snapped the power supply.
Within minutes, the sun vanished like it does in the hills and the sky sent down early warnings of a heavy downpour. The darkness and the pitter-patter was enough to drive the crowd crazy. Then, the clouds thundered. In a split second flashed five tigers, scaling the complex wall from the riverside.
It was mayhem. The clouds continued to roar intermittently, lighting up the lawn and returning it to pitch darkness again. And in those brief moments, the tigers could be seen, each time at different spots, walking among the people. Children and women shrieked, men yelled, many scampered in the dark. Within minutes, the big cats disappeared in the forest. Nobody suffered a scratch. One forest official broke a leg running for his life.
Corbett is full of such surprises, and delicious scares. Few wild experiences compare to the numb thrill of taking a narrow road, flanked by a gorge and a steep slope, at an hour when elephants do the traffic duty. Returning one late afternoon from Khinanauli (with special permission, due to an emergency), I was stared down by a mighty bull at 15 feet, who stood guard for what seemed an eternity while his herd climbed up from the river and walked across. No, this giant did not even mock charge, the chill his cold, composed eyes spread was enough.
THE YOUNG JIM
But Corbett is more than its spirited animals or its splendid collection of birds. Very few places compare with this reserve's ever-changing horizons. The moist terai and rocky, porous bhabars at the margins of the Shivalik in the southern parts, the mixed forests dominated by Sal trees around Bijrani, the amazing savannah of Dhikala, the riverine bounty along Ramganga, the frosty heights of Kanda - there are so many Corbetts to surprise one.
After all, this is the stage of that "small boy armed with an old muzzle-loading gun... kept from falling apart by lashings of brass wire" roaming the jungles, "sleeping anywhere he happened to be when night came on...wakened at intervals by the calling of tigers..."
That boy grew up to kill 33 maneaters, 19 of those tigers. Hunter Edward James Corbett. Then he met Frederick Walter Champion, a forester who would be one of India's first naturalists. The hunter became a conservationist. Together, they ensured this spectacular Kumaon wilderness was protected as Asia's first national park, named after Lord Malcom Hailey in 1936. Post-Independence, the park was renamed after its lifeline, the Ramganga river, in 1954. Next year, Jim Corbett died in Kenya. In his honour, the park was re-renamed in 1956. When India launched Project Tiger, the world's most ambitious conservation programme, in 1973, it was only fitting that Corbett was the chosen venue.
COST OF SUCCESS
Today this reserve is one of the few high points of Project Tiger's success and also one of the world's top wildlife destinations. But the tourism boom has exacted its cost. More than 100 small and big hotels flourishing around Corbett need 20 per cent occupancy to stay in business. That amounts to 2.2 lakh double bed rooms or more than 4 lakh tourists. Even after increasing the park's carrying capacity, it cannot allow entry to more than 2.4 lakh a year.
Clearly, hundreds of thousands of tourists, who apparently do not even enter the reserve, crowd Corbett for extended sessions of corporate unwinding or rowdy weddings. To accommodate them, more and more multi-star hotels come up behind high walls, block wildlife corridors, add to sound and light pollution, drain vital resources like water, and leave behind tonnes of garbage in ecologically fragile areas.
LOCALS VS ANIMALS
At the same time, with little benefit of conservation or tourism being shared with the local communities, the level of intolerance towards animals is rising. In the recent past, a number of Corbett tigers were removed as so-called maneaters; some others died mysteriously. Without benefitting the local stakeholders, no celebration will help secure Corbett's future.
The efforts to save this marvel of Kumaon wilderness began long before Jim Corbett by the likes of Major Ramsay (1870s) or ER Stevans (1900s). But Jim's true legacy lies in understanding the wild, and its most awesome mascot, the tiger. In increasingly conflict-ridden times, we should not forget that little boy, who once crept up a bush while stalking jungle fowl and saw "the bush heaving and a tiger walking out on the far side and, on clearing the bush, turning round and looking at the boy with an expression on its face which said as clearly as any words, 'Hello, kid, what the hell are you doing here?' and, receiving no answer, turning round and walking away very slowly without once looking back."
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