Rhinos hacked. Tigers poisoned. Elephants butchered. Otters skinned.
Mongooses clubbed and plucked. It is
easy game for poaching syndicates and the brazen plunder has reduced state
protection for India’s rich wildlife to a cruel joke. Worse, the spoils are
funding terrorism and elections alike.
Surrounded by cops, Devi
Singh Moghiya seemed too soft-spoken and dignified to be a poacher. His melancholic
whispers belied the chilling admission that he was one of the six shooters who took
out 22 tigers in Ranthambhore between 2003 and 2005. They roamed the forest
looking for pugmarks. Once a trail was established, they took positions on
trees after sundown. One shot in the moonlight was all it would take.
How did they get away
with killing so many under the nose of 273 forest staff that guarded India's
most high-profile reserve? Devi Singh looked puzzled: “You can always dodge
them during the daytime recce. And which forest guard comes looking in the
night when you fire your gun?” His team earned R 40-60,000 per tiger. He had no
idea how much the traders made in the international market.
Devotees of Lord Vishnu
take home hundreds of boxes of Tirupati laddoos through the Chennai airport. In
the cargo scanner, the laddoos, like any biological material, appear a shade of
warm orange and no security staff gave those little globes a second look till
it was discovered how thousands of star tortoise hatchlings tightly packed in
sweet boxes were slipping through.
Typically, the traders stopped
giving the tortoises water days before the transit to avoid stench of urine. Just
before the scanning, the handler would give the boxes a violent shake so that
startled hatchlings retreat completely into their shells and appear suitably
round. Some even use a touch of chloroform to discourage movement.
Up to 30,000 star
tortoises worth several crores of rupees are still sourced from southern states
for R10-15 each but the consignments now leave the country for Malaysia and
other East Asian destinations through the Kolkata airport. Some also take the Bangladesh
route via Dhaka.
Last month, when several rhinos
were poached in Kaziranga, a local source with a past in the trade described how
the shooters had hit the rhinos in “all wrong places” and how the horns were
chopped off with “sloppy, unclean slashes”. Even parts of ears were torn off to
establish the authenticity of horns before the buyers. Apparently, new
operators are at work — a disturbing possibility in the aftermath of the
Bodo-Muslim clashes.
Brazen, bizarre and desperate in turn, the trade in wildlife is flourishing. The demand overseas is
fuelled by an absurd faith in traditional medicine or a craving
for exotic fashion, furniture, stationery and pets. The cheap skill of subsistence hunters ensures unhindered supply and
there is little check by way of enforcement. With profit to the tune of 20-50 times, top syndicate bosses such as Sansar
Chand can afford to flout the toughest laws and engage the country’s best legal
firms.
The result is worse than
decimation. Some species, from the mighty elephant to little otters, have taken
such a hit that the trade in their derivatives has actually ebbed. By the late
1980s, the selective killing of males for tusks triggered a genetic response. From
20 kg, the average weight of tusks dropped to below 10kg and the number of makhna (tuskless by birth) males shot up.
Alongside, the standard
1:7 male-female ratio in an elephant population slid to below 1:25 in the
forests of Chamrajnagar and Mysore districts in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu’s
Sathyamangalam where Veerappan operated for more than three decades. “Today,
most males are young with just about 5-10 kgs of tusk which is again not hard
enough for carving,” explained an old trading hand.
There have been few exclusive
hauls of otter pelts because hardly anyone was looking. But till a few years ago,
the smooth skins would show up frequently in consignments of big cat pelts. Then,
there were easy pickings no more. Nobody is counting but experts fear a 50-70
per cent dip in otter populations outside protected forests.
The mongoose may soon
follow. This June, 51 kg mongoose hair and 50,000 mongoose hair brushes were
confiscated in Meerut. With each animal accounting for only 10-20g of hair, the
brush industry’s annual demand for 8-12 quintals has probably killed more than
a million mongooses in the last two decades.
A lot of the buying has
shifted to the internet for anonymity and speed of transaction. Hill mynahs are
in high demand and each cost more than an economy flight to London. Trade in red
sanders, a tree species endemic to the Eastern Ghats, is probably worth up to R
50,000 crore. Horse shoe crabs, a living fossil, are being harvested from the
Orissa coast by the truckloads for their medicinal value and flown out from
Kolkata. Even tiny insects such as butterflies and tiger beetles are a catch at
a few hundred dollars each.
Most traders take land
route to Tibet via Ladakh and Nepal, and to Myanmar via Manipur. Delhi is the
main transit point for goods heading to Tibet. In the North-East, syndicates are
shifting from the traditional Dimapur-Kohima-Imphal route to ferrying consignments
through Arunachal Pradesh along the northern boundary of Assam and then down to
Nagaland. A third route through Silchar is also active. The extermination of
rhinos in Manas took some business away from Siliguri but it remains a key hub for
its proximity to Nepal and Bhutan. The Sunderbans waterways are the busy,
invisible channel to Bangladesh.
While Bengal tigers still
make the loudest headlines, leopards are the bigger kill by quantity in open forests.
As tiger numbers slide, leopards are also being targeted as a tiger substitute.
Besides, perceived medicinal value makes the bones of a big cat worth up to ten
times its pelt. A range of tiger bone wine sells for $80-3,000 per case in
China.
Since 2010, by official count,
66 tiger and 466 leopards have been poached -- amounting to at least 4000 kg of
bones. Yet, seizures mostly throw up only skins. Worse, very few skin seizures
lead to recovery of bones. While anti-poaching agencies claim success in confiscating
skins, poachers make a fortune trading in bones.
Foolproof physical protection
of our wilderness is impossible. Unless we literally fortify our open forests
into zoos, intruders will always stand a chance and wildlife wander out of
protected zones. The only effective deterrence to poaching is the fear of
getting caught, prosecuted and punished. But even after the setting up of the
Wildlife Crime Control Bureau in 2006, intelligence gathering and prosecution remained
suspect.
The National Tiger
Conservation Authority (NTCA) has introduced E-eye, a thermal imagery system,
for round-the-clock surveillance. Plans are also afoot to introduce drones to
watch remote terrains. But there is no substitute for quality human resources.
Every forest management needs eyes and ears on the ground. Since sleuthing is
not the forte of the average bureaucrat, field managers should be handpicked to
fit the job profile. Every forest division also requires a dedicated legal cell
with trained officers to make a robust case when a poacher is caught.
But one cannot fight an
unacknowledged enemy. The culture of denial is so deeply embedded that most forest
officers refuse to accept that poachers have struck. First, they play the
jurisdiction card. Nobody is held accountable for poaching of, say, rhinos just
outside Kaziranga or tigers adjacent to Corbett. The management practically
disowns the animal the moment it steps out of park limits. And officers in
charge of areas outside parks never have the resources to fight poachers nor
are they expected to.
When a carcass cannot be
disowned, imaginative authorities attribute the death to anything from food
poisoning to heart failure to fight with another animal. “Tomorrow, I won’t be
surprised if someone classifies a tiger death as suicide,” a senior Environment
ministry official recently quipped.
A desperate NTCA had to
issue a directive this May, ordering that “to ensure due diligence and topmost priority,
every case of tiger and leopard death would be henceforth treated as a case of
poaching, unless otherwise proved beyond reasonable doubt”. But trust our
forest bureaucracy to find a way around this too.
The result is there for
all to see. While Sansar Chand (wife Rani runs his syndicate) and Shabbir
Hassan Quereshi (son Sarfaraz controls the family business) stay behind bars, few
other kingpins have ever been arrested. Some, like Tashi Tshering, are busy in
Nepal. Others, like Pema Thinley, operate from China and Tibet. A bunch of
middle-rung operators are picked up every now and then but they either walk out
on bail or get away with serving brief sentences.
But a multi-billion
dollar industry cannot trust its fortune on administrative weaknesses alone.
Veerappan allegedly funded political parties in two states for over a decade.
Sansar Chand’s mysterious diary apparently had tell-tale signs of collusion
with the who’s who of India’s power elite. Left insurgents value the dense
forests in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand as cover but are accused of funding arms
deals by clearing Indravati of its tigers.
In the North-East, almost
every militant group harvested wildlife during the 1980s and 1990s when a
number of prime forests, including Manas national park, became virtually
inaccessible to the administration. The official count for rhino poaching alone
touched the 550-mark.
Shoot at sight orders
against poachers at Kaziranga slowly helped the rhino bounce back. From 1999 to
2006, the park lost 41 rhinos to poaching at an annual average of just 5
animals. Then, the 2006 Assembly elections unleashed what sources call “reward
killing”. The toll jumped to 20 in 2007 and the poachers were back. After the
2009 Lok Sabha polls, around two dozen animals were killed till 2010. Last
year, only one rhino was poached before the Assembly elections in May. The toll
has again crossed two dozen since.
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