They were founded by the one of the most legendary conservationist in India. They were instrumental in helping police nab the most notorious poachers in the country. Now members of renowned wildlife conservation not-for-profit Tiger Watch Ranthambore based at one of the world’s most famous national parks in northern India tell Grin how they have made locals in the Kiplingesque forests into champions of tiger conservation.
Tiger Watch was created by a legendary conservationist, the former director of the Ranthambore National Park, Fateh Singh Rathore in 1997. It is now led by his protege Dr. Dharmendra Khandal, also a renowned name in wildlife conservation, and operates on ground zero, always on the front lines of the many battles taking place to protect not just the Tiger but to also preserve the entire landscape.
When a wave of poaching incidents happened in the 2000s, Tiger Watch realised that most of the poachers in the park belonged to the Mogya traditional hunting tribe. It was not enough to just stop them from poaching using police raids but the tribe needed an alternate way of livelihood.
Tiger Watch initiated the Mogya Rehabilitation and Education Program which sought to bring the tribe into the mainstream by ensuring that the next generation received an education & were thus weaned away from poaching. The first to enroll in the program were the children of the very poachers arrested in Tiger Watch raids with the police. The community, among other things, now has its first ever university graduates.
‘This program was initially discouraged by other conservationists in the anti-poaching business but vindicated itself when a timely tip-off from the teenage son of a notorious poacher in our program led to the biggest wildlife crime duo in central India (Hari Singh and Munni Bai) being nabbed by the police in 2015,’ said Ishan Dhar, a representative of Tiger Watch.
The anti-poaching focus has meant that Ranthambore has one of highest tiger populations in the country at around 70 animals. The tiger population has now reached its highest-ever recorded density. This rise in population has led to a new phenomenon an increasing number of tigers leaving the park.
In 2013, a male tiger left the park and Tiger Watch was called in to track the animal. Two village youth equipped with a motorbike, motion-sensing camera traps and smartphones set off to trace it. It took 50 days to trace the tiger code-named T-56 which was finally located 230 kilometres from Ranthambore. Through this process, new path-breaking knowledge about the migratory habits of tigers in India was discovered.
Working with the Mogya tribal people now gives the Indian forest department nearly 20 per cent of its tiger-related data, and has led to another local community-oriented programme called the Village Wildlife Volunteer Programme.
Led by a man called Hanuman Gurjar, the 50-member team of village youth help monitor tigers. Overseen by Tiger Watch and the forest department, these pastoral herders are given a monthly stipend and smartphones with memory card adaptors for the camera traps which allow them to report their findings every morning to Tiger Watch via WhatsApp. They operate out of villages in an unofficial buffer zone on the peripheries of the 1,700 square kilometre tiger reserve and have become an unprecedented source of liaison between the forest department and local communities.
While monitoring tigers roaming outside the park, they also added anti-poaching to their responsibilities when their camera traps began to document wildlife crime. Local volunteers were able to identify local poachers and criminals caught on their camera traps. This also allowed them to get critical authentic intelligence on poachers, making anti-poaching preventative rather than reactive. When, for instance, a tiger wanders into a village, the forest department takes the assistance of the volunteers to keep the villagers calm as rescue squads go into extract the animal.
Tiger Watch has trained these volunteers to fill a missing link between the forest authorities and local communities. They are the ones who help out when a cattle kill by a tiger infuriates villagers who, then, go on a hunt. ‘The Village Wildlife Volunteers ensure that aggrieved herders get their compensation from the forest department. They also make sure that no herder takes advantage of the generous compensation schemes by falsely reporting the deaths of cattle,’ says Dhar. The volunteers have also helped in gathering breakthrough data for research on gharials (crocodilians) in the River Parvati nearby the reserve. Their efforts have won praise from the local government of the state of Rajasthan and from India’s foremost tiger conservation expert Valmik Thapar who has applauded the transformation of village boys to ‘wildlife warriors’. It is the monitoring of the volunteers, for instance, which helped in the protection of a tigress that helped the birth of a tiger cub in the Kailadevi Wildlife Sanctuary which forms about half of the Ranthambore Tiger Reserve after three decades.
‘The tiger is the apex predator here (in Ranthambore) and, thus, the umbrella species for the entire ecosystem. The health of an umbrella species indicates the health of the ecosystem. The job of Tiger Watch is to keep it safe,’ Dhar adds.
~
