"the tribal world is watching". the nilgiri blues.

The Nilgiri Biosphere was just the Nilgiris when I grew up in those Blue Mountains.  It was 'wilder' then. Much more than it is now. It had been a lot 'wilder' under the 'wild' tribes for whom it was home  before the colonial British 'discovered' it. Before they used their Forestry Acts to exploit it for the colonial plantation economies  they set up in those ancient hills.

The Eucalyptus and Tea that the Nilgiris are now famous for were colonial imports , export oriented exploitations of 'wild' lands.  Their Import Export colonial  Big Business. The colonial Forest Manual they used is still the god given guidebook for the Indian Forest Services. Services that are still about exploiting resources for the new "Indian" Colonials.

                          The Nilgiris. looking out at "Sleeping Beauty" - in the blue distance.

Wildlife conservation in India has generally emulated the early American (Yosemite/Yellowstone) model which regarded forests as pristine wilderness, excluded human beings from national parks and other protected areas, and saw its aboriginal people as “marauders,” “poachers” and “encroachers,” all the while sanctioning the lifeways and hunting practices of elite sportsmen and urban tourists. Throughout rural India, tribal Adivasis, ancient forest dwellers who occupy thousands of villages, are routinely blamed for declines in local biodiversity. As a government training manual for foresters instructs its students:

Forest dwelling communities are invariably inveterate hunters and have in most areas practically annihilated game animals and birds by indiscriminate hunting and snaring. It is surely time to instill in the tribal mind a respect for the basic game laws of the country.

In the past three decades 28 major relocations of Adivasis have been documented, seven more are known to have occurred, but not officially recorded, and there are several more in early planning stages. There are no hard numbers available, but estimates of conservation refugees in India range from 100,000 to 600,000, 

While the alleged purpose of the evictions was wildlife conservation, teak and eucalyptus plantations eventually replaced more than 40 of the evacuated hamlets. As it has in Botswana, Kenya and elsewhere, conservation in India has become a convenient and respectable cover for less savory motives when the very same national government that removes native people from their land in the name of conservation has no compunctions about giving up ecologically sensitive areas to large-scale development projects.

The fig leaf of conservation was eventually spread to cover a World Bank-funded eco-tourism lodge proposed by the Taj Hotel Group. In December of 1996 Adivasis filed for an injunction with the Indian High Court and called for a general strike in the Nagar Hole to stop the Taj project. A month later the High Court found the Taj Group in violation of conservation laws, a ruling that was upheld on appeal. The half-finished, abandoned structures of the Taj in the Nagar Hole represent one of the very few Adivasi victories anywhere in India.

The Nilgiri Biosphere was  still just the Nilgiris when I grew up in the Blue Mountains. It was 'wilder' (comapartively sp then . much more than it is now. 

The Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 and the Forest (Conservation) Act of 1980, later fortified by the WWF lawsuit, have set the stage for what still might eventually become the largest mass eviction of indigenous peoples in any one country. Millions of people are still threatened with displacement. “Even while the rest of the world moves towards environmental policies that reconcile wildlife conservation with human rights and justice, India is headed in completely the opposite directions,” 



Indian conservation, influenced by WWF-International and other foreign NGOs, has persistently embraced a model that focuses on ‘mega-charismatic metavertibrates’— elephants, rhinos or tigers, rather than on whole habitats.



The decline in tiger population is a consequence of development—large dams, iron mines and the shifting appetites of distant elites—not the lifeways of forest dwellers whose habitats have likewise been threatened by the same phenomena. “Why then punish one victim to save the other?” asks Indian historian Ramachandra Guha.

http://www.guernicamag.com/features/post_1/