India: Tribe faces eviction from tiger reserve
– but uranium exploration approved
The Chenchu have lived
alongside tigers in Nallamala Forest, which includes
Amrabad tiger reserve, since time immemorial.
© Survival
Officials
in India are threatening to evict a tribe from a tiger
reserve in the name of conservation – but have just
approved uranium exploration in the same reserve.
The move has angered campaigners, who accuse the
authorities of hypocrisy.
The
Chenchu tribe in Amrabad tiger reserve have pleaded
to be allowed to stay on the land which they have
been dependent on and managed for millennia.
They
say: “The forest department is planning to evict us from
this place. We do not want to go anywhere. We protect
our forest. If we go outside it is like taking a fish
out of the water, it will die… But now the government,
for their own profit, is separating the Chenchu from the
forest, this is like separating children from their
mothers.
Chenchu woman from Pecheru
village. The village was evicted in the ’80s. Chenchu
report that of the 750 families that used to live in the
village, just 160 families survived after the eviction
took place. Many starved to death. Nagarjunsagar
Srisailam Tiger Reserve.
© Survival
“The
government is selling the forest to mining
companies. If we go to the plains areas we will
become addicted to alcohol and we will drink and
die. In the future the Chenchu will only be seen in
photographs and videos.
“We
live in the forest and we will die in the forest. The
forest is our mother and our life. Wildlife is our life,
without wildlife we cannot live.”
Indian
authorities justify their forced
evictions of tribal people – which are illegal
according to national and international law – on the
grounds that any human presence in the reserves is
harmful to tigers. However, in many
tiger reserves in India, fee-paying tourists
are allowed to visit in large numbers, and
road-building, mineral exploration and even mining have
all taken place.
A Chenchu woman from Amrabad
tiger reserve. For the Chenchu, being forest people is
an essential part of their identity and pride.
© Survival
Background
briefing - The Chenchu are just one of many
Indian
tribes facing eviction from their ancestral land.
Many Baiga communities have already been evicted in
central India, either thrown out to fend for themselves,
or moved to government resettlement camps where living
standards are frequently dire. - Indian law requires
any evictions to be voluntary, and communities are
supposed to be compensated. However, tribal people are
rarely informed that they have a guaranteed right to
stay, and are often threatened. Compensation money is
rarely sufficient to allow them to adapt to life outside
the forest, and people often don’t receive what they
were promised. - Amrabad tiger reserve is in
Telangana state in southern India. - The Chenchu
lived by hunting and gathering in southern and central
India for millennia, until hunting was banned in the
1970s. Government efforts to make them take up farming
have been largely resisted by the tribe themselves.
- The Chenchu have an incredible knowledge of their
forest and the animals they share it with. They collect
20 different types of fruit and 88 different types of
leaves. They see all the animals as both their relations
and as gods. Their customs dictate that they should
never take more than they need from the forest or waste
anything. One Chenchu said: “If outsiders come inside
the forest, they will cut all the trees and take away
all the fruits; we don’t cut the trees and we take just
the fruits we need.”
Lord Curzon, viceroy of
India, and his wife, pose after a tiger hunt. India,
1902. Hunting by the Raj elite was the main reason for
the decline of the Bengal tiger, yet many conservation
efforts are now directed at tribal peoples.
© Wikimedia
Survival’s
Director Stephen Corry said: “This is the ultimate in
hypocrisy: the authorities want to evict the
tribespeople who have managed this environment for
millennia, on the pretext that tiger numbers will suffer
if the people stay, but then allow in uranium
prospectors. It’s a con. And it’s harming conservation.
Tourists to Amrabad Tiger Reserve should realize they
are supporting a system which could lead to tribal
people, the best conservationists, being illegally
evicted from their ancestral homelands, and that uranium
mines might one day take their place.”
Read
this online: http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/11711
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