Author: Shweta Shivakumar

Key highlights:

  • Households adjacent to protected wildlife parks face disproportionately larger costs of living with wildlife
  • Disparity in the definition of ‘wildlife damages’ by the Forest Department and the people
  • The compensation policy in Rajasthan is doing very little to reduce HWC or reduce the perception of conflict animals.
  • The people recognize the ecological and existential value of many wildlife species, even the ones involved in HWC, despite the costs associated with it. 

Rural households surrounding protected areas have been known to bear disproportionately larger costs of living with wildlife than others. The benefits of conserving wild animals, however, are  more diffused in nature, with the distance to protected areas playing no role in this benefit distribution. Losses due to wild animals through crop damage, livestock depredation by wildlife, property damage, and human injury and death, are a major part of Human-Wildlife Conflict (HWC). To encourage positive wildlife conservation attitudes among these households, the Government of India has put in place an ex-gratia policy that mitigates economic losses due to wildlife, and alleviates losses to livelihoods due to conflict. The potential of this policy, to foster wildlife conservation values among the rural households that face losses, has been in question in the Global South, including in India.

In the current study, the scientists explore the effectiveness of this compensation policy, the most widely used tool of conflict mitigation in India, as a solution to Human-wildlife conflict (HWC). Interview surveys of 21 Forest Officials and 2234  households were conducted around four protected areas (Jaisamand, Kumbhalgarh, Sitamata and Phulwari) in Rajasthan, India. It was apparent from the study that the Forest Department did not perceive HWC as a big issue in their state, whereas the household surveys indicated a high rate of crop loss. Further investigation revealed that the very definition of HWC was very different for these two parties. Crop loss, the more prevalent type of wildlife-induced damage among all the losses in the four parks, was not included as a loss type by the Forest Department. Despite the presence of this divergence in conflict definition, the communities have not been able to communicate this disconnect to the concerned authorities, or challenge the compensation procedure’s inefficiencies. Between 2013 and 2014, around 1700 of the surveyed households experienced crop loss with 47% of them losing 26 – 50% of their crops. Interestingly, the households also acknowledged the ecological and existential value of many wildlife species, even the ones involved in HWC, despite the costs associated with it.

 

Demoiselle Cranes alongside human settlements in Rajasthan.

The authors conclude that the compensation policy, as it exists in Rajasthan, is doing very little to reduce HWC, or reduce the perception of conflict animals. The authors of this study suggest an entitlement policy as an alternative to the existing compensation policy. This entitlement policy will be controlled at the state level, where payment is made at a certain threshold to all households around parks. However, the authors acquiesce that even this will not address the existing social barriers (of caste, sex and education level) for availing such schemes, despite bringing people’s livelihoods issues to a more equal footing for wildlife conservation.

Original Article: Compensation as a policy for mitigating human-wildlife conflict around four wildlife sanctuaries in Rajasthan, India –  Johnson, M., Karanth, KK, Weinthal, E. Conservation and Society, 2018.

You can access the original article here.