Residents from other villages in the tiger reserve now want to be relocated and have approached the Maharashtra forest department. Officials say people are eager to relocate because of the revised rehabilitation package and a novel formula developed by the forest department to disburse the compensation.
The core area of this tiger reserve in Amravati district has 30 villages. This is not the first time the forest department has made an effort to relocate villages from the core area, as required under the Wildlife Protection Act. It had initiated the programme twice before: first in 2000-01 and then in 2003-04.
It managed to vacate only five. The programme got stalled due to reluctance of people.
“The compensation then was just Rs 1 lakh per family. It was too meagre to motivate people to give up their land and forest resources," says S M Sarjuse, a range forest officer in the tiger reserve.
There was another option: the government would rehabilitate people at a location of their choice. Landless people would receive one hectare per family and the rest be compensated on house-for-house and land-for-land basis. The forest officials had used this option for relocating two villages from Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve in Chandrapur district in 2007. Each family was given a house and a little more than two ha as part of rehabilitation package. But they could not grow crops in the absence of irrigation facility. Within two years, most had returned to the forest, saying they were well-off depending on bamboo and forest produce (see ‘Relocation by half measures', Down To Earth, August 1-15, 2009).
So in 2008, when the Centre raised the compensation amount to Rs 10 lakh per family, following the recommendation of the National Tiger Conservation Authority, forest officials seized the opportunity. “We prepared the proposal for relocation of Amona, Nagartas and Barukheda villages in Wan wildlife sanctuary and sent it to the Ministry of Environment and Forests," says G D Deshmukh, range forest officer of Barukheda range. The relocation process could not be initiated until January 2011 due to administrative hurdles and funds crunch. But once the money was sanctioned, 381 people from these villages were relocated within four months, he adds. Read the full report here.
Source: Ashwin Aghor, Down To Earth.
