Valparai
is famous hill station in the Coimbatore district of
Tamil Nadu. It is located 3,500 feet
above sea level on the Anaimalai Hills range of the Western Ghats, at a
distance of 100 km from Coimbatore and 65 km from Pollachi. There are 40
hairpin bends on the way up to Valparai from Azhiyar. On the Valparai plateau people live in fear
of unexpected encounters with giants in the dark. As dusk settles, tea and
coffee pickers collect rations from the townships run by the corporations that
own the plantations and drift back towards their colonies. Buses drop workers
on the roads and they make the precarious walk through the dark to their homes. We
are reading about this Award, known as ‘Green Oscar’ not only because 2 Indians
have become the recipients – also for the cause for which it stands ! ~and this
post is specific on Dr Anandakumar
The Whitley Fund
for Nature (WFN) is a UK registered charity offering awards and grants to
outstanding nature conservationists around the world. The Whitley Awards are given annually by the Whitley Fund for Nature (WFN)
to recognise and celebrate effective national and regional conservation leaders
across the globe. The awards are worth £30,000 (2007) and are now amongst the
most high profile of conservation prizes - they have been called the
"Green Oscars". The awards particularly seek to recognise
contributions to conservation made from outside the developed world, and to
bring to international attention the work of deserving individuals committed to
precipitating long-lasting conservation benefits on the ground.
The
Whitley Awards were established in 1994 by Edward Whitley, when a single award
of £15,000 was made. In 2007 eight awards were made, together with several
runner-up and associate awards. Of the
Whitley Award winners selected each year, one recipient goes on to win the
prestigious Whitley Gold Award, worth an additional £30,000. The Whitley Awards
Ceremony, hosted by the patron of WFN, The Princess Royal, is held annually at
the Royal Geographical Society, usually in the Spring.
It is not new and
for ages, people having been living in fear at Valparai. On the Valparai, high in India’s Western
Ghats, tea and coffee companies have flattened 221 sq km of prime rainforest
for their plantations. The cleared land is now home to 70,000 workers, who live
surrounded on all sides by the rugged, deeply forested Anamalai (Tamil for
‘elephant hills’). “They are scared. If
I am there I am really scared,” said conservationist Dr Ananda Kumar, who created
an SMS warning system to help workers live safely among elephants. Recently, his work won a £35,000 Whitley
Award, dubbed a ‘Green Oscar’.
~ and at Valparai as also in many other elephant corridors
– there have been accidental encounters with the mammoth. Quite natural considering the fact that man
has encroached their living area and in some places cut through its transit
paths. There have been stray
incidents of pachyderms harming people too – elephant is a huge animal, dark
skinned looking like a rock and will be standing very still when they notice
people.” Still the 2,000 odd elephants inhabiting the hills have no
understanding of the multinationals’claim to the plateau.
If they are
startled or feel threatened, elephants can be very dangerous. In the small
community of Valparai, 41 people have been killed since 1994. The problem, said
Kumar, was that people simply did not realise elephants were nearby. “Out of 41
deaths, 36 people did not know there were elephants. If these people had known
about the elephants’ location, all these people would have been alive,” Kumar
told the Guardian. “Human habitations will also get hit by elephants. They will
break from the outside, towards the kitchen. Obviously they are looking for
[food]. Suddenly the people will hear a sound in the middle of the night at the
kitchen side. It’s a very traumatic experience.”
“Elephants are
strongly related to their ranges, this is scientifically established. It’s a
part of their home, which is lost to plantations because of historical
exploitation,” said Kumar, who has spent a decade working on a system of text
messages, television alerts and warning lights that keep track of elephants as
the move through the plantations. A team
of trackers, called the conflict response team, watches over elephants as they
pass through the plateau, they are assisted by Tamil Nadu forestry department
workers and local informants, who act as extra scouts for the programme.
Information is relayed via a hotline, manned by Kumar’s appropriately-named
colleague Ganesh. The hotline receives over 1,000 calls each year, many of them
not seeking information about elephant locations but providing word of elephant
sightings to their neighbours. When an
elephant is spotted, alerts are sent via text message to all those who reside
within a few kilometres of an elephant’s location. At 5pm each night, local TV
stations broadcast the locations of all elephants on the plateau. The warnings
also go out to volunteer wardens in each colony, who operate red warning
beacons that light up via text message. This allows people to plan their trips
and let visiting friends know to beware.
“The local
communities have adopted this. Government has responded positively. It is a
collective effort that is actually making it a win-win situation, both for
elephants and for people,” said Kumar. Even incidents of elephants damaging
property have reduced by half as the people embraced a philosophy of living
with elephants and made food stores more secure. The programme has won the Whitley award for its novel and
pragmatic approach to the elephant-human conflict, which kills 400 people and
more than 100 elephants across India every year. In a decade, Kumar’s warning system has cut
the rate of deaths from three per year to just one. It is seen as an exemplar
in the efforts to tackle the India-wide conflict between elephants and humans.
Kumar said the
challenge was not removing dangerous elephants but making habitat safe for both
elephants and humans. He believes the perception of the deranged rogue elephant
that has pervaded much the elephant conflict debate in India had been
thoroughly debunked by science and the results of his programme. By empowering
the local community with location specific information, Ananda Kumar and his
team, including Ganesh Raghunathan, have turned zones of conflict into
co-existence. As a next step, Mr. Kumar
and his team is in the process of collecting data and understanding the
human-elephant relationship scientifically in Sathyamangalam region to reduce
crop damage.
With regards – S.
Sampathkumar
6th May
2015
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