Kerala’s forests have too many animals. It’s coming at a cost for humans

Last November, in the run-up to the Assembly by-election in Palakkad, I travelled to Attappadi, the district’s tribal block bordering Coimbatore. Dusk had set in as I reached Agali, the Attappadi taluk headquarters, from where I proceeded to Sholayur, a fifteen-minute drive. I must have covered a couple of miles on the winding road with giant bushes on either side when I suddenly spotted a tusker, camped right in the middle of the road.

I must consider myself lucky to have survived to recount the story, unlike the German tourist who died earlier this week in Tamil Nadu following an attack by a wild jumbo, or the ill-fated Mathrubhumi News cameraman last year. Such deaths have become all too common across Kerala over the past decade. On Monday, two people in Idukki and Wayanad were killed in separate incidents of attack by wild elephants while another body was found in Thiruvananthapuram. A couple of weeks ago, a 45-year-old tribal woman was mauled to death by a tiger in Wayanad. The deaths have sparked a huge outcry and spontaneous protests in its wake.

Incidents of man-animal conflict have been reported across Kerala’s highland areas. Leader of Opposition in the Kerala Assembly, VD Satheesan, undertook a Highland Protection March on 25 January in the wake of the human calamities across the high-range region, concluding it on 5 February at Amboori. According to the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests, 486 people have been killed in animal attacks in Kerala over the past five years.

Kerala is a victim of its own success in wildlife conservation.

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Loss of balance

Kerala’s forests seem to have undergone a change of balance over time.

Forests have a ‘carrying capacity’, transcending which animals are bound to venture outside these protected areas.

Last year, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) took the Kerala forest department to task for not conducting a study on the carrying capacity of the state’s wildlife habitats. There are no official numbers even on the number of elephants in the state—estimated to be around 6,000—or tigers, even if the forest officials claim to have a database of their own. India holds just 25 per cent of the total tiger habitat in the world but still accounts for 80 per cent of the world tiger population—now estimated to touch 4,000, doubling over a decade. And the Wayanad trijunction harbours a substantial number of them.

Forest officials also argue against the administering of Animal Birth Control (ABC) measures on wildlife, citing practical difficulty.

Kerala has a population density of 859 per square kilometre, with 29.6 per cent of its land under forest cover. But, if you consider the Forest Survey of India’s criteria—which identifies plantations and areas with over 10 per cent canopy cover as forest—this number would touch 54.7 per cent. Kerala makes up only 1.2 per cent of India’s total land area but its canopy cover is twice that figure on the total national forest area.

These statistics indicate that Kerala’s forest cover has actually gone up over the past fifty years. Until 1972, when the Wildlife Protection Act (WLPA) came into force, hunting of wild animals for trophies and as a source of food was common across India. Since Kerala fared better in law enforcement, poaching of animals became a rare occurrence in the state. What has followed is a wildlife explosion, which cannot be sustained anymore.

The trouble with tabulation is on account of animals traversing borders regularly in search of food and water. The Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary borders the Bandipur National Park, Nagarhole Tiger Reserve and BRT Tiger Reserve in Karnataka; as well as the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve and Sathyamangalam forest in Tamil Nadu. In the summer months, the elephant herds—known to walk miles in search of food—and tigers cross over to the Kerala forests, where water holes are available every 2.5 square kilometres.

With human settlements and plantations abounding the protected areas of Wayanad, these animals get drawn to the smell of farm produce.

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Draconian WLPA

Today, people living in 430 of Kerala’s 931 panchayats in the highlands or bordering them are at risk of wildlife attacks. The state administration, duty-bound to protect life and liberty, simply passes the buck to the Centre, citing the WLPA. The law, amended in 2022, does have clauses to kill animals in self-defence; yet, the interpretation of these clauses is left to the forest officials.

Last month the state government proposed the Kerala Forest (Amendment) Bill. It gave arbitrary powers to the forest officials to arrest or detain people who drift into protected areas without a warrant, even outside protected areas. The wildlife officials in Kerala are known to stringently follow the law in letter and spirit, lest they get entangled in legal suits by self-certified animal lovers. No wonder people took to the streets in protest, following which the Bill was abandoned by the state government.

This also came on the heels of the Supreme Court order mandating a one-kilometre buffer zone around national parks and sanctuaries affecting whole villages, which was later modified.

According to well-known conservationist Madhav Gadgil, the theory of “nature remaining in balance and regulating animal numbers” advanced by urban nature lovers is fundamentally flawed, as nature has always been in flux, “on evolutionary as well as ecological timescales”.

Predation has always kept these numbers in check, and human beings have obviously been the largest predators of all time.

Optimal foraging theory

Gadgil also suggests that the WLPA being in force since 1972 has made animals smart about foraging and venturing out to human settlements. Elephants have a life span not too dissimilar to human beings, and they seem to have realised that they can invade human settlements impulsively because people won’t offer any resistance, for fear of the WLPA. The infamous tusker ‘Padayappa’, who regularly ventures out to terrorise the inhabitants of Munnar, is a prime example.

Optimal foraging is the idea that animals tend to feed in ways designed to obtain maximum nutrition with minimum risk and time. The optimal foraging theory is also backed by Ullas Karanth, a leading expert on tigers. This premise was also endorsed by the senior officials of the Kerala Forest Research Institute (KFRI) at Peechi, near Thrissur, during my interaction with them.

Ecologist R Sukumar contends that even if elephants have the option of obtaining food in forest ecosystems, they invade agricultural areas and forage on crops, which provide a much greater amount of nutrients for a given effort.

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Government failures

Kerala has, albeit belatedly, declared man-animal conflict as a state disaster. Once the issue was declared a state disaster, the onus to deal with it shifted from the forest department to the state disaster management authority—powered by the Disaster Management Act—which could override other laws. This is one way of bypassing the stringent WLPA rules, although the state government has seldom displayed the will to bend the law.

But the state hasn’t been proactive in dealing with the crisis to prevent wildlife from entering human settlements. Radio-collaring of rowdy animals has also not turned out to be a successful remedy.

Worse still, Kerala has not abandoned the practice of monoculture in forests, despite having learnt of its implications over the years. For example, planting teak—despite being an indigenous species—for timbre on a large scale results in the reduction of underground water and the gradual drying up of water sources. Since wildlife cannot flourish in an area under monoculture, they come out of these protected areas into the human settlements around them.

In fact, the planting of non-native groundwater-guzzling species like eucalyptus and acacia in Kerala forests was sanctioned by former CM EMS Namboodirippad in 1958, as part of the first Communist government’s decision to produce raw materials such as pulp for the (now defunct) Birla-owned Gwalior Rayons Factory, in Mavoor, near Kozhikode.

And it hasn’t found a proper solution to the wild boar menace yet. The Centre has been totally opposed to Kerala’s repeated pleas to declare wild boars as vermin under WLPA.

The Kerala government gets funds from the Centre as part of the Development of Wildlife Habitat, Project Tiger, Project Elephant initiatives—although most of it is utilised to pay compensations to people attacked by wild animals rather than prevention methods such as solar fencing, barbed wires and digging trenches. Development initiatives are prioritised with scant regard for their conflict implications.

Eco-restoration efforts to relocate families have also not made much headway. The state government has also been accused of failing to give timely solatiums, except in cases of deaths wherein a signed cheque for Rs ten lakh (divided with the centre on a 60:40 ratio) is always produced instantaneously, as a way of quelling public anger.

Victimising desperate farmers

While Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has been calling for increasing the area under agriculture, settler farmers making ends meet through cultivation have been left to the mercy of marauding wildlife. The conservationists and armchair activists tend to blame these farmers, without a clue on how they ended up migrating to these hilly terrains in the first place.

The first wave of migration to these highland areas for agriculture took place in the wake of the ‘Grow More Food’ campaign by the erstwhile Travancore princely state during the Second World War, following an acute rice shortage. The settler farmers are not ‘encroachers’ as the privileged urban activists seek to portray them, and are, in fact, the rightful heirs of the verdant land.

With the state government failing to protect the life and liberty of people, collectives such as the Kerala Independent Farmers Association (KIFA) have cropped up to advocate the cause of farmers.

Kerala often looks up to Scandinavian countries as model welfare states, but it ignores that in countries like Norway and Sweden wildlife is treated as a renewable resource. In fact, no civilised country in the world puts the welfare of animals ahead of human beings.

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Regulated hunting

There is a line in a recent Malayalam film Rifle Club where Dileesh Pothan’s character laments that the “bane of the modern man is his inability to partake in the food chain”. There is no other country in the world where a blanket ban exists on hunting. The common wisdom among our policy-makers of “nature regulating itself” has only proved to be disastrous, and human intervention cannot wait any longer.

The idea of wildlife as a renewable resource is something Gadgil had been advocating for all along. Ullas Karanth reckons that tigers have reproduction rates similar to house cats. Gadgil also deems denying India’s protein-deficient people of wild boar meat totally unacceptable.

India also needs to come up with a more humane law to replace the WLPA, or pare it down to prioritise human lives over animals. The law came about in 1972 following the World Conference on Environment held in Stockholm earlier that year, when things were completely different on the conservation front.

Unless the situation is quickly reversed, wild boars taking over Kerala—much like George Orwell’s Animal Farm – may not be a farfetched proposition.

Anand Kochukudy is a Kerala-based journalist and columnist. He tweets @AnandKochukudy. Views are personal.

(Edited by Theres Sudeep)