Aditya ‘Dicky’ Singh

Here is an article that I wrote for the Sanctuary magazine:

A few weeks ago, I received a scathing response from a ‘tiger activist’ friend to an article I had posted online about the conservation value of tourism. After blasting my views, he finally stated that what tigers really need is “isolation from the forest department, researchers, scientists, locals, tribals, conservationists, hoteliers and tourists.” While it sounds like the perfect solution to all our problems, we do not live a perfect world. It would be ideal if our biodiversity would be protected for its intrinsic natural value rather than economic benefits but years of petitions and campaigns have still not translated into concrete results, and much of the public is still distanced from conservation. It is high time we consider a broader triple bottom line – market, environment and society. The reality is that tourism is here to stay, whether we like it or not. But the positive aspect of tourism is that it can be made into a winning formula, if we really want it to be, and use it for the advantage of wildlife.

Green bucks
There are few pristine wilderness habitats left in India and the majority of them are surrounded by human habitation. Ranthambhore – a prime tiger reserve – has been described as “an ecological island surrounded by overgrazed pastures and agricultural fields” in the Management Plan of the reserve. Nearly 100 villages surround Ranthambhore National Park and these villagers depend on the park’s resources for their livelihood – fodder for cattle, fuel-wood for their kitchens and minor forest produce for sale. The farmers who own land around the reserve use every possible means to keep wildlife off their fields, including hiring poachers to kill them. The only pro-biodiversity economic activity around Ranthambhore (and most of the Protected Areas in India) is tourism.
Traditionally, the forest department and most conservationists “have seen tourism as a necessary evil with zero conservation value.” Many forest officers and old school conservationists have accused me of the ultimate wildlife crime — of “making money from wildlife.” My answer always remains that I do not make money out of wildlife, — poachers do that. Yes, I make a living but my work supports and sustains the park, its wildlife conservancies, buffer zones and local communities.
Tourism is the only economic activity that values wildlife habitats as ‘economic zones’ and is the only ‘industry’ that pays for biodiverse, standing forests. Tourism is also a very effective anti-poaching unit in many Protected Areas in India, possibly the most effective given the poor track record of patrolling. Consider how few patrolling vehicles we have in most tiger reserves and compare this to the large number of tourist vehicles plying through the tourism zone. Little wonder the tourism zones seem to harbour the highest tiger densities. Dr. Raghu Chundawhat, an imminent tiger scientist, has stated on record that the Tala zone of the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh held a greater density of wild tigers (by far the highest in the world) than he had ever believed possible in such a small area. Of course, the Tala range also happens to support one of the highest tourist densities out of all our tiger reserves.

Tourism, to a large extent, was responsible for the revitalisation of African wildlife. In a developing country like South Africa, wilderness tourism generates US$12 per acre per annum, while agricultural land yields just US$3 per acre. Furthermore its national parks are virtually financed by tourism revenues. Mountain gorillas ‘earn’ $200,000 per annum in permit fees alone Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda, and the indirect revenue is probably 30 times greater. Living Kenyan elephants will help bring in $1,000,000 in tourism revenue in their lifetimes, while a local poacher will earn less than $300 for the value of elephant ivory.
Let’s move to tigers. What is a tiger worth? The tourism zone of the Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve, which has around 20 tigers, contributes over Rs. one billion – directly and indirectly – to the Indian economy, every year. Of course we have a problem here. Over 40 per cent of this amount never reaches anyone in Ranthambhore and barely three per cent actually goes to the park.
A different kind of wildlife tourism
Sanctuary readers hardly need to be informed that “traditional” wildlife conservation practices in India have failed. This is primarily due to the ‘one size fits all’ approach” of wildlife tourism in our country. Travel Operators for Tigers (TOFT) – a campaign for responsible use of wild habitats in India sums this up well: “There is a growing recognition that tourism presently available within tiger reserves is often of poor quality in terms of facilities, interpretation and guidance, is ‘one species’ (read tiger) centric, often at loggerheads with park, community and tourism officials and offers little support for local communities.”
We – tourism professionals, including myself – are largely responsible for the mess in which wildlife tourism finds itself in India, but it hardly helps that government’s policies too run counter to what effective and sustainable wildlife tourism needs. Considerable blame must also be apportioned to the unfulfilled promises of major tourism ‘players’ including corporates, travel outfits and hotel chains. Most have adopted a “green” language because that is what travelers now want. But value tourism has not been internalised by them. Wildlife tourism must be built on the premise that it should empower locals, increase awareness and contribute to wildlife conservation.

Ranthambhore is an excellent example of what is wrong with wildlife tourism in India. Spread across nearly 300 sq. km. (50 per cent of which is a tourism zone, which supports most of the park’s tigers), Ranthambhore is encircled by almost 100 villages and three small towns. Yet only five villages and two towns have somehow cornered 90 per cent of all the tourism revenue from this destination. A small ‘cartel’ of hotels, local travel agents, suppliers, shop owners and transporters are earning money, the rest get nothing. Why should they support the park?
Yes, tourism provides some employment to locals, these are ridiculously low-paying jobs. There is more. Of the over 100 guides, 80 per cent have little wildlife knowledge or real training. The hotels are all located along on a short strip between Sawai Madhopur town and the sole entry point to the park, thus concentrating tourism benefits to a tiny fragment of the population.
Alternative tourist options such as hiking, birding and camping are discouraged even outside the park. The entry fees to the park are so low as to constitute a mere five per cent of the budget of most tourists. Meanwhile, the national park is woefully short of funds. To add insult to injury, as of now not a rupee from the entry fees goes towards conserving the park, though technically 75 per cent of these fees are labeled ‘eco development surcharge’.
The list of contradictions and problems is endless and could possibly be applied to almost any Protected Areas (PAs) in India. This is why “a dead tiger is worth more to the local villager than a live one.”
The way forward
Julian Mathews founder of the TOFT campaign, suggests that wildlife tourism in India needs to “provide a much more rewarding holiday experience for visitors, raise the quality of life of local communities, and protect the natural environment.”
So how do we achieve this? To make wildlife tourism an effective conservation tool in India we – conservationists, the government and tourism professionals – must change our own archaic thought processes regarding both tourism and conservation. There are no magical solutions but there are a few things that we can do. Almost all PAs have core zones, which are out of bound for tourists and a buffer area where tourism is permitted. The density of wildlife is much higher in the tourism zone and the core area is rarely monitored. Predictably, most wildlife offences including poaching, cattle grazing and woodcutting take place in the core zone, where offenders have a free run. In Ranthambhore, the poaching incidents that took place between 2003 and 2005 only came to light because poachers started targeting tigers in the tourism zone, after they had wiped out tigers from the inaccessible core. Field biologists and forest officers need to work together to come up with a plan that suggests how tourism in core areas can be turned into a monitoring exercise for a few days each month. The revenue generated could pay for 24×7 patrolling, 365 days a year. This does not mean that the core zone be turned into a ‘free for all’ because wild animals do need the solitude that is often denied when noisy vehicles and tourists enter. But surely it is time now for us to work out sensible ‘tourist carrying capacities’ for park? And no, the current carrying capacity analysis is not going to cut it. Often this constitutes a simplistic formula park managers come up with to arrive at figures stipulated by ‘higher ups’. So we accept 90 vehicles a day as the suggested carrying capacity of the Tala range in Bandhavgarh, while this actually exceeds the carrying capacity of the entire Ranthambhore tourism zone, which is three times the size of the Tala range.
We need to get real about wildlife tourism. Visitors are able and willing to pay much more. In some parks, the fee is even lower than the price of bottled water in a mid-range hotel. And there is nothing wrong with charging special-interest tourists including photographers and birdwatchers more for the privilege of longer, (carefully) supervised excursions and permissions to use hides, or guard outposts.
We should explore the idea of developing a tourism buffer within the forest buffer area. In most parks, for instance, agricultural fields begin right where the forest ends, leading to human-wildlife conflict. If hotels in wildlife areas were only permitted to set up facilities in harmony with the land on just two per cent of their land holdings, they could be persuaded to manage the rest of their land holding with the same strict rules that are implemented within the national park. If this were done, within a few short years, we would have a high biodiversity tourism buffer on the periphery of most parks. This would not only add to the forest area but reduce the tourist pressures at today’s over-crowded entry points. And, of course, ‘tourist cash’ would automatically reach locals.
So will we see a situation where degraded wildlife habitats next to PAs are leased out to tourism facilities, rather than to paper mills around Tadoba? Or land ‘developers’ and industrialists around Kanha, Bandhavgarh, Periyar, Bandipur and Keoladeo? I hope so, because if this is not done, I believe the noose around the PA network can only tighten, till it throttles the biodiversity that brings in the tourists.
The forest department controls over one-fifth of India’s total land area and the vast majority of these lands are going from bad to worse. The department lacks the resources to revive and nurture them. Leasing them out on very strict terms for wildlife tourism might just be the most effective, least risky way to revive these degraded forests. In the process, according to Sanctuary, local communities and the forest department itself could legitimately earn a sizeable amount from the carbon trading regimes that are currently not able to do much to actually help counter climate change.
The bottom line? Forest and Tourism Departments, the tourism industry itself and local communities need to recognise the benefits of working together on systems and solutions that restore health to our wildernesses. The economic and the ecological health of our nation will improve, poaching will come down and the more popular parks, which are hotbeds of local conflict, could see a wonderful transformation with locals community leaders and tourism professionals taking on the role of ‘wildlife activists’ in India.

The gentleman who is busy photographing the tiger from the ground (which is strictly forbidden in Indian Tiger Reserves), in the above picture, was the Deputy Director of the Kanha Tiger Reserve in Central India. So much for responsible behaviour.

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It’s been a long time since I posted on the blog. I was on a long vacation and got back to Ranthambhore about 3 weeks ago and since then I have been busy trying to make a living. Yes some of us have to do that. Here are some updates from Ranthambhore:

1. The Park reopened to visitors on the 1st of October after being shut for three moths of monsoons. This year the monsoon rains were spectacular. The best that I have seen and all the waterholes in the park are overflowing. The park is lush green and there should be no major water shortages in the dry summer months.

2. The cubs of the Guda tigress that was found dead in September are still alive and kicking. They have been killing deer fawns and are apparently doing well. A true miracle. They are just about 10 months old – one male and one female – and have been taking care of each other. More about this in a later post.

3. In the Sultanpur area of the park (southern part of the national park) a tigress has given birth to two cubs. They were probably born somewhere in the late summers and have been seen by a number of visitors in the last three weeks.

4. The Forest Department has come out with a new policy to govern tourism, which is a total disaster. This policy is neither good for tourism nor for conservation and has ended up making Ranthambhore the “most visitor unfriendly park in India.” Basically it has made life extremely tough for people like me who make a living out of the visitors who come to see the park.

5. I learnt something really amazing yesterday. The Rajasthan Forest Department has started an “official inquiry” into my blog. A senior Forest Officer who is based in Jaipur is the enquiry officer. Apparently some people took some print out of this blog (mainly of some stuff that I had posted when tiger poaching was at its peak in Ranthambhore – 2004 or so) and sent them as a “complaint” to the Forest Department in Jaipur. The Forest Department, for obvious reason went ballistic and have now launched an enquiry on how I could post such stuff. . What really upset me is that they took three years to know about something that is so public. Just goes to show that no one really reads what I write.

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Yesterday afternoon (1st September 2008) the carcass of a tigress was found in the Guda area, that lies at the southern end of the Ranthambore national park. This tigress was known as the Guda female (see image below) and was over 10 years old – an old age for wild tigers – and had two cubs that would slightly younger than a year in age. The cubs are missing and even as I write this the forest department officials are trying their hardest to find the two cubs.

According to the forest department sources the carcass of this tigress was found in the early afternoon yesterday in a highly decomposed state. She was probably dead for over two days. The forest department officials cremated the body after conducting an autopsy. The autopsy report is yet to be released and probably never will be, at least the likes of me will never see it.

It is being made out by official sources (and the national media has really lapped it up) that she died in a “territorial fight” with another tiger. The Press Trust of India (PTI) newline says “Rise in Tiger population in Rajasthan’s Ranthambore Sanctuary seems to have given rise to “territory wars” among the predators…………………….. the Ranthambore national park, spread over 400 sq km is busting with robust tiger population. As per a 2007 census, the number of stripped animals have increased from 25 in 2005 to 32 last year. The figure excludes cubs, whose number is estimated to be around 14.”

I would like to clarify the following:

1. The Ranthambhore national park is spread over an area of 282 square kilometers and not 400, as PTI (India’s leading new agency claims – come on guys get your facts right).

2. The official census data of 2005 claimed 26 tigers in Ranthambhore and not 25. The real figure at that time was 13 adults and 5 cubs (all below the age of 6 months).

3. The census figures for last year were 32 (released early last year) and this census was the most exhaustive one ever undertaken. This figure of 32 included all the cubs. After these figures were released 8 more cubs were born and two of these (the cubs of the Guda tigress) are missing.

4. The tiger numbers have definitely increased in Ranthambhore, in fact they bounced back from a near calamity. But Ranthambhore is not (by any standard) “busting” with tigers. Ranthambhore national park and the two adjoining areas where the tigers spread to (the Sawai Man Singh sanctuary and the Sawai Madhopur sanctuary” can easily accommodate over 40 adult tigers. This was the number that existed in 2001. Right now there are about 22 (I may be off by 10% plus or minus) adults and that is not “busting” at all.

Rajasthan’s leading regional Hindi newspaper – Rajasthan Patrika – also adds that the forest department is not ruling out death due to poisoning and had sent the viscera for investigation into this angle. This is really interesting.

The area around Guda and further south (outside the national park – where there is little protection for wild life) of it is the beginning of the “Ranthambhore tiger death zone” – I mean that’s where 15 or more tiger have disappeared in the last 4 years. There are a few “forest unfriendly” villages in that area and few large settlements of former hunting gathering tribes (Mogiyas, Bagariyas and Kanjar).
The Guda tigress shares her area with a few villages. Her territory overlaps with that of two male tigers – one is her son from the last litter and the other is the father of her new litter (the two cubs who are missing right now). It is highly unlikely that she was killed in a fight with one of these two tigers. Her present mate would not fight her and her son dare not.

I don’t know how she died but I would bet my cameras (the most precious possession that I have) that it was not because of a territorial fight.

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Recently a judge in the Rajasthan High Court passed a ruling that Ranthambhore should be closed for 2 days in a week so that the animals can get “rest” from tourists.

The Park is shut for tourists during the monsoons from July to end September. The people living around the park have a free run during this time. They go in for grazing their cattle, stocking up firewood for the winters, collecting forest produce like antlers etc, poaching etc etc. There is zero patrolling and I really mean zero. We joke that the rarest sight in Indian parks is a “Forest Guard patrolling his beat”. But believe me this is not a joke.

On a conservative estimate the amount of people who go into Ranthambhore on monsoons (when the park is shut for tourists) is ten times more than the amount of tourists who visit the park throughout the year. However, the authority just chooses to ignore people who go to the park in the monsoons and since there is no official record of such offenders, they officially do not exist.

Every year a few tigers disappear in the monsoon months and are never seen again. The official version (when there is one) is that the tigers have migrated. Migrated to where? This story is probably true for all parks in India, with the exception of Kaziranga - where they shoot first and ask later.

When I moved to Ranthambhore, about 10 years ago, there were over 30 tigers. How am I so sure? Well there was a family in the lake area - a tigress with 3 full grown cubs. There were four other families with three to four cubs each in Kachida, Chiroli, Lahpur and Thumka. There were 4 big males and a few sub adult males and at least 5 tigresses without cubs.

Since then I have seen over 60 cubs grow up to maturity and separate from their mother and then disappear to be never seen again. They just disappear , sorry “migrate” and are never seen again. A noted poacher had told me once that sub adult tigers are the best ones to “milk” - they are nearly full grown (perfect skin size) and no one notices their disappearance. Believe me, when I say that professional poachers actually “milk” tigers for their skin and bones. They never wipe out the entire lot. They really messed up in Sariska - where they ate the chicken instead of the eggs every day.

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Continuing the posts on our trip to Ranthambhore Fort in the Ranthambhore Tiger Preserve, you can see one of the gates that the Rajputs used to hold fast against armies.

As you get closer to the main structure of the fort, after climbing up numerous stairs through three major gates, you finally begin to see the fortifications. This part of India was the first true barrier against the constantly invading hordes from the North and the East. Everyone from the Turks, the Persians, the Huns, the Mongols, even Timur the Lame and Alexander the Great attempted to knock on India’s doors in this region.

This is considered to be the oldest part of the fort, dating back to the 12th and 13th Centuries, AD. You can see the different methods of constructing the walls, they mark the development of construction over the centuries. Also the size of the stone blocks used increases as tools and development improved the people’s ability to measure and carry.

[View from the top of Ranthambhore Fort overlooking the Tiger Reserve, photo credit: David Tait]

Note the slates that are piled on top of each other to construct this portion of the fort.

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As promised, I’m continuing the story of our visit to Ranthambhore as a guest blogger for Aditya Singh. On our first full day, after a leisurely brunch, we left for Ranthambhore Fort by Jeep accompanied by Bhupinder Singh Chauhan, acting as our guide and the young driver, who was a superb spotter with an eagle’s eyesight. The Killa or Fort lies in the heart of the Tiger Reserve and almost the first thing we saw - which, to be honest, I didn’t expect to see, was that hoary cliche of India. A couple of elephants being ridden as transport animals. Yes, Virginia, you really can see elephants on the roads of India. I can only imagine the traffic jams.

This is the Guptaganga, a perennial source of water that local myth claims has never run dry in historical memory. The actual stream of water has been channelled through a marble bull’s head, possibly Nandi himself, pouring lifegiving water from his mouth. You can see the Shivalinga just above the bull’s head. This site is considered very holy and is the official entrance to the Fort, whose walls can be seen high up above. We have already entered the Tiger Reserve and our spotter pointed out a variety of local fauna. A little further along, we heard a leopard scream and slowed down and stopped along road, waiting with bated breath for close to 20 minutes in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the great cat. But there was nary a sign and we continued on to the foothills of the Fort.

The parking area situated at the entrance steps to the Fort are swarming with gray langurs, whose eerie howls can be heard late at night, rustling their way through the trees of the forest. Closely associated with Hanuman, the monkey god whose army of monkeys helped Rama build a landbridge to Lanka, and helped defeat Ravana who had carried Sita away, these langurs are allowed to roam freely throughout the fort and the numerous temples there. This story is the basis of the epic Ramayana.

The Fort at Ranthambhore has a long and checkered history of war, pillage and fierce Rajput resistance against the invading armies sweeping into Northwest India from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and the Russian Steppes. One of the most famous associated with the Killa is that of Veer Hammir, or Rana Hamir, a Chauhan king descended from Prithviraj himself who held his homeland against the vast armies of Ala-ud-din Khilji. From Ranthambhore’s history,

The Fort had its golden moments during the reign of Rao Hammir, the last ruler of the Chauhan dynasty (1282 - 1301 AD). During 1300 AD, Ala-ud-din Khilji, the ruler of Delhi sent his army to capture the Fort. After three unsuccessful attempts, his army finally conquered the Fort in 1301 and ended the reign of the Chauhans. In the next three centuries the Fort changed hands a number of times, till Akbar, the great Mughal emperor, finally took over the Fort and dissolved the State of Ranthambore in 1558. The fort stayed in the possession of the Mughal rulers till the mid 18th century.

And so, forts were built on inaccessible mountain tops with steeply rising slopes, numerous walls, fortifications and gates creating obstacles to invaders. You can see a sentry tower located at the first turn up the steep stairs that rise towards the three main gates of the Fort. Also scattered around the country side were sentry towers such as the one that can be seen below by the edges of the Talao, where signal fires were used to send alerts to the main garrison within minutes according to our guide. He’s the one in the green uniform of The Ranthanbhore Bagh on the left hand side of the photograph above. Carrying precious supplies up the stairs is a local villager.

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Photo credit - Brian McMorrow

Greetings, my name is Niti Bhan and I’ve been invited to write about my recent experience as a guest at The Ranthambhore Bagh, by Aditya Singh, the owner of the lodge just outside the Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve in Sawai Madhopur, Rajasthan, India. I guess this is what they mean by guest blogging!

Dicky, as Aditya is better known to me, hosted us from the 6th to the 8th of December 2006 after I’d arrived in New Delhi from San Francisco to attend the recent CII NID Design with India Summit along with my colleague David Tait, Creative Director of Readymade, a product design and innovation consultancy based in Pretoria, South Africa. Let me attempt to recreate in words - this journey - a world away from the world in which I normally reside; one that took me back in time, forward in space and more profoundly, deeper inside to a very peaceful place.

We took the night train, the Mewar Express from Nizamuddin Station, tickets were arranged for us by Vikram Singh, who runs Wild World India, an ecologically aware wildlife tour company based in New Delhi. I spent much of my time standing at the open doorway outside our first class airconditioned compartment, preferring to smell, see and feel the desert; it was almost the full moon and late at night as the train rushed us through Faridabad, Mathura and Bharatpur getting us into Sawai Madhopur station just five hours later. Other than a blurry drive, the first thing that I recall on my arrival was a warm, already heated and cozy tent with quaint details such as a mosquito net and a luxurious pukka shower and bathroom. I couldn’t believe it was just a tent, from the inside it had all the mod cons and amenities you could wish for, including a long hot shower to get rid of the filth of the train journey.

[Outside view of Ranthambhore Bagh's premium lodging, the tents, photo credit - David Tait]

You can see David’s tent here, mine is the one on the left just hidden by the bushes. They’ve all been laid out to ensure a little bit of privacy for any guest who may choose to sit out on their personal porch and relax with a beer or two. Or three, but we won’t go there , since we were Dicky’s guests and he was the one who’d taught me how to hold my drink back when I was a freshman.

That night we had dinner outside sitting around a portable fire pit that kept us warm enough in the chilly night air of almost winter in North India. Temperatures have been known to go down to 10 celsius or lower. Since it was late, we had missed the daily evening highlight - a Rajasthani family of musicians arrive to entertain Aditya’s guests with haunting local ballads of lost or unrequited love, popular songs from old hindi movies or classical melodies based on stories from India’s mythological epics - The Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

Their young daughter danced most gracefully for us, encouraging the guests to join her when an upbeat tune was played. You get to snack on tidbits, drink the best the bar has to offer, and Dicky’s bar has been and is, legendary. Just sit back - we happened to be there on the night of the full moon - and lose yourself in a state of emotional euphoria bordering on pure lethargy.

After my long flight from California to India, the hectic rush of the conference, this timeless place after 9 months without a break from work, was nothing less than pure bliss. Or as I read recently, heaven on earth, for heaven is the place where you get all your needs fulfilled. Enough, I have to shake my head to return from those moments but that was when I knew I would return, for all the stress, the pressure, the tension, just seemed to melt away and I was left a boneless puddle.

The next day, we set out after a leisurely brunch to see Ranthambhore Fort or Killa as its known in the local language. Built in 944 AD by the descendants of one of India’s best known Rajput kings, Prithviraj Chauhan, whose story is worthy of any swashbuckling romance from the days of yore and chivalry. I’ll continue with a post on the Fort tomorrow with more photos and stories of the legendary bravery of Veer Hammir and the Rajputs of Ranthambhore.

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I own and run a small lodge on the outskirts of the Ranthambhore tiger reserve in India. I used to be a civil engineer working in Delhi but that was a long time ago. In 1998, my wife and I quit the rat race and shifted to Ranthambhore for good. Why Ranthambhore ? Mainly to stay close to tigers. Wild ones.

We now make less money than we did before but there are absolutely no regrets. Life here is good. It is slow, laid back but good.

We meet great people, take nice pictures, travel a lot and generally have a lot of fun doing what we are doing. Lets face it I dont know many people who go to the forest early in the morning, see a lot of wildlife - including tigers and come back home for breakfast.

Where is Ranthambhore?

Ranthambhore (often misspelled ar Ranthambore) is a Tiger Reserve in the northwest Indian state of Rajasthan.

As you can see, Ranthambhore is very conveniently located in Northwestern India, close to the Capital city of New Delhi. The nearest major airport is Jaipur, about three hours drive. The closest rail head is at Sawai Madhopur, about 15 minutes drive from Ranthambhore.

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