Aditya ‘Dicky’ Singh

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.

No Comments | Read full story »

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.

2 Comments | Read full story »

The rest of the National geographic crew – Sue (the big boss), Becky and Andy (the cameraman) landed in Calcutta by midnight. On the 1st of April we went to get shots of a male tiger in the Calcutta zoo. This tiger had killed a girl in a village that was just on the outskirts of the forest. A few days after killing the girl he again landed in the village. But that time the Forest Department officials were prepared. They had set up a trap in the village and they did manage to trap the tiger. After they trapped the tiger, they realized that a few months ago this same tiger had been trapped, after he had killed a person, in a nearby village. They had at that time released him deep in the heart of Sundarbans. They decided not to do so again and sent him to the zoo, where he was lodged in a cage that was out of bounds for the general public. When we went to film him in the cage, he was extremely agitated and tried to charge at us a number of times. We would have been in serious trouble if there were no bars between us. Andy did get some great shots.

The rest of the day we drove around the streets of Calcutta taking random shots of the city. My old friend Sanjoy Ghosh (or “Chotu Bong” – a slang for Short Bengali) drove us around in his car. He was a big hit wit the entire team. In the evening when we were sitting in the hotel, we realized that there were not enough Bengali speakers in the team – in fact there was just one – and since most people in Sundarbans understand only Bengali language, we would have to take along some more people who cold speak Bengali. As a result, another friend of mine – Joydeep Kundu – got in the boat the next day. We also had a Doctor on board who was carrying every possible kind of anti-venom.

We left for Sundarbans the next morning and had a blast for the next 10 days. We were booked in a lodge in Sajnekhalli, where we would spend the nights. The film was essentially recreations of there different “tiger attacks” – one on a girl in a village, the other on a man who was part of a group of “honey collectors” and the third was a fisherman (the only one to survive the attack). Most of the filming happened very close to where we were staying but for some shots we had to go a fair distance on the boats. We had two boats – a “launch” and a smaller boat that is locally known as a “bhotbhoti” because the engine makes a racket that sounds like bhot ..bhot ..bhot. The bhotbhoti is a smaller boat and it can go in some pretty narrow creeks, where the launch cannot make it.

The weather in Sundarbans is very hot and extremely humid in April and so we used to shoot from just before sunrise to about 8 in the morning and then from about 3 in the afternoon till sunset. Joydeep and I used the time in between to do a lot of birding – a great way to spend time in Sundarbans. We saw very little terrestrial wildlife – some Spotted Deer and a few Wild Boars – but we did see a lot of marine wildlife, including Dolphins, Sharks, Sea Turtles, and a large variety of Crabs. The bird life was really amazing. Wherever we went shooting we had a large group of curious onlookers following us, like these kids on a cycle rickshaw (the dominant mode of transport in Sundarbans).

2 Comments | Read full story »

Sundarbans – the largest Project Tiger Reserve in India – is a tidal estuary where the only modes of travel are small to medium sized slow boats. It is truly a boat country. On the 25th of March, we went to the office of the Field Director of Sundarbans Tiger Reserve, which is in a small port town called Port Canning; about three hours drive from the outskirts of Calcutta. That was my first interaction ever with any Forest Department Officer of West Bengal cadre.

We met quiet a few forest officers who were in charge of Sundarbans and the feeling I got was that most of them were clueless and were living in a make believe world. For instance, one very senior officer gave us a long lecture on the “fact” that writers and filmmakers were defaming the tigers of Sundarbans by spreading “rumors” that a lot of them were potential man-eaters. When I asked him if this was not true then why do forest guards take such elaborate protection measures whenever they have to get off their boats to go to the shores, inside the park? When ever the guards have to do that they load their guns (with the safety catches off), wear “tiger proof” armored jackets and helmets, put a tall nylon safety net around the entire area that they have to work in etc etc. This officer informed us that these were “routine” safety measures that are adopted in every tiger reserve in India. That was not true. In all the tiger reserves in India, the forest guards almost never carry guns; forget the rest of the paraphernalia. He later showed us a lot of statistics to “prove” that very few people had been attacked by tiger in Sundarbans during the last 10 years. Apparently the forest department had stopped recording tiger attacks on humans for the last 10 years and so “there were hardly any attacks on humans,” officially for the last 10 years. With such officers around, the future of Sundarbans did not appear to be very bright.

On 26th March, we left for a familiarization trip into Sundarbans and during the next three days we met a number of people whose friends or family members had been mauled or killed by tigers. There are a number of villages in the periphery of Sundarbans that are called “Tiger Widow” villages, where tigers had killed a large proportion of the adult male population. Most of them were killed when they had illegally gone into the reserve area, for cutting wood or collecting other minor forest produce. Since what they were doing was illegal, their cronies never filed a complaint and so their deaths went unrecorded. By the time we got back from the trip, on the morning of 31st March, we had learnt a few things about Sundarbans:
1. There is no way that Sundarbans Tiger Reserve could boast a population of nearly 400 tigers (that they officially do). The figure should be closer to 125 or so. This is true for almost all the Tiger Reserves in India – where officially there are two and half times more tigers than the real number. Forest Officers love to exaggerate the numbers for a variety of reasons.
2. Sundarbans has loads of problems (again lie most other tiger reserves in India), that include wood cutting, population pressure, over fishing, “economic development” etc. The reserve is totally porous and it is almost impossible to patrol its periphery.
3. Tigers will survive in Sundarbans for a long time, just because a large part of it is extremely inhospitable to man.

We got back to our Hotel (Sonar Bangla – a fine place) on 31st and the air conditioning was a welcome relief after the hot and humid weather of Sundarbans.

1 Comment | Read full story »

When I was in Bharatpur, I got a call from a guy from Bangalore called Lesley, who wanted to know if I would be interested in working on a two week project on Tigers of Sundarbans, , with the National geographic Film and Television department. He was the India co-coordinator for this project and told me that if I was interested he would put me on the Producer in Washington. If I was interested??? This guy must have been crazy – Of course I was interested. It is not everyday that national geographic takes us out on an all expense paid trip to an exotic tiger habitat and pays us at the end of the day for our time (which most people like us have in plenty). So I told the guy that I “maybe interested.”

When I got back from Bharatpur I got a call from James Byrne from National Geographic, Washington. We discussed a lot of general things and he told me that the shoot starts from the 1st of March and would be over in two weeks. He also told me that he would be in Calcutta (the closest airport from Sundarbans on the 25th of March) and would then head to Sundarbans for a familiarization trip and would be glad if I could join him for the same. I reached Calcutta on the 24th night (a day before James was to reach) and met up with Lesley.

Over dinner, Lesley explained to me what the film was going to be all about. I knew a bit about it but not enough. The film was about man eating tigers of Sundarbans and was to cover three different stories – one about an attack on a girl child inside a village, another about an attack on a fisherman who was on his boat and the third about an attack inside the forest on a man who was part of a group of honey collectors. In all the three cases the tiger (different ones in each cases) had killed the people they had attacked but could not eat them, mainly because the other people around had managed to scare the tiger away.

Sundarbans – the world’s largest estuarine mangrove forest - is the largest habitat of Bengal tigers in the entire world. It gets its name from the “Sundari” mangrove tree, which is now a rarity in most parts of Sundarbans. It is situated in the southern tip of Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. Sundarbans is the delta of two of India’s mightiest rivers – the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. The entire place consists of a number of tiny islands and is cris-crossed by tributaries, distributaries, creeks and backwaters. The face of Sundarbans changes dramatically with the diurnal tides. Durinf the high tide about half the land is submerged and one can see floating forests” all around. While at low tide, large expanses of mud are visible all over. Sundarbans is home to large number of aquatic and terrestrial animals. As one goes closer to the sea, the salinity of the water increases and this has an important role to ply in the mix of the aquatic animals and plants that are to be seen.

The Indian part of the Sundarbans has been declared as National Park and is a Project Tiger Reserve. UNESCO has also declared the region as a “Biosphere Reserve.” The region is home to some of the poorest people in the world, who make their living out of farming, fishing, aquaculture and through the collection of minor forest produce (such as honey). It is one of the few regions in the world where there are no social tensions between the mix of Hindu and Muslim population that inhabit the area. In fact the muslim and hindu population share a large number of social, cultural and even religious traditions.

2 Comments | Read full story »

Bharatpur is small town (by Indian standards – which means a population of about 200,000 people) that is half way on the train route from Ranthambhore to Delhi. Bharatpur is home to one of the best bird sanctuaries in India – namely the Keola Deo Ghana National Park. I left for Bharatpur for a week in the first week of February.

Bharatpur has a number of small and big lodges but the only one that I stay in is The Birder’s Inn. The owner of The Birder’s Inn – Teerath Singh is a great friend of mine. Besides owning and running this lodge he also leads wildlife tours on a freelance basis. My guides (or Gurus – to be more precise) in Bharatpur are Laxmi Mudgal (who is by far the best birder in Bharatpur) and Rajeev (who owns and runs a drug store – that is when he not busy taking pictures in the bird sanctuary). If I go to Bharatpur and do not stay with Teerath, he would probably kill me. Birder’s Inn is a small 12-room lodge but a great place – good food, clean room and great company – and they sure know how to get you drunk on dark rum.

Situated at the confluence of the Gambhir and Banganga rivers in the Bharatpur district of Rajasthan, the sanctuary was originally a natural depression prone to seasonal flooding. Over a period of time it developed into a lush, thriving system of freshwater marshes that attracted a large and diverse population of migratory birds. The Maharajas of Bharatpur added some bunds (dykes) and developed it as a duck shooting reserve. You can see the list of their exploits inside the park. Later, when hunting was stopped, it was deemed a Bird Sanctuary and later a National Park.

The park is generically called Bharatpur, after the town but its official name is Keoladeo Ghana. “Ghana” means dense while Keoladeo is derived from the Shiva temple situated at the heart of the park. Shiva, in his form of Pashupati or Lord of the Animals is the protector of the park’s various species. The fascinating mix of wetlands, woodlands, woodland swamps and dry grasslands has blessed the park with a rich biologically diverse birdlife. Keoladeo and its surrounding area host over 400 bird species and a single day trip may yield 140 species.

Bharatpur is paradise for outdoor photographers, particularly when there is no water shortage in the Park. Most of the water for the Park in Bharatpur comes from the Pachana dam on the non-perennial river Gambhir. However, for the last few years some local politicians have been ensuring that this water is diverted for a small group of rich farmers, who grow mustard in their field around the dam. Diverting this water makes a small group of rich farmers (who are politically very vocal) richer. However, there are many small and marginal farmers (who are not so politically influential) who make a living growing vegetables on the river bed of Gambhir, whose economy take a big hit when the water from Pachana dam is not released for Bharatpur. The once thriving tourism industry of Bharatpur (that employs over 20,000 people – directly and indirectly) also takes a huge hit, whenever the water from Pachana dam is not released for Bharatpur.

No Comments | Read full story »

After the Operation Co-operation came to a premature end, all of us got pretty frustrated. I got back to my work, which is running a safari lodge an since February is a very busy month; I did not have time for any further activism. Dharmendra and Vakil (the Tiger watch team) took to some serious activism. They started getting in touch with the local and national media and started highlighting the plight of Ranthambhore in the media. The disappearance of tigers from Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan was still fresh news and the media really took the Rajasthan Forest department apart. I had no role to play in all of this, though many people in the Rajasthan Forest Department still believe that I was instrumental in spreading “ false stories” about Ranthambhore in the media. Some of them along with the local police and administration were gunning for us but they did not get their chance till almost a year later.

The media lapped up all the news about Ranthambhore and published them after “spicing” them up a bit. The Rajasthan Forest Department had to bear the brunt of the media onslaught. The international media picked some of this news up and that added to the fire.

Tiger Watch put together a small project for gathering information on poaching around Ranthambhore and started looking for funding for the project. About a month later they got the funds though Fateh Singh’s son’s Non Governmental Agency and they started collecting information from around Ranthambhore.

In the first week of February I left for Bharatpur (Keola Deo Ghana Bird Sanctuary) for a week. By that time I was getting pretty fed up with all the politics that went with tiger conservation.

2 Comments | Read full story »

After our successful raid of 29th January 2005, where we busted Rajmal Mogiya (who much later on admitted to his involvement in the killing of 5 tigers), we were on top of the world. The paper work after the raid took all night to complete and we went to sleep around 10:00 AM the next morning. On the 30th of January all of us slept and later in the night we celebrated. As a result, there were no raids on the 30th.

On the 31st January, the Deputy Field Director (Mr. G.S. Bhardwaj) decided to accompany us on a raid in the Khandar fort area that lies in the North-east end of the Ranthambore National Park. We left around 10:00 in the morning – not the best time to go for a raid – in a convoy of two Forest Department jeeps and one truck. There were about 40 people. We first went to small village about 10 kilometers short of Khandar – where a few families of “Bagariya” tribals live. The Bagariyas, like the Mogiyas, are a former hunter-gatherer tribe, who now kill animals mainly for bush meat. They are not as lethal as the Mogiyas but are no friends of wild animals. We searched about 10 odd huts that were there in the settlement but did not find anything substantial. We did find a small cooking pot with some wild boar meat but since we could not ascertain, who the pot belonged to, we could not take any action. A large crowd had gathered around and the word had spread that the Forest department officials were on the prowl looking for poachers.

Around noon we went to a small village called Bhaopura on the banks of river Banas towards the North of the Ranthambhore National Park. On the outskirts of the village, on top of a small hillock was a small hut that we were told belonged to a Mogiya. There was no way a jeep could have reached even close to the hut, so we had to walk the last half kilometers or so. By the time we reached the hut, all the men had disappeared and there were only two small kids and one old woman. We asked the women if she had heard of any hunting in the area and she swore that they were law abiding citizens and that there was no hunting at all in the area. We still searched the area around the hut and after about 15 minutes found a small plastic bag that contained two nails of Sloth Bear and some black coloured hair that we believed came off a bear (see pictures below). The woman was arrested and taken to the Forest Office in Khandar. By that time it was getting close to sunset and we headed back.

The next day we went to the Deputy Field Director’s office and he informed us that the Operation Co-operation was off because the officials of the “Flying Squad” (which is in-charge of all anti-poaching operations) were getting “demoralized.” That was the end of it – at least for us. For the next two weeks or so the Forest Department did carry out a series of raids, which did not result in any arrests. Mainly because the word was out that a lot of raids would happen in the next few days and most of the poachers had just disappeared.

Did the Operation-cooperation achieve anything worthwhile? It did though indirectly. The Operation did not arrest many people but it did scare the poachers who had no choice but to disappear. Many months later, we asked a poacher (Devi Singh – who was one of the king pins) when poaching actually stopped. He told us that most of the poachers left the area around Ranthambore after the “series of raids that were conducted in the end of January.” In that sense the Operation Co-oeration and the series of raids that followed were the main reason for the end of large scale poaching around Ranthambhore that started in the beginning of 2003.

No Comments | Read full story »

On the 29th of January 2005, Vakil got some information about a Mogiya tribal – Rajmal -who was regularly killing and selling the meat of Sambar deer and Wild Boar, in Bhairopura village in the Man Singh Sanctuary, a part of the Ranthambore Tiger Reserve. We met the Deputy Field Director – Mr. Bhardwaj – in the morning and gave him the information. He gave us the go ahead for conducting a raid on this Mogiyas area and asked us to go along with the Range Officer (Project Tiger) and some forest guards. We were supposed to meet the officer in the Raj Bagh Forest Check post at sunset.

In the evening 5 of us – Dharmendra Khandal (Field Biologist), Vakil Mohammed (Safari jeep owner and driver), Rafiq (Nature Guide), Lokesh (a hawker who make a living selling T-shirts to tourists) and I – left for the Raj Bagh check post. The Range Officer along with a driver and a forest guard was waiting for us. He wanted to take us for “patrolling” along the main highway to Madhya Pradesh (the central Indian state that borders Ranthambhore). We told him our plan about trying to bust Rajmal Mogiya. He was not at all keen on any raid and tried to convince us that such raids can be very “risky” in the night and that there were too few of us to execute it. That did not make sense to us because we thought that 8 people (5 of us and three forest officials, including the ranger, who was armed) were more than enough to catch one man who would be in a hut in an agricultural field, way outside the village. After a lot of arguments (which I would not even like to mention) he agreed to come along but insisted that neither he nor any of the forest official would carry out the actual raid. They said that they would take us to the location where we thought Rajmal would be and they would wait near that location, while the 5 of us carried out the actual raid. In case they thought that the raid would get out of hand they would leave. That was acceptable to us and we left.

We reached Bhairopura at midnight and soon located Rajmal’s beaten up motorcycle parked at the edge of an agricultural field. The ranger’s jeep dropped us close to where the motor-cycle was parked and we went inside the fenced field while the forest officials waited in the jeep. We found Rajmal sleeping on a wooden cot. There were a few empty bottles of “moonshine” alcohol near the bed and one cooking pot. Rajmal was obviously knocked out drunk. We checked the cooking pot and found a lot of blood and some meat sticking to the base of the pot. We also found a wooden log that was covered with blood and it appeared as if someone had slaughtered an animal on top of this log. That was all we needed to be con-vinced that Rajmal had killed some wild animal recently. We surrounded Rajmal’s cot and shook him awake. As soon as he got up he started shouting and tried to run. We pinned him down but he continued to shout as if he was trying to warn someone else. There was a lot of shouting and I don’t clearly remember the sequence of events that followed for the next 15 minutes or so. I remember the Forest jeep driving up to the edge of the field, a lot of pushing and shoving between Rajmal and three of us. Suddenly another man (who was probably sleeping in another cot close by) got up and started running. Lokesh and Dharmendra ran after him and caught him after a brief chase. By that time the ranger was screaming at us to get out of there. We put the two people that we had caught inside the jeep and got out of there. We drove straight to the Falodi Range Office.

In the Falodi Range Office – the Falodi Range Officer – Mr. Kala, a burly Sikh officer – started interrogating Rajmal and the other person. After a lot of very patient cross question-ing, Rajmal admitted that he had killed a porcupine. We did not believe him because the amount of blood that we had seen could not have come out of a small animal like the porcu-pine. That’s when Mr. Kala decided that we should go back to the location where we had caught Rajmal and search the entire place with a toothcomb. It was almost four in the morn-ing by the time we reached the filed and all of us were very excited. After searching the field for an hour we found two gunnysacks full of Sambar deer (Cervus unicolor - see picture below) meat. The deer had been cut up into large sized pieces and stuffed in the sack. Soon we found a loaded gun (a muzzle loader) and a lot of gunpowder. Rajmal was busted – fair and square – and he ad-mitted that he had killed the sambar the night before and that he had sold half the meat. He also told us that the other person that we had caught was also involved in the sale.

We got together all the evidence and took both the persons that we had caught to the Forest Department’s head quarters in the Sawai Madhopur town. The Deputy Field Director (Mr. Bhardwaj) and a lot of other forest officials were waiting for us. Mr. Kala had informed them about the raid. It took another few hours to get the entire paperwork (for their prosecution) done and by the time we were finished it was almost noon. We were exhausted but did not feel it because of the excitement. All of us were on top of the world and felt that we had done our bit to help save Ranthambhore’s wildlife.

It felt good.

Top: Rajmal’s wife and one of his three daughter-in-laws, a few days after Rajmal Mogiya was arrested by us for killing a Sambar deer. At that time we did not know that he was involved in killing of tigers. A few months later we came to know that between 2003 and 2004 he was involved in the poaching of over 6 tigers in and around Ranthambhore.

No Comments | Read full story »

By the second week of January 2005, the Tiger watch team had started working on a presen-tation to highlight what they thought was wrong with the Ranthambore national park. They wanted to show this on a seminar of “WWF India” , which was to be held on 27th January in Delhi. The problems that they wanted to highlight were mainly Habitat destruction that was going on around the tiger reserve and the “missing tigers” of Ranthambore. At that point in time, we knew that many tigers of Ranthambhore were missing but we were not sure what had happened to them and how did they go missing. We were not even sure how many tigers were missing. Tiger watch claimed that there were 18 tigers missing but I do not think that even they were sure about it. I did know for a fact that we could easily identify 24 dif-ferent tigers, when we were working on a film project (which came to an end in May 2002) for BBC. By the early 2005, only 6 of these 24 were still around. That makes it “at least”18 and not just 18.

Bittu Sahgal, the editor of “Sanctuary magazine” – India’s only wild life magazine – was in Ranthambore in the third week of January. After meeting the Deputy Field Director, he asked us to go meet him and work with him. We – Dharmendra Khandal and I – went to meet Mr. Bhardwaj (the Deputy Field Director) on the 26th of January 2005. After a long discussion, which got pretty heated at times, Mr. Bhardwaj decided to initiate intensive pa-trolling by the Forest Department officials and volunteers like us. He decided to call this “Operation Co-operation.”

On the 27th January we headed out after sunset for our first job. There 5 volunteers – Dharmendra Khandal (a Field Biologist), Ashlesh Sharma and Hemraj Meena (both are nature guides that take tourists to the park), Vakil Mohammed (a tourist safari jeep owner-driver) and I. We were to meet 3 forest guards in the Bodal chowki and work as per their instruc-tions. The guards told us that we were to go to a point on the Mansarovar Road (Mansarovar is a large lake at the edge of the park) and set up a road-block there to “look for suspected poacher.” We did not think that this was a great idea but we went along with them anyways. Why did we think that this was not a good idea? Because setting up a road-block to nab poachers is a bit like throwing a baited fishing line in the Loch Ness and hoping that the monster will grab it. If the poachers were so stupid then most of them would have been caught by now. We did set up a road-block but soon got bored of hanging around there. Va-kil was the first one out of us to express that he had come out to catch poachers and not for conducting a traffic survey. He had some information about a suspected poacher (I would not name him because he is still at large) coming to small village near Khandar (a small town on the northeast edge of the park – from where Vakil hails). We decided to go there and try to nab him. One of three guards decided to accompany us while the other two de-cided to stay at the road-block and off we went to Khandar in my brand new jeep.

Only when we reached the outskirts of the village did we realize what we were getting into. Half the male population of the village had a criminal record and if they ever realized that we had no back up they would have beaten the living day lights out of us. We decided to pretend that we were some special police and had a lot of back up. Most of us wear military jackets etc so we could pass of as some special police group. We parked the jeep a slight distance away from the village and entered the village. We did not find the guy we had come for but we did find his grown up son who was just beginning to cook a few partridges (game birds that are protected by the Indian law). We grabbed the guy and whatever evidence we could gather fast – like the cooking pot with the meat in it, a knife and an axe that were covered with blood, some turtle shells etc – and tried to take the guy to the jeep. That’s when the entire village (about a dozen houses) came out of their houses and surrounded us. There was a lot of screaming and shouting and we were playing the part of special police force so well that all of them still think that they were raided by a special force. The villagers stayed with us all the way to the jeep but neither tried to stop us nor did they try to touch us. They just kept staring at us. We got the guy we had caught inside the jeep and got out of there fast. We took this guy to the Khandar range of the Ranthambore national park and handed him over to the Range officer with whatever evidence that we had gathered – which was enough to put him behind bars for a few months. That was the end of our operation and we headed home. The next day we learnt that the Range Officer had discarded the turtle shells as evidence ( and legally they would have been the most incriminating). As a result the case was very weak and the guy got bail from the courts immediately. So much for our first raid to save Ranthambhore.

1 Comment | Read full story »