They are the people responsible for India's iconic animal being threatened with extinction, a tragedy of unimaginable proportions. Two nomadic hunting tribes, along with corrupt or incompetent forest officials, continue to hunt the tiger in its natural habitat using primitive traps. The result is that tiger population figures have registered an all-time low.
India has lost two-thirds of its tigers in the last eight years. Driven by greed and the money, they can earn by selling tiger skin and parts to the Chinese market, India's most notorious poachers are decimating tiger populations virtually unchecked. Sariska and Panna have lost all their tigers to poaching even as forest officials feign ignorance. Principal Correspondent Mihir Srivastava has been on the trail of the poachers to identify the main culprits, their modus operandi, their buyers and the havoc they have already caused among India's tiger population. His report:
The Pardhis and Bawariyas are nomadic hunting tribes who travel across the country to poach tigers to supply them to organised smugglers in tiger parts who feed the market in China. They commit crimes as a family vocation, are cunning, constantly on the move, and kill tigers with religious fervour.
2,200 tigers were killed in the last decade. Their current population is one-third of what it was in 2000.
80 sites where wild tigers exist in India. Only 39 are tiger reserves.
16 tiger reserves are critical, heading the way of Sariska and Panna which lost all their tigers to poachers.
60 tigers a year is the demand from the Chinese market from two poaching gangs alone.
Killing a tiger means big money, Rs 2 lakh for a tiger skin, and being adept hunters, it also means easy money, tiger parts and organs fetch another Rs 2 lakh. What is less known about these tribes is that they indulge in other criminal activities. They also kill leopards, bears and elephants for ivory, indulge in organised theft of railways and telecom properties, are into sandalwood smuggling while some do contractual murders. Being nomadic, they cannot be traced for their crimes. Their latest racket is land scams, and Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi would be shocked to know that the men and women who are killing tigers in the state's reserves are also part of a gigantic compensation scam for the Narmada Valley Project.
Pardhis have migrated en-mass from various villages in Katni district of Madhya Pradesh, a Mecca for poachers, down to Khandwa and Harda districts along the Maharashtra border to seek compensation as displaced families from the Narmada Valley Project. Some of them have actually got lakhs of rupees as compensation along with land, while others are camping there for their share of the booty. Locals know about it but are too scared to talk.
Pardhis with the tiger parts seized in Allahabad in 2007Local officials do nothing presumably because they are getting a cut. If tigers are to be saved in the forests of India, this vicious network and nexus of tribals and traders will have to be broken. It is now clear that tigers and tribals cannot live together in a forest, as was the case traditionally, for the lure of big money is impossible to resist.
The poachers are hired and sent into the forests by notorious traders like Sansar Chand and Shabeer Hassan Qureshi. Both are currently in jail and together would be responsible for 1,000 tiger deaths in the last decade but now their extended families are carrying on with tiger killings. It's a tightly knit nexus: traditional hunting families supply tiger parts to traditional families trading in wild animals. Poachers-turned-informers and some Pardhis themselves revealed the modus operandi and rewards.
Shabeer Hassan Qureshi
Sansar Chand
Sansar Chand and Hassan Qureshi are together responsible for the estimated killing of 1,000 tigers.
Here's how the unholy nexus works-and spells doom for the tiger. The tribal hunters receive orders, estimated to be for 60 tigers a year, to be skinned and body parts collected and preserved. The hunting party, including women and children, sets off by train to the target zone. Reaching the targeted forest, they camp in the vicinity, setting up temporary shops selling cheap jewellery as a cover. It takes them just a few days to learn about tiger movements in the area.
They lay out the bait-wild animal meat-to attract tigers and conceal iron traps along the path the tiger will take to the bait. It needs a dozen-men team to monitor the movement of the tigers and the patrolling routine of forest guards. Usually, the last patrol is around midnight and they are free to stalk the tiger undisturbed till late next morning. The success rate of tribal poachers is very high but the consequences for India's national animal are tragic and inhuman.
The jaws of the iron trap close with a great force; cracking the powerful leg of the tiger in two and holding it like a vice. The hunters arrive on the scene from their hiding place and thrust a thick bamboo pole with a pointed spear into the tiger's mouth and stuff some earth into it to make sure death is quick and quiet. It takes half a dozen men to release a dead tiger from the trap. Male tigers can weigh up to 225 kg, a tigress up to 136 kg. Then, using a razor-sharp knife, they skin the tiger on the spot. Then they slice it open and remove organs, including the penis which fetch high prices in China.
Pardhis do the primary tanning of the skin at the site by stretch-drying the skin after applying turmeric and salt. They bury the carcass nearby, and come a week later to retrieve the bones when the rotten flesh has fallen away. The hunters can kill five tigers in one trip in the same forest. They will camp for a couple of months, eat deer and wild boar, and in the process kill not just tigers, but leopards as well.
To meet one such group of the Pardhis, we went to Bediya village in Khandwa district where they have shifted base from their hideouts in Katni to claim false compensation. Bediya has neatly built houses. A short distance away is where the Pardhis live in shanties that look as if recently built. They mob the car and enquire: if you are from the revenue department with compensation documents. The only sign of well-being are motorcycles, some without registration numbers.
The motorcycles are used for meetings between trader and the hunters to get contracts to kill tigers for the international market for animal parts, a market next only to the illicit trade in drugs in magnitude. The wholesalers and traders of tiger's parts come on motorbikes to place orders, oversee the progress and arrange for delivery to Fatehpur, Kanpur, Ghaziabad and Delhi. While one half of the Pardhi population is involved in an audacious land scam, the other half is combing the jungles of Karnataka to get some "chaddars" (tiger skins) to meet current orders. Maur Lal, a Pardhi, agrees to take us to another village, Kuksi, in Harda district. The menfolk, we are told, should be out hunting but they come back to share the booty, connect with their family and procure more orders.
Tribal hunters receive orders, estimated to be for 60 tigers a year, to be skinned and body parts collected and preservedTheir official source of income is selling rudraksh procured from Nepal. Maur Lal explains: "We get it from Nepal, via Katni, Kanpur, Lucknow, Gorakhpur." That also happens to be the route to smuggle out tiger parts into Nepal on its way to China.
We meet 'English', the dreaded poacher on the run. English finds mention as one of the poachers responsible for hunting tigers in the Special Investigation Team report by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) on Panna along with others. His extended family includes the likes of Mintar Singh, who was arrested two years ago with 36 accomplices for poaching eight lions in Gir. Others like Daryawani and Lalarsi are still at large, operating with impunity, taking calls on their mobiles, discussing prices for tiger skins and parts, but only if you say you are from Fatehpur, where most of the orders to this group are sourced from.
Dabuliya Bai, head of Pardhi clan, is believed to have delivered some 35 tiger skins to Sansar Chand
While we were talking, a fat lady comes charging towards us, yelling: "I will tell you their real story. None of them belong here, they are from Katni, they are all criminals, they have killed my daughter, they kill wild animals too. I cannot let them fool the Government." She is Dabuliya Bai, head of a clan of the Pardhis.
No one dares to stop her while she spews venom at the rival gang run by Kanthi Lal. Her own family record in killing tigers is unmatched. Her husband Raj Mahal with his gang is believed to have killed 35-40 tigers in Maharashtra and Karnataka. Her brother, Siddhe Singh, died in jail serving a sentence for tiger poaching. Daru, who operated in Gujarat and Karnataka and is under arrest for poaching, is a relative. She is believed to have delivered some 35 tiger skins to Sansar Chand, the most notorious trader of tiger skins. Her nephew, Ajit Pardhi, has made a fortune killing tigers and pays more than a lakh of premium on insurance policies in his, his wife and his brother-in-law's name.
To find out why she is camping in Kuksi, we travel to Katni where we meet octogenarian Baburu Pardhi, a legendary figure in the community who has poached many tigers and leopards, but has never been arrested. Baburu has passed the baton to his five sons believed to be involved in most of the tiger killings in Panna and Rajasthan.
Dauwa with his family, all of whom are into poaching business
Tracing the poachers, we visit Khiraini on the road that leads to the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve. We meet Dauwa who spills the beans. Dabuliya's outburst is part of a turf war between poachers on who will get access to prime hunting grounds in Karnataka and Maharashtra.
The stakes are high enough: 30 tiger skins for each gang, each year, which means 30 tigers dead and crores earned. That makes them extremely competitive. "Till about two years ago, the two gangs would agree to travel to different locations to poach, but now they all want to go to Karnataka and Maharashtra where there is a healthy tiger population," says Nitin Desai, WPSI's director in central India, who has been instrumental in the successful investigation of poaching cases in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.
"There is also a rift in revenue sharing as they are fighting for a larger share of the booty," explains Manjula Shrivastava, an anti-poaching lawyer in Katni with a record of 98 per cent conviction in poaching cases. Dauwa claims that he has nothing to do with poaching but he fails to mention that his wife, Sukh Chiana, was arrested with Qureshi in 2007.
Three hours away is Panna National Park which lost all its tigers, 35 in just five years, to poaching while the Forest Department blatantly lied that all was well (see box). Now they have started a novel initiative to provide the Pardhis with alternative means of livelihood, other than hunting. In 2007, with the help of World Wide Fund for Nature-India, the forest department opened residential schools for the children of the Pardhis. "It was very difficult to convince Pardhis to send their children to school.
They thought it was another ploy to arrest them by the Forest Department," says Indrabhan Singh Bundela, field officer for the Pardhi project here. The children, in all about 200, some of them sons and daughters of the most notorious poachers, talk freely about how their parents used to kill tigers and bring trophies home. Some Pardhi families, all of whom were poachers earlier, have been hired as local guardians by the school.
One of them is Daheli Pardhi, who says that he was involved in tiger and leopard poaching in the past as there was no other source of livelihood. "Now my people do not trust me. They think I have changed loyalties," he says. That is why he does not get to know where his peers are travelling and on what mission. He explains the economics of poaching. The Rs 2 lakh for each tiger killed is shared between the team members, but according to the size of their families. The sharing of booty leads to conflicts too, as the spat between the Dabuliya Bai and the Kanthi Lal gangs reveal.
Critics of the scheme abound, and claim that the scheme merely allows poachers to go hunting more freely, unencumbered by children. However, Pramod Shukla, a forest guard involved in this project, insists that there are advantages. "Thanks to this project, we now have access to the Pardhis. They have opened up before us. We understand them better and we have been able to breach their earlier impregnable fortress and this can be used for counter-poaching operations as well as to reform them."
But reforming the Pardhis seems to be a far cry given the scenario seen by India today. For forest officials, the emphasis is on protection of tigers within protected areas. But when the big cats move out to territorial forests, they are easy prey for the poachers and their steel traps.
Acknowledges Sanjoy Majumdar, conservator of forests in Katni: "A forest guard with 10 sq km to cover on foot can do little against poaching." He points to many cases where it is difficult to save a forest guard if he happens to kill a poacher in the forest, as the guard will then be tried for the murder. Invariably, the forest guard in such cases has had to be suspended pending the inquiry.
The Pardhis travel to far-flung places to hunt. They travel by train and even ticket collectors are too scared to confront them for travelling for free. They are always successful in the hunt and poorly equipped and poorly trained forest officials and guards seem powerless to stop them. Last year, 43 people were sentenced in the Katni forest division for poaching and supplying animal parts to international poachers Qureshi and Darya Singh. Property worth Rs 2crore was seized from Qureshi. Last month, the gravity of the problem was highlighted by no less than the prime minister himself, who wrote a personal letter to the chief ministers of five states urging them to act more forcefully in saving the tiger from poachers.
His concern is timely. In 1989, in the wake of Project Tiger, India's tiger population was 4,334. By 2001-02, it had dropped to 3,642. Today, it is down to a shocking 1,411 tigers spread across all of India, the lowest since the Independence. The india today investigation shows that the impunity with which the Pardhis operate is scandalous and an eye-opener.
The obvious answer is not in India's hands, namely to crack down on the insatiable market for tiger parts and skins in China, where it is used in traditional medicine or as an aphrodisiac.
The Chinese, however, can only be pressured by international organisations dealing with wildlife protection. The Pardhis, as our interaction revealed, are hardcore criminals who also happen to be skilled trackers and hunters, a deadly combination. The alarm bells have been ringing long enough. If the concerned chief ministers and forest officials fail to act, our children may never get to see one of the world's most magnificent animals and our national symbol, in its natural habitat.
NEWS Reported:May,2010,India Today
