A roaring success

Grazing, fuel wood collection, and human activity are increasingly putting pressure on the Gir habitat. According to a report in the Journal of Environment and Development, highways passing through the wilderness and pilgrims visiting the temples inside the sanctuary also result in heavy traffic. There have been several incidents of lions getting injured in road and rail accidents. Six lions died in 2014 due to confrontation with humans.

Forest guard Rasila Vadher’s office is surrounded by cages full of injured or sick lions and leopards, many of them continuously growling. Vadher, 29, heads the animal rescue section and has been awarded for her conservation efforts. She has been part of around 900 rescue operations—200 of them involving lions and 425 involving leopards—in which the animals had to be subdued, caged, and transported. “People doubted my abilities because I was a woman, but I have proved them wrong,” she says.

Next day, returning from another early-morning foray into the forest, we meet Sandeep Kumar, deputy conservator of forests, who heads the team looking after Gir. I ask him if employing female guards has made any difference to the park. “Since we began recruiting women, poaching has ended, rescue operations have been enhanced, and gathering of information has been strengthened,” he says.
But how did recruiting women stop poaching? Trupti Joshi, a forest guard from the first batch of female recruits in 2007, offers the explanation. “One of the tactics of poachers was to use local women to transport body parts of animals they had killed,” she says. “The women would strap the stuff to their bellies and pretend to be pregnant. Male forest guards can’t search them, but we do.”

Female forest guards were introduced in Gir in 2007, when Modi, then Gujarat chief minister, introduced 33% reservation for women in the state forest service. Until then there were only two women in the department—both from the Indian Forest Service—in all of Gujarat. Eighteen women were recruited for Gir in the first year. The number has risen to 60 now.

The new recruits spend six months at a rangers’ training institute in Rajpipla in Gujarat’s Narmada district. They then do stints at Junagadh and Gandhinagar, where they are trained to handle weapons and do police work. A few take up administrative duties, but the rest—uniformed, carrying walkie-talkies, binoculars, and cameras to record lion behaviour, and lathis to protect themselves—patrol the forest on motorbikes. They start on a monthly salary of Rs 7,000 and work up to 12 hours a day in all weather, reporting for duty at 7 a.m.

After a quick lunch, we set off in a van with Kagda to explore the forest, hoping to record some lion behaviour ourselves. There are no roads, only tracks, and the vegetation, mostly dry scrub and deciduous trees, gets thicker. We are lucky to spot a lioness, and its location is promptly conveyed to headquarters by walkie-talkie.

Kagda says it was not easy for her to take up the job of a forest guard. “I’m a Rajput, and where I grew up, women from our community do not go out to work,” she says. “I took the qualifying exam without telling my father. After I was selected, my mother and I had to do a lot of convincing before my father allowed me to take the job.” But her example has inspired her seven sisters. Two of them will be taking the civil services exam soon.

HUMAN-animal conflict has been a recurrent theme in India’s conservation discourse, and Gir is no exception. Around 800 families of the Maldhari community, along with their 15,000 heads of cattle, live in 54 settlements within the forest. They earn their livelihood by selling milk and milk products. Besides the Maldharis, there are 14 villages inside the sanctuary and 97 in its 5 km periphery.

The afternoon sun is baking-hot as photographer Reuben Singh and I arrive at the Gir National Park and Wildlife Sanctuary. The 1,412 sq. km. park in Gujarat’s south-west corner is the only habitat of the Asiatic lion. But it has risen to prominence for another reason: It is the only national park in the country to have a substantial number of female forest guards.

We meet the first of these women near the gate of the forest lodge where we are staying. Darshana Kagda, 24, cleared a written exam and some tough endurance tests to qualify for the job in 2011. At the time, she had just passed her Class 12 exam (she is now a graduate). We get talking, and soon Kagda starts describing her closest lion encounter during one of her patrols. “It stood just 10 ft. from me,” she says. “I only had my lathi. I stood still and it walked away.” She insists she was not scared. “As long as you don’t encroach into their space or disturb them during the mating season, lions don’t attack,” she says. In fact, she claims to have struck some sort of rapport with one that died recently of old age. “We called him Raju. When I brought schoolchildren with me on tours, he would behave extra nice.”

Around 5% of India’s forest area is designated as protected, but nearly 180 species of flora and fauna have been categorised as either endangered or critically endangered. The Gir sanctuary was set up 50 years ago to protect Asiatic lions, which had been reduced to an endangered species due to indiscriminate hunting. The 2015 census put their number at 523, up from 411 in 2010. Last year, the park saw 511,000 visitors, earning around Rs 6 crore in entry fees.

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the “Make in India” programme last year, he chose the lion as its logo. According to a report in the business daily Mint, he suggested that it should be made the national animal, as was the case before 1972, when the Congress government had replaced it with the Royal Bengal tiger.