Thousands of acres of forests burnt in fires, hundreds of mammals, birds and reptiles charred by the flames, significant movement of larger animals like elephants in search of water, even the tragic death of a forest guard fighting the fire in Karnataka’s Bandipur Tiger Reserve… news reports through January and February indicate clearly that summer has come early to the forests of southern India this year, it is going to be a long summer and a harsh one too.
An analysis of about 50 news reports in this period reveals themes and a structure of reporting that is interesting even as it is similar: forest officials and wildlife experts suggesting that the fires are not natural and have been ignited by miscreants, by local communities unhappy with the forest department’s policies, or even by disgruntled forest staff. The reports also uniformly highlight the sorry state of affairs—sanctioned posts have not been filled in many places resulting in a serious shortage of manpower to deal with such situations; staff, where available, is not adequately trained and there is a serious shortage of necessary infrastructure and equipment.
One of the biggest challenges in fighting the blaze in Bandipur, for instance, was getting food and water to fire-fighters in good time and in adequate quantities. And then there is the mandatory assertion by the authorities that a criminal investigation has been (or will be) instituted, and the miscreants will be brought to book; the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) is reportedly looking into what happened at Bandipur.
The obvious way to understand and explain the situation is of a failure of management and planning. If it is a well-known fact that forest fires are a regular occurrence, why is it that issues such as the shortage of staff, lack of training, of insufficient and inadequate equipment, and of the neglected status of the frontline staff only come up when the crisis is in our faces or the damage has already been done?
Failure of imagination
What happens to all the funding reportedly made available for better equipment for forest and protected area staff? What about regular reports of cutting-edge sensing, imaging and communication technologies that are supposed to mitigate, if not prevent, precisely these situations? The questions may be rhetorical, but if there is something that needs to be investigated, it is this sorry state of affairs.
But there is another failure too that needs to be discussed: this is a failure of imagination that leads to us having only one narrative on fires in the forest. When the language of miscreants, sabotage and criminal investigations is at the heart of the narrative, the issue, clearly, is seen as a law-and-order one. While there is no denying that this might be an important dimension that needs attention, there is another reality that gets little, if any, attention at all.
What if fires were not all destructive, as the current dominant storyline would have us believe? What if investigations of history would tell us that a no-fire policy was more a compulsion of colonial forestry practice with commercial exploitation of the forests for its timber being its primary objective? What if we were to accept that fires and forests have a positive relationship and might have co-evolved? What if we were to find a deeper understanding of this dynamic relationship in traditional knowledge and practices of forest dwelling communities? These ‘what-ifs’ are not mere speculations because studies in fire-ecology in recent years, though rather limited in the Indian context, are showing just that.
Fuel to fire
Some of the most interesting insights have come from work done in the forests of Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple (BRT) wildlife sanctuary in Karnataka, by researchers associated with the Bengaluru-based Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment. Writing recently in The Hindu (‘How to tame our forest fires’, March 08), Bharath Sundaram, who is currently with Nalanda University, argued that fire occurrence is indeed an important factor in maintaining the dry tropical forest ecosystem that constitutes a large part of India’s forests, that tree species in such forests have special features to deal with these fires, and that regular low intensity fires in the past actually ensured that invasives like lantana were not allowed to grow uninhibited. The large scale presence of lantana in Bandipur has been held responsible for the intensity of the fire this year, it added fuel to the fire in the most literal sense of the metaphor.
Fire has been used differently by different communities at different times in different landscapes. This reality needs to be factored in if we have to deepen and widen the understanding of our forestscapes. A fire in the forest may not be all evil as is generally believed because as Sundaram notes, the fire can be both “rejuvenating and revitalising”.
The forest-fire relationship is a very complex one and it is important that its contours be re-articulated. In it might lie a new understanding of the problem as we see it today and the solutions that we seek to offer will also need to change accordingly.
The writer researches issues at the intersection of environment, science, society and technology.
