E-Kantipur

JAN 07 -

She remembers when she used to go into the forest to collect firewood as a young girl. “My parents ran an alcohol shop in the village so we needed wood to prepare the alcohol, as well as for our cooking,” says Durga Gole, 22, a local of Baneldhap village in the Churiyamai VDC in Makwanpur.

With eight mouths to feed and not much in the way of finances, Gole’s family had no other source of income apart from their little home-made alcohol business and like so many other families in remote villages across the country, were solely dependent on forests for their survival. “Me, my mother and my sisters would go to pick up shrubs and twigs, sometimes even chopping down full-grown trees if we had to,” Gole says. “We were desperate.”

That was more than a decade ago. Today, Gole is an active member of a female

anti-poaching unit that seeks out those who are encroaching forested area in the district—covering 869 hectares—and takes action against them. The 21-member all-women squad was formed in May 2009 under the Churiyamai Buffer-zone Community Forest Users’ Group of the Parsa Wildlife Reserve (PWR) and have proved extremely effective; poaching and illegal logging have now been brought to a halt in most of Makwanpur’s forests. This they’ve achieved through regular and thorough patrolling of the area—

considered a risky job even for men.

 “We generally patrol the forests twice or thrice a week in a group. And if there are

emergency cases like if we’re informed about illegal activities taking place somewhere, then we go check it out right away,” says Gole, who is presently a bachelor-level student at Hetauda Campus besides being a teacher at a local school.

The Hariyali and Bhabishya forests in Churiyamai—that altogether sustain around 14,000 households—were first looked after by forest guards, who weren’t able to do much. It was then that the local women came up with the idea of creating a team that would patrol the forests. “I joined three years ago and my decision was prompted by a desire to protect those forests that have been so vital to our existence in the villages, but are deteriorating because of illegal poaching and logging,” Gole says. New members on the squad are generally given a basic training on the roles of communities in protecting forested areas and the sustainable use of forest resources for the benefit of the lives and livelihoods of local people.

As much as things have changed now, getting to this point was not an easy task and the women describe many challenges they encountered over the years, including death threats. “The loggers and poachers we caught would often threaten to kill us or our families if we didn’t stop,” says Bimala Moktan, former chairperson of the Anti-Poaching Women Awareness Campaign. The squad would usually come across groups of eight to ten people inside the forests, preparing to cut down the trees. And if these groups were there without the permission of the community, they would be held accountable. The patrollers would first let them off with a warning, but if it happened a second or a third time, they would be fined between Rs 1,000-5,000 depending on the severity of the case and then sent to the PWR for further investigation. According to Moktan, most found guilty of repeated transgressions were women. 

Thanks to the persistent efforts of the team, however, the area, denuded during the early 90s, has now started to gradually recover its lost greenery. “I remember being able to look through the trees to almost a kilometer in the distance because of how sparse the forest had become. But it seems to have regained its denseness, and you can’t see beyond 25-30 metres anymore,” says Moktan. She adds that there has also been a significant drop in the poaching of animals like deer and bison, where the team has been able to set aside 1.5 hectares of grassland for these animals to graze on.

Besides protecting forest resources, the squad has acknowledged that a big part of their responsibility lies towards the female demographic in villages, the ones who directly rely on forest products to feed their families. The Buffer-zone committee has therefore established a cooperative in Churiyamai, which offers loans to needy families—particularly those looking to invest in agriculture—at an interest rate of nine percent, Moktan explains. Not only that, the committee also organises various trainings to impart useful vocational skills to the locals.  

One more significant achievement in recent years has been the construction of bio-gas plants in about 80 percent of households in and around the Churiyamai Buffer-zone area. “It isn’t enough to tell families dependent on forest resources to just stop; you need to give them alternatives,” says Moktan. And so it was that with the technical and financial help of the Tarai Arc Landscape Project and the cooperative, these plants were erected in people’s homes as a bio-efficient replacement for wood-burning stoves. 

Churiyamai and surrounding regions lying along the Shiwalik or Churiya ranges comprise of some of the most fragile landscapes in the country, prone to natural disasters and biological degradation. Add to that the effect of haphazard logging and poaching and it is little wonder that forest areas were hit hard. But the female anti-poaching squad—comprising of young girls and mothers who wanted to make a difference—were able to take matters into their own hands, revealing the kind of possibilities that exist in such grassroots endeavours. “We’re proud to say that we’ve played a role in protecting our forests,” says Moktan.

Posted on: 2012-01-07 09:31

Post Your Comment

Please note that all the fields marked * are mandatory.
* Full Name
* Address
* Email Address
* Comment
* Captcha	Get another CAPTCHA code
Note:	Comments containing abusive words or slander shall not be published.