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The (black) buck stops here, and eats everything

Salman Khan went to jail for shooting a blackbuck. But today, farmers in Aurangabad district would be overjoyed if some shirtless superhero could help them get rid of the animal.

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The baked black soil crunches under your feet as you step into Babasaheb Sakpal’s arid, two-acre field in Kaate-Pimpalgoan village of Gangapur tehsil in Aurangabad.

Though this area falls in the rain-shadow region of the Deccan plateau, there has usually been enough rain by this time of the year for the villagers to start their kharif plantations.

But it is not the truant rain gods or the Rs25,000 he’s borrowed from the local money lender that has this 42-year-old from Maharashtra’s Marathwada region worried. We walk to the fields with his wife Ratnabai, 35, who is taking him his lunch — three jowar rotis, a raw onion, and coarsely pounded green chillies with garlic and salt. As she opens the cloth bundle to serve him, he stops her, looking into the distance, behind us.

“There they are,” he says, shaking his head, “back to destroy our hard work.” He takes off after the herd. “The government should decide for once and either shoot them or us,” says Ratnabai, as she rushes after her husband, arms raised, screaming at the blackbuck herd to get out of their one-acre ginger patch.

Nearly 76 km away in Khultabad tehsil’s Golegaon, droppings and hoof marks are all that remain of Sattar Sheikh’s devastated field.

“We’ve been facing heavy losses for nearly a decade. We used to plant moong (bengal gram), chowli (one-eyed beans) and matki before. Despite changing what we plant, we continue to suffer losses to the tune of Rs15-20,000 per acre every three months,” he laments, pointing out how the grass meant for his own goats and cows has also been ravaged. “The invading herds destroy more than they eat.”

These are not isolated instances. Across the tehsils of Vaijapur, Gangapur, Khultabad and Kannad in Aurangabad, what seemed like cute guest appearances until a decade ago has grown into a menace that farmers have no clue how to handle.

The multiplier effect
Aurangabad-based Utkarsh Daithankar, a conservation activist whose organisation has been studying the issue for six years, pegs the number of deer in the region at around 20,000.

“Each of these animals lives for 10-12 years. They achieve sexual maturity when they are a year and a half old. They breed through the year and can birth one or two offspring after a six month gestation,” he explains. “The male can have five to as many as twenty females in his herd, and he mates regularly. All this, combined with the fact that there are no predators has meant that the deer problem keeps multiplying.”

Further, these animals enjoy protection as a Schedule-1 animal under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. In any case, the average farmer is no match for these antelopes which can get away at a top speed of 80 km per hour.

And the farmers know this all too well. But given that these animals are destroying their livelihood, do the farmers ever get enraged enough to attack them? Villagers confirm that there were occasional poaching incidents until 2000.

But the high-profile blackbuck poaching cases seem to have scared off hunters. “We have read about many high profile cases in the papers, about how people had to face the music for hunting blackbuck. So we are afraid to do anything to the deer,” says Babsaheb Bhosale, of Vengangaon village in Khultabad tehsil.

By 2005, the damage to the crops began to get out of hand, and farmers embarked on a series of protests asking for government intervention and compensation.

While a 2003 Maharashtra government resolution (GR) allowed for compensation based on area, farmers felt this was neither justified nor adequate. “In fact, this was one of the major issues in this region in the 2009 assembly election,” points out NCP MLA from Vaijapur, RM Vani, who does not forget to add, “Our party fulfilled its promise by making the exact cost of the damaged crop the basis for the compensation.”

But the new GR also mandates a joint panel comprising the sarpanch, the talati, and a representative each from the agriculture and forest departments to conduct the panchanama and decide the extent and cost of the damage. On the ground, farmers tell us, this translates into more graft and hardships. “We are made to run around for the paperwork and the panel which conducts the panchanama often wants a bribe before they take up the case,” points out a villager from Akoli Vadgaon in Gangapur tehsil.

Nowhere to graze

Forest department figures show that the amount handed over in compensation had been growing every year till two years ago.

The forest department connects this rise and fall to the rains, like most other things in arid Marathwada. “We had poor rainfall from 2005 to 2009. This meant there was little for the deer to graze on, in whatever little forest land we have. But over the past two years we’ve had better rainfall, and therefore fewer complaints,” says BS Hooda, conservator of forests, Aurangabad.

In fact Hooda disputes the number of deer roaming the region. Insisting that there are only 2,500, he says, “The problem is not as big as it is made out to be. The greed to make money in the name of compensation has led to the animal being given a bad name,” he says, adding for good measure, “Ninety percent of the claims are bogus.”

He also points to the attempts made to tackle the problem. Earlier, there were plans to create a 1,000-acre fenced off sanctuary for the deer in Vaijapur, but these faced vehement protests from locals who feared they would have to give up land for the sanctuary.

“If the animals can be driven into the sanctuary, why can’t they be driven back to the forests where they came from?” was an oft-repeated poll campaign speech by RM Vani. While making speeches is easy, two years into his tenure, even Vani has not been able to find the forest he talked about.

While the National Forest Policy says that every district should maintain a forest cover of 33% for ecological balance, in Aurangabad, this has been reduced to less than 3%. “Increase in cultivable holdings has had a direct impact on the blackbuck habitat, and they end up coming near the villages in search of food and water,” says Hooda.

“This region had many natural predators like foxes, wolves and hyenas, but these have been systematically wiped out by people who thought they were a threat to livestock. With the food chain broken, we have this problem on hand.”

In 2009, the forest department sought the permission of the Union ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) to translocate the deer to a sanctuary in Washim in eastern Vidarbha.

The MoEF asked for a habitat viability analysis, a monitoring protocol, adherence to guidelines of the Wildlife Institute, Dehradun, and the active participation of the Andhra Pradesh Forest Department which implemented the country’s first translocation programme for wild deer in Kurnool.

“After we complied with all the requirements, we got experts from Andhra to come here and help us capture and safely translocate the deer. Accordingly, to date, 400 deer have been moved out,” explains Hooda, who feels it is high time the blackbuck are culled. “Their numbers have grown to an extent where this seems the logical thing to do.”

Salman, where are you?

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