Making a difference

[Rishi]

WILDLIFE ACTIVIST SANJAY GUBBI WINS GREEN OSCARS

*This image is copyright of its original author

Sanjay Gubbi

Karnataka’s famed wildlife activist Sanjay Gubbi won the annual Whitley Awards, dubbed as the ‘Green Oscars’, for his work to protect Karnataka’s tiger corridors. Gubbi, received 35,000 pounds (USD 45,374) prize money for the projects.

Gubbi had quit his job as an electrical engineer to work with nature and wildlife. In 2012, working closely with the Karnataka government, he secured the largest expansion of protected areas for the conservation of tigers in his state. “Karnataka is home to the highest number of tigers in India, and in 2015. Our aim is to take the numbers up to 100 over the next few years. This can only be possible through thorough participation of the community,” he said.
Gubbi, 45, a conservation biologist with the Mysuru-based Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), now holds a Master's Degree in Conservation Biology from University of Kent, UK where he received the Maurice Swingland Award for the best postgraduate student of the year. His dissertation from the M.Sc won two major international awards. He is the recipient of Carl Zeiss Wildlife Conservation Award for 2011.



He came up with the first tiger corridor initiative work carried out in the entire world.

Since 2010, Gubbi and his team have helped secure 2,385 sq. km for wildlife protection, an area almost three and a half times that of Bengaluru. Over five years, Gubbi helped create what he says is India’s largest contiguous landscape for tigers (around 9,500 sq. km, including 7,038.2 sq. km of protected area and 2,500 sq. km of reserve forest area) by connecting 23 discrete protected areas (PAs; tiger reserves, national parks, wildlife sanctuaries) through corridors and new sanctuaries. It is the largest expansion of conserved landscapes India has seen since the 1970s. Today, Karnataka has three large protected area complexes, which extend from the Bhimgad-Anshi complex that borders Goa in the west to the Nagarhole-Bannerghatta complex in the south, bordering Kerala and Tamil Nadu.



The areas selected are low on human population with little disturbance from the urban areas. They are mostly forested land.

*This image is copyright of its original author

To do this, one needs to navigate a more fraught landscape, one that is interwoven with basic human needs, political aspirations and profitable futures, none of which a tiger can offer. “Wildlife conservation is the hardest sell. How do you market an elephant, an otter or a frog?”, asks Gubbi.

And so, over 2010-11, Gubbi and his team set about the jungles of Karnataka to find real estate for wildlife—decent forest patches that were still categorized as reserve forests. Gubbi’s interest in such areas goes back to 2002, when he was tramping through the forests around the Dandeli and Anshi national parks in northern Karnataka. His mapping showed that there was good potential for large mammal conservation, and he decided to propose that the reserve forests be declared as sanctuaries. The first expansion of this landscape resulted in the Bhimgad-Anshi complex that now connects nine protected areas. “We lobbied with the government, pushed the file from 2002-05. Seven years later, it was finally declared (a sanctuary) in 2009,” says Gubbi.
Gubbi, along with H.C. Poornesha, a GIS (geographic information system) expert, and his team looked for areas with high tree cover and no human settlements. Human habitations were left alone in enclosures, a more socially acceptable alternative because of restrictions on human activity inside PAs. Of the 4,700 sq. km that was identified, 2,385 sq. km is protected today. “These forest areas were threatened by encroachers and politicians. These habitats would have deteriorated as our misdeeds have gone on eliminating the tiger, but now they can grow into better habitat,” says B.K. Singh, a former principal chief conservator of forests (wildlife) for Karnataka.

This was all possible due to the joint efforts between Gubbi’s team and the Government. “One person I especially have to thank for the success of this mission is Poornesha H.C. and his excellent skills in Geographical Information System (GIS), which were critical in our work on protected area expansion,” says Gubbi.
It wasn’t an easy task giving shape to this unique project. Convincing political leaders and the government was difficult.

Quote:

“Of course, they asked what’s in it for people here? What will they get out of it? So we explained to them the advantages in that context,” says Gubbi.

The team explained to the Government that there would be an increase in tourism, flood control, better air quality and many more such benefits by expanding the protected areas. The Government, seeing the larger benefit, agreed to the idea and supported the initiative.

By now, Gubbi has spent as much time in political corridors as he has finding corridors for wildlife. When we met in November in Delhi, he had said: “I am here to meet lawyers, wait for people and make hundreds of phone calls to get one appointment. It is frustrating and horrible but you have to do it."
“Most of the time in science, you build your data first—there are tigers here, so you declare it as PA. But here, we did it the other way around. We first looked at social acceptance and political viability rather than ecological quality,” says Gubbi.

The seven years it took to declare Dandeli-Anshi a wildlife sanctuary/protected area taught Gubbi an important lesson, “You have to follow your file from table to table and see it off to the last mile.” A PA declaration is a complex juggling operation involving bureaucrats, local politicians, the state government and forest department—a tangle of egos, political compulsions and vested interests.

Another of the success stories of Gubbi’s work is in Malai Mahadeshwara Hills (906 sq km) that was declared as a new wildlife sanctuary in May 2013 due to his team’s efforts. They now have camera traps in that area and have seen fantastic results for tigers. 
The tale of how MM Hills got declared as a sanctuary is nothing short of dramatic. Around the time of the May 2013 Karnataka state election, it was feared that vested interests in quarrying might be able to use the situation to their advantage—if they did, it would be difficult to preserve the landscape of MM Hills. The new PA, then, was declared ahead of the assembly election. “We were lucky it went unnoticed. It was done practically between governments,” says Singh, laughing.

Changing others’ minds is sometimes about forgetting your own objective completely. “With politicians, I didn’t talk about science or tigers,” says Gubbi. “I talked about water.”
And C.P. Yogeshwar, a former state minister of forests and a five-time MLA from Channapatna, a water-stressed taluka (administrative division), listened. One of his long-term projects was to recharge the groundwater, filling 150 dry tanks in the taluka by lifting water from the Cauvery. “It was the only way to improve irrigation in my area, to develop economically. I got the connection between protecting nature, forests, water and farmers,” says Yogeshwar. Today, he claims, these tanks irrigate 75% of the taluka.

Today, forest watchers and guards rush to Gubbi with their problems. Most of the ground-level staff consists of local tribals desperate for some extra employment. At the Holemuridahatti (“where the river takes a sharp turn”) camp, water is scarce. It has to be carried up manually from the river because there is no power here, so Gubbi is mulling over setting up a small solar pump.
Staff recruitment, retention and motivation are critical to the kind of protection a park gets. “Medical and life insurance, direct debit of salary into accounts, we need all these interventions,” he says.



Sanjay’s recent work, focusing on the Western Ghats of Karnataka, India has strived to reduce the impact of habitat fragmentation, collaborated with the Karnataka Forest Department towards an expansion of protected areas, helped institute new social security and welfare measures for forest watchers and guards. On these projects, Sanjay works with a wide cross-section of people, including policy makers, media and social leaders.
Sanjay also conducts training workshops for print and electronic media and conservation enthusiasts, among others, to expand support for and enhance public understanding of conservation. He has taught Master’s program courses at the National Centre for Biological Sciences and the Wildlife Institute of India. Today, Sanjay sits on the State Wildlife Board and other key panels of the state.
He writes extensively both in English and Kannada, and is especially keen on popularising wildlife conservation in local languages. 

With his award money, Gubbi hopes to reduce deforestation in two important wildlife sanctuaries which connect several protected areas and act as corridors for tigers, allowing them to move between territories. Reply