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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Forced out of the forest -K Venkateshwarlu and S Murali

Forced out of the forest -K Venkateshwarlu and S Murali

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published Published on May 6, 2017   modified Modified on May 6, 2017
-The Hindu

For the Chenchus, the Nallamala forest is their home. Not any longer after a National Tiger Conservation Authority order stripped them of their rights in a bid to fortify India’s largest tiger reserve.

The sun has barely risen but the Chenchu men and women along with their children are out on a long trek, one which will take them deep into the Nallamala forest along the Eastern Ghats, in search of leaves, tubers, roots, soapberries, honey and gum. Waving a branch of the Devadari kura (Cedrus deodara or native cedar) plant, the lean and wiry Udumula Anjaiah suddenly shouts out as he chances upon the wonder plant — its leaves, when consumed after being crushed into a paste, are believed to ward off liver, urinary and respiratory infections and gastric ulcers.

Forests as a lifeline

Before heading off to the forest, the Telugu-speaking food gatherers and hunters of the Nallamala hill range will have a brunch which is a cocktail of curries made of leaves and fruits, mainly custard apple and gardenia which are found in plenty here. Armed with an axe and a bow and arrows for “self defence”, as Bhumani Ankanna puts it, they will set out along with their pet dogs for company on an arduous journey undeterred by the tough terrain in search of a variety of minor forest produce, their lifeline.

Somewhere along the way, prayers will be offered to Malalamma Vana Devatha (the goddess of honey) before Anjaiah and his children collect the honey from a variety of sources like ‘Pedda pera’ (which means big tree) and ‘Junna’ (trees and shrubs). “We trace honeycombs just by observing the movements of the bees,” says Damsani Guruvaiah. They brew their own liquor “Thummachakka” with acacia bark, mahua flower and jaggery, which is consumed after a hunt.

For Anjaiah, Ankanna and Guruvaiah, living deep inside the dense Nallamala forest which also happens to host India’s largest tiger reserve, the 3,728-sq.-km Nagarjunasagar Srisailam Tiger Reserve (NSTR), this has been their daily grind for as long as they can remember. But that is now shrouded in uncertainty following a recent order from the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA). The order of March 28 read: “in the absence of guidelines for notification of critical wildlife habitats, no rights shall be conferred in Critical Tiger Habitats (CTH) which is notified under section 38 V (4) (i), of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972.” What this means is the Chenchus will no longer be able to claim Nallamala as their home.

It also means living in a red zone of man-animal conflict with an inviolate space for the tiger and virtually no place for Chenchus who ironically are counted among the oldest aboriginals of south India and have lived in the Nallamala hill range for hundreds of years. In the skewed tiger versus tribals debate now rekindled, will the Chenchus lose out again? Will they be edged out of the CTH and thrown into the plains in the name of rehabilitation? And what will happen to those who were already given land rights in the Nallamala forest?

The order has come at a time when the Chenchus thought the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 — commonly called the Forest Rights Act or FRA — had come as a huge relief providing them the forest land rights they deserved and waited for so long. Around 1,502 Chenchu families got rights over forest land spanning 5,700 acres in Prakasam district, with corresponding figures for Kurnool and Guntur being 443 families and 1,250 acres and 149 families and 452 acres respectively.

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The Hindu, 6 May, 2017, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/andhra-pradesh/chenchus-of-nallamala-forest-forced-out-of-the-forest/article18394340.ece


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