...There is a Fire in Your Forest

The concept

Exactly 100 years after the first national park was set up in Yellowstone, US, Project Tiger in India was launched in 1972. This in many ways laid down how the conservation policies would be interpreted in future. Superimposing the Yellowstone model meant that areas of high biodiversity value were to be isolated from human habitation and made inviolate zones. With one stroke of the pen, millions of people, mainly adivasis (tribals), found themselves out of home and hearth. People who were living with the forests for many generations were gradually alienated from the only world they knew.

This had serious long-term repercussions on the affected people, forests and as many would argue, civil society at large. This physical dislocation from the forest thus destabalised their whole life. Along with this, their knowledge of the medicinal plants in the forest was slowly being eroded. Baigas in Central India were the 'medicine people' with a vast compendium of knowledge regarding the medicinal usage of plants. Pushed to marginal forests their medicinal practices were now severely curtailed.

Unfortunately the flora and fauna which was to be 'saved' from the 'people' was not safe either. A bird's eye view of the forests and an animal head count would amply prove this. When the adivasis lived in the forest, they had a stake in them and protected them. They were, as the saying goes, "the eyes and ears of the forest". After their marginalisation, 'outsiders' like the miners, poachers, industrialists and the timber mafia came and tightened their control over this vast resource. The alienated adivasis have very often helped in this process, as they do not see the forest as their own any more. With the erosion of the animals and the forests the ecological and the hydrological imbalance has effected the civil society at large.

One of the central issues here then is, who does the forest belong to and who should it be conserved for?

The film

The film has a central character in a wildlife photojournalist who is passionate about wildlife, as any of his tribe would be. He, Sanjay Sharma, is out on an assignment to Kanha and he meets Anita Pawar who has worked with the displaced adivasis of Kanha for years. Together with Anita he discovers a new world beyond his. Initially suspicious of the adivasis positions and motives, Sanjay finally starts seeing their perspective and broadens his understanding of conservation. He interacts with the villagers of Mawala on the buffer of Kanha. They have clear-felled 100 acres of prime forest for farming, unable to survive the choking off of their Nistar (collection of MFP) rights.

He meets Sardar, a Baiga who is a vast source of knowledge on medicinal plants but today laments the loss of control to the forest department and other outsiders. Sanjay spends a night on a machan in the middle of a paddy field and gets a first hand look into wild animals destroying crops – laying waste a whole year's hard work – all in a night's work. Finally he meets Sona Bai, now 60, as she collects Mohua. Sona Bai recounts how she was thrown out of her village Aurai, inside the Kanha park in the monsoon of 1972... how she had to sell everything to settle her family again. Sanjay then goes to Lafan , the community which has revived the degraded forest patch next to their village for their usage. Sanjay looks at a village which is still inside the national park – Jami – and closely watches it sustainably 'use' the forest.

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