‘A stick and a khukri’: Low pay, little equipment for frontline staff patrolling tiger reserves
The focus on tiger conservation is reliant on casual workers and home guards, with little training and few powers, who work at great risk to their lives.
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As the sun was beginning to set on a late August day over the savannah grasslands of Orang Tiger Reserve in Assam, Dhanmani Deka, a home guard in the Assam Police Department who had been married for less than a year, was out on a usual post-lunch forest patrol with colleague Sahajul Haque, a casual worker who doubles up as a mahout. Deka, 32, had been serving in the park for more than 10 years.
They were entering the forest thickets, with Deka about 10 metres behind Haque and armed with a vintage .303 rifle. “I had a stick and a khukri. It’s all I have used for years. Casual workers like us aren’t assigned guns,” Haque told IndiaSpend.
Just a few steps in, he heard Deka’s cry. “When I looked back, I saw a large tiger getting hold of him and dragging him away. I picked up the rifle and shot several rounds at the tiger in a panicked frenzy, forgetting that I wasn’t authorised to do so. But the tiger vanished.”
After several hours of searching, around 10 pm, the park staff located Deka’s mutilated body.
Four National Parks in Assam – Kaziranga, Nameri, Manas and Orang – are designated Tiger Reserves under Project Tiger, the Indian government’s flagship project aimed...
