A Numbers Game

The air is rife with speculation; tip-offs on the best locations are doing the rounds. The Project Tiger reserve areas are the most sought after and the volunteers are pulling last minute strings to ensure good vantage points for tiger sightings. The original allotment by the forest department is steadily discarded and the official lists are slowly replaced by volunteer wish lists. There are 301 waterholes at Ranthambore and 614 volunteers are participating forest staff,wildlife enthusiasts,journalists and the curious. This year,public volunteers outnumber the forest staff for the exercise: 332 to 282. Quite a few of the public volunteers are first-timers,without any background in wildlife.

The annual waterhole census is a primitive exercise conducted on a full moon day in May at many sanctuaries in the country. Panned by the National Tiger Conservation Authority NTCA and dismissed by experts like Ullas Karanth,waterhole censuses have somehow stuck around. This exercise may have lost its relevance but forest officials claim that this method is still their best bet to arrive at broad estimates of large mammals other than tigers in the sanctuary. Divisional forest officer YK Sahu explains that every animal visits the waterhole at least once every 24 hours and the supermoon night would help in the sighting of nocturnal animals. GV Reddy,chief conservator of forests,adds that this exercise will help in combing the forest for illegal construction or signs of poaching activity. Public participation,he claims,envelopes the exercise in a noble cloak of transparency.

Yet,numbers of the previous censuses are not forthcoming. The department brought out a compilation of the last four years censuses a month ago but the office has just one copy of it. The data lies unstudied,unverified and unavailable.

5 minute crash course

Sahu,DFO,reads out the dos and donts the volunteers are to follow while in the forest. His voice is low and steady,volunteers strain their ears to listen but the attentive silence is constantly broken by blaring cell phones. Pankaj Joshi,a naturalist at Ranthambore,whips out the Ranthambore nature guide and gives the volunteers a quick crash course minutes before they embark on the census exercise.

The exercise will last 24 hours,from ten in the morning until ten the next day. No sleep is to be had while on duty,lunch and dinner packets will be delivered twice,torch lights and pens are handed out the census has officially begun.

Mischief and mayhem?

As vantage points go,the machchan constructed for the Rajbagh I is a location that is hard to beat for the excellent view it offers of the water body. Two first-time volunteers are manning it and they flash confident smiles when a channel crew comes by. We are physically fit and very excited at the prospect of spending the entire day and night in the jungle they say to the cameras. It is only hours later,that the forest ranger is told that the two have defected from their posts complaining of sore backs and other discomforts.

For the 614 volunteers,machchans have been constructed on trees at every waterhole,which is to play host to two volunteers a forest staff and a public volunteer. Most of the machchans are rudimentary; some are suspended dangerously low from the ground,some have no tree cover whatsoever and some are points for manning two large waterholes. The heat is unbearable and Bhandari receives reports of the first casualty. Its a big haul. An entire canter of volunteers has returned complaining,unable to climb,sit and survive.

The Jogi Mahal zone is infested with first-time volunteers,bemoans Forest Ranger RV Singh Bhandari,the area he is assigned for patrol duty. The wireless is constantly transmitting messages of tired,hurt,scared,uncomfortable volunteers abandoning their machchans. Bhandari is already short on forest staff here. With volunteers fleeing,he is quickly running out of options to ensure that a census exercise even takes place. Most of the forest staff has retired and thats a reason for heavy volunteer participation he says.

Bhandari has his work cut out. Originally intending to check on 82 waterholes,he has managed to go to just 20 of them. The Jogi Mahal area is becoming particularly troublesome and the chowki in-charge Tarachand is doing little to help. Food packets intended for volunteers have mysteriously disappeared under Tarachands lazy supervision. Medical units,patrol vehicles and permit-less vehicles are gallivanting about the forest,disturbing the silence. Word also gets around that the alu sabzi in the lunchboxes has gone bad.

At 1am,Bhandari receives a message from the DFO. A volunteer is injured and needs attention. Bhandari sets off with his driver,armed with supplies. An hour long search yields nothing until they reach the Guda check-post. Bhandari stops there to ask for directions on the wireless and draws a blank. Sloth bears are at the waterhole nearby,a civet is spotted and incessant chital calls point to the presence of a predator. Minutes later,Guda chowk comes to life when the injured volunteer along with other volunteers and some forest staff are discovered,fast asleep. Most arrangements have gone awry,volunteers stray and Bhandari has had to fall back on his limited staff for the completion of the census.

picnic manane aaye the

On the night before the census,Dharmendra Khandal of Tiger Watch sits in the football field of Ranthambore Public school surrounded by volunteers. He is categorically dismissive of the exercise but has still invited his friends to participate. Junglee,a large group of volunteers from Gujarat,come every year for the census. They are the most enthusiastic participants of the waterhole census at Ranthambore and are praised by activists and officials alike for their committed participation.

The waterhole census,however,Khandal says,is not the biggest problem of Ranthambore. He divulges other problems that are afflicting the national park relocation of villages,invasion of exotic species,illegal mining and other constructions but that is another story altogether.

At Jogi Mahal chowk the next morning,half-filled census forms are lying on Tarachands desk. Volunteers who have roughed it out are returning,exhausted. Much of the clean-up exercise,dismantling of machchans is left for the forest staff to finish. Even as volunteers are being ferried back from the waterholes,regular safaris for tourists have begun at Ranthambore. The annual ritual of a seemingly serious census exercise for which the park was shut down for a day and a half for visitors has just as easily turned into an organised circus.

Bhandari however seems relieved minor hiccups but on the whole a successful exercise, he declares choosing to forget the supermoon night at Ranthambore.