How Man-Animal Conflict Led To Poaching Networks In Haryana

Six years later Singh, a farmer growing mustard, sugarcane, millets, cotton in addition to wheat in the northern Indian state of Haryana, can tell half a dozen such stories of skirmishes with poachers.

The term nilgai literally means “blue bull” in the local language. However, it’s not a bull. Its body rather resembles a horse, with its long neck and sturdy legs, but it’s not even a horse. Nilgais are the largest antelope species in the northern Indian subcontinent, deriving their name from their cow-like horns and tail and their blue-grey hued skin.

Their natural habitat is in the rolling savannas: dry grasslands with scattered trees and short bushes, where they maintain vegetation balance by grazing on grass, herbs, fruits, and flowers. Their droppings enrich the soil and help disperse seeds. And in the areas where they cohabitate with carnivores, such as in the Aravallis, they become an important part of the food web by becoming prey to larger animals.

Over the past few decades, Haryana’s myopic focus on expanding highways and farmlands have shrunk, fragmented, or destroyed their habitats, says Vinod Karwasra, a local wildlife conservationist who works closely with the government. As a result, herds of nilgais can be seen roaming around farms that once used to be grasslands, often ravaging the crops and causing heavy losses for the farmers. The damage becomes more pronounced during their mating season in February, when the farms witness intense mutual fighting.

“Many other animals like blackbucks and wild boars roam the farms, but blue bulls do the most damage,” says Dharamveer Punia, a farmer in Haryana, as he inspects the half-eaten leaves on his mango tree. “They like mangoes--and berries, guavas, and apples. Oh, and pigeon pea! They absolutely love it, smelling it from a distance. In fact, people here have stopped planting pigeon pea [due to the fear of damage].”

Dharamveer Punia inspects half-eaten tree leaves on his mango tree at his farms in Haryana.

Blue bulls can damage as much as 27% of farms in western Haryana, sometimes resulting in losses worth over Rs 17,000 per hectare, according to a 2024 study published by professors Kiran Rani and Bhupinder Kaur Babbar at the Punjab Agricultural University. This can significantly impact the earnings of small and marginal farmers.

Time and again, farmers have raised the issue with the government but the discussions, debates and even protests have hardly ended in a sustainable solution. So in February this year, the government of Haryana approved the culling of nilgais--a controversial decision that immediately sparked statewide protests by conservationists and members of the Bishnoi community, a Hindu Vaishnava sect that reveres the animal and is known for its wildlife conservation practices.

The protests have reportedly compelled the government to stay the order, but the conflict was back to where it started: what to do with the nilgais?

My reporting from western Haryana shows that the vacuum created by a lack of solutions to the longstanding conflict between farmers and nilgais has had far-reaching consequences: It has led to formation of local poaching and trafficking units in parts of Haryana that could seriously disturb wildlife populations and the ecological balance of the region.

We wrote to Vineet Kumar Garg and Vivek Saxena, Principal Chief Conservators of Forests (PCCF) at the Haryana Forest Department, for comment. We will update this story when we receive a response.

Caste, conservation, and crime

The fact that his uncle lost a finger while firing a similar gun years ago doesn’t unnerve Suraj Kumar [name changed] as he calmly loads a fistful of explosive into the muzzle of his rifle, rams it down the barrel using a thin metal rod, and pulls the trigger: BOOM!

Kumar works as a caretaker, or rakhwaalaa as he is locally known on the farms. Over the years, farmers in Haryana have applied many different methods to solve the conflict: some have used fencing while others have started hiring men like Kumar to watch over the crops.

These caretakers come with guns: India’s Arms Act allows farmers to procure certain types of firearms, usually a muzzle-loading rifle that operates on a low-grade explosive made of sulphur or potassium. But wildlife activists noted that the caretakers were misusing the weapon and killing the animal, instead of simply firing in the air. So they appealed to the administration and got them banned in Haryana in 2023.

The caretakers found another way to smuggle the guns in.

They bring guns from neighbouring states, often carrying old licenses issued to their friends or family members, explains Karwasra. “Let’s say a person procured a license in Rajasthan, he would get it photocopied and distribute the copies to his 10 relatives even outside Rajasthan.”

Kumar neither accepted nor denied the claims.

Suraj Kumar Bawariya guards a farm with his rifle in Haryana.

The 22-year-old grew up watching his father do a similar job in Haryana. His family is from Rajasthan, where he studied until grade XII. But now he hardly stays there, juggling multiple jobs in multiple cities: between November and April, he guards hundreds of acres of land for several farmers in Haryana, for which he earns about 10-15 kg of wheat per acre of land, instead of cash. In summer, he leaves for Gujarat, where he picks cotton by day and guards the farms in the evening. After this, he sets off on the final leg of his annual migration, travelling back to his native Rajasthan where he works as construction labour.

“I spend all day and night on the farms here,” he said when I met him in February this year. “I have hardly eaten anything since last night.” Every time farmers spot a nilgai, they ring him up and off he rushes on his motorbike, his rifle dangling on the side.

Kumar comes from the Bawariya tribe of northwest India, a formerly nomadic hunter-gatherer community who used to earn a living by hunting for the elites in colonial times. Like many other nomadic communities in those times, the Bawariyas were labelled a “criminal tribe” by the British under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871; they were delisted or ‘denotified’ in 1952.

Even after India gained independence and repealed the Act under which they were labelled criminals, Bawariya generations continue to face stigma and marginalisation, being deprived of decent socio-economic opportunities. Moreover, the Wildlife Protection Act 1972 criminalised their traditional livelihood: hunting.

Many Bawariya community members, thus, continue to be involved in illegal poaching activities, assert wildlife experts, with numerous cases of conviction reported in the media.

Early one morning in 2020, Rameshwar Das, a wildlife inspector and his team raided half a dozen Bawariya households in Haryana’s Hisar district and confiscated over 20 kg of nilgai meat. “Our sources informed us that somebody had killed the animal on the farms the previous night, cut it open and dragged it home on a cart. They then distributed the meat among the community,” Das says.

Two other wildlife inspectors in different districts of Haryana shared similar stories. Caretakers, who often come from Bawariya and other marginalised communities, end up poaching wildlife, they said, not only killing nilgais but also blackbucks, wild boars and others under the guise of guarding crops.

“They consume the meat themselves or sell it sometimes for as little as Rs 80 per kilogram to their own community, private meat-sellers, or high-end hotels where [the rich and the elite] pay a handsome amount for the “exotic” meat,” Das says.

Karwasra explains that people in the villages are used to hearing gunshots. “The caretakers take advantage of that. When they hunt late in the evenings or at night when everyone is fast asleep, people think they are only shooing away the animals but that’s not what’s actually happening.” He also attributes the Bawariyas’ hunting practices to their community beliefs. “They believe these animals’ meat is good for the body.”

Kumar rejects the allegations of his community members being involved in poaching: “I have no idea about hunting. Besides, it’s a Bishnoi-dominated area; they won’t let anyone kill the animals.”

A road sign cautioning vehicles of wildlife presence in Fatehabad, Haryana.

Many wildlife experts emphasise that conservation narratives are often dominated by privileged upper-caste communities that further stigmatise marginalised groups.

“The crime has nothing to do with one particular caste or community,” says Dinesh Jangra, a wildlife inspector in Haryana, suggesting that farmers are equal contributors to the crime. “See, they want the wildlife removed from their farms, by hook or crook. And it’s the animals’ nature to go back to the spot where they belong; they don’t want to leave their native places unless forced to do so.”

Wildlife inspector Jaivinder Nehra agrees: “The Bawariyas are often found to be involved in smuggling and poaching animals using illegal arms but in this case, farmers don’t pay them unless they kill the nilgai.”

Over the years, the wildlife population, especially that of blackbucks, has gone down considerably in the region. In 2015, a team sent by the Wildlife Institute of India noted spotting over 400 blackbucks in the region but now “Haryana hardly has any blackbucks left”, Nehra says, “although nilgais reproduce faster so they are better off”. The exact number of nilgais in Haryana is hard to find out, in the absence of an official census, but according to an estimate by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, there might be around 100,000 nilgais in India.

Haryana also happens to be a state with extremely low wildlife crime reporting, like with most other parts of India. Data obtained by Karwasra under the Right To Information Act reveal that between 2014 and 2023, only 79 cases of wildlife crime have been filed in two environmental courts of the state. None of them ended in a jail sentence for the convicted.

He attributes this to the lack of general willingness as well as resources allocated for wildlife conservation. “The wildlife staff here are not well-equipped. The thing is wildlife crimes almost never have any eye-witnesses as they take place at night. Unlike police investigating another kind of crime, wildlife guards don't act swiftly and collect evidence. And in the absence of any strong evidence, the courts are forced to acquit the person," he says.

A wildlife crime involving a species protected under the Schedule 1 of the Wildlife Protection Act invites a minimum imprisonment of three years that can be extended up to seven years, along with a fine.

Whose land is it anyway?

Before the water drawn through the Bhakra dam in Himachal Pradesh reached southwestern Haryana and turned its parched, uncultivable land into fertile alluvial farmlands, there were sand dunes of various shapes and sizes, with sparse vegetation. Now the dunes have been levelled and replaced by lush farms of mustard, wheat and various fruits, interspersed with dhanis, the brick and mortar settlements of farmers.

“This place has changed so rapidly over the last few decades. Only three years ago, I saw sand dunes here when I came to collect soil for my chickpea crops,” farmer Punia tells me as we drive around the farms of Fatehabad one sunny afternoon.

A herd of nilgai rushes into the natural habitat in Haryana.

A red-naped ibis crosses our path. A nilgai sits on a patch of grass.

“She is actually imprisoned,” Punia says about the antelope. “She can’t move. There are farms all around, and many of them are electronically fenced. The animals know it.”

A number of farmers have surrounded their farms with electric fencing and barbed wires that can bring significant injuries to animals, or even to human beings loitering around, Karwasra says. But physical barriers are not a sustainable solution, Punjab Agriculture University professors Rani and Babbar note in a separate study, because they are not cost-effective apart from being “inhuman”. In the paper, they suggest using chemical repellents on vulnerable crops to keep the animals away.

Karwasra emphasises on working on a holistic solution.

“We are taking each problem head on. We obtained data on poaching from the last decade [to check] what all weapons are used and found out that most animals were killed with the muzzle-loading gun. So we got it banned. Now we are working on getting stray dogs sterilised as they are also a major threat to the wildlife here,” he says. But more importantly, “we are working on securing their natural habitat”.

We are sitting on a cot in an open field. Golden soil glimmers in the evening sun, a group of blackbucks frolic around trees and bushes scattered around the area. As we drive around the space in the Badopal village of Fatehabad later, we encounter a large herd of blue bulls rushing into the field that the locals call their “natural habitat”.

Blackbucks frolic around in their natural habitat in the Badopal village of Haryana.

“People now have a designated land,” Karwasra says about the field. “They can chase an unwanted animal away into this space where they can roam around freely.” The space is maintained by the local community, mostly comprising of the Bishnoi people, who gather resources through a WhatsApp group. An inspector sits on duty to chase stray dogs away and keep an eye out for poachers.

This hasn’t come without challenges, though. In 2014, the government laid the foundation stone for a proposed nuclear power plant in the region. Under the plan, around 1,400 acres of land, including this space, was acquired to build the plant, along with a township. Barbed wire fencing for the township led to the deaths of seven blackbucks. But Karwasra and other activists are protesting, battling multiple legal cases. “This has always been the animals’ land,” he says. “But how do they claim it?”

Wildlife inspector Jangra agrees. “It’s us humans who know how to lay a claim to lands. Which courts or tehsils do these animals go to--to claim their lands, to say that it belongs to our ancestors? Whom do they appeal to and say look, our jungles are being cut down, our habitats are being destroyed?”

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