Wild scare: Villagers seek resettlement

[Sakobav]

Another side of the coin if hunting was legalized with eco-tourism these folks would have some means of livelihood and could stay at their ancestral place ..any thoughts folks

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2010/20100227/punjab.htm#10
Chitleen K Sethi
Tribune News Service
Mirzapur (Mohali), February 26
Unable to eke out a decent living for themselves and on the verge of starvation, over 500 residents of Mirzapur village want to move out of their 700-year-old village and “resettle” elsewhere in Punjab.

The village, barely an hour’s drive from Chandigarh, is mainly forestland, brimming with wild animals, but making it almost impossible for villagers to save their crops from them.

The village is the lone settlement upstream of the Mirzapur check dam, the last in the series of check dams that conserve rainwater of the Shivalik foothills in Chandigarh’s periphery. Majority of the area in the village, though privately owned, is a protected forest and there is only about 100 acre cultivable land left.

“Over 200 acre of fertile cultivable land was acquired for the building of the dam. We are left with little land, which we can cultivate. The rest is a forest and we cannot touch even a blade of grass there without permission of the Forest Department,” said Shankar, a resident of the village.

However, what is making it impossible for the residents to live here is the wildlife. “The place is infested with blue bulls, wild boars and deer. They live near the village as they flock to the dam for water. Our fields are raided almost every night and whatever we have grown so far is finished in a matter of hours. There are seasons when we are unable to even get back the seed that we had sown,” Shankar added.

The villagers thus keep a watch over their meager fields day and night. Male members spend the night in small makeshift sheds perched in the fields and beat drums through the night to save their crops. No one is however armed to kill animals.

The villagers have requested the State Forest Department to acquire their land and shift them to another village giving them the same size of land in return.

A resident Dila Ram said the government had not even given the enhanced compensation for the land acquired for the dam. “The land for the dam was acquired in 1995. There are some people still waiting for the compensation,” he said.

“The statutory permission under the Punjab Land Preservation Act that allows us to cut the trees on our part of the forest is given periodically. But even for that we have to run around a lot. I have deposited over Rs 15 lakh as security and yet the approval has not been given,” Shankar said.