Road to Nowhere

This book is about a question that bothers no one in India: Why preserve wild animals despite the danger they pose to human life and property? While the whole world is conserving wildlife as a natural resource to support national economies, India preserves dangerous animals just for the heck of it. While the world feeds millions and makes billions from wildlife, an impoverished India says we want none of it. As a result, both, the animals and people, are just struggling to survive.HS Pabla, of the Indian Forest Service, spent 35 years trying to preserve India's wildlife, wondering: why? When he found an answer, that wildlife can be the backbone of the rural economy, rather than just being a menace, he found himself pitted against his own Government and peers. Here he bares his heart about how the Indian conservation paradigm is, surprisingly, neither rooted in its cultural and religious traditions, nor has any vision for the future. India will be poorer if she is able to save wild animals which have no use either for the tourist or for the hunter, he argues.Millions of acres of wilderness have been saved worldwide because the public wants to see or hunt wild animals on those lands. Wildlife tourism works both for people and for animals. This book, the first in a trilogy, shows how and where.
About the Author: Dr. Harbhajan Singh Pabla grew up in a Punjabi village, India. He joined the Indian Forest Service in 1977 and retired as the Chief Wildlife Warden of the state of Madhya Pradesh in February 2012. Apart from the usual things that an Indian forester does, he nurtured his love for wilderness while managing national parks like Kanha, Panna and Bandhavgarh. Along the way, he developed a penchant for questioning the status quo and challenged the stereotypes that have ruled the conservation mindset in the country. He introduced the concept of "conservation by incentive" in the form of a cash rewards to farmers for hosting an endangered bird, the lesser florican, in their croplands. He was responsible for changing the face of wildlife tourism in Madhya Pradesh, despite opposition from NTCA, and made tourism revenue a significant resource in tiger reserves of the state. When Panna lost all its tigers, he developed and implemented the tiger reintroduction plan that has given the world the confidence that wild tigers will always be around. He was the principal force behind the reintroduction of gaur in Bandhavgarh and blackbuck in Kanha, after both the species had become locally extinct in the nineties. His unfinished agenda for the state included the reintroduction of barasingha in the Forsyth country, i.e. Satpura Tiger Reserve and white tiger in its native Sanjay Tiger Reserve. Barasingha has already reached Bori in Satpura, and he hopes to see white tigers in the wild before saying adieu to this world. He unsuccessfully tried to introduce sport hunting for the conservation of crop raiding species. His wish-list for conservation includes seeing Indian foresters riding horses for patrolling and enjoying the wilderness. Apart from a stint on the faculty of the Wildlife Institute of India, he has been an international consultant on wildlife management in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. He is an ardent tennis player and lives in Bhopal, India.