Down To Earth speaks to conservationist who has documented and written about tigers growing up and surviving in the Terai landscape of northern India
The Atkona tigress on the Gurdwara wall is gawked at by the villagers. Photo provided by Rahul Shukla
On the morning of December 26, 2023, residents of Atkona village in Uttar Pradesh’s Pilibhit district thronged near the wall of a local Gurdwara. They gawked at a young tigress, that was perching on the wall in full glare of the crowd.
The sight created quite a spectacle and before long, the images from Atkona had been beamed across India and the world, creating a sensation on social media. The tigress was eventually rescued by the forest department after being tranquilised.
The Atkona incident is not a one-off. Pilibhit is located in the Terai, marshy lowlands that border the lower foothills of the Himalayas. The Terai can best be described as a transition zone between the Himalayan range and Indo-Gangetic Plain.
In Uttar Pradesh, the Terai stretches from Saharanpur in the west to Kushinagar in the east. It also forms the border between India and Nepal in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. In eastern and northeastern India, the Terai is known as the ‘Duars’ (from Sanskrit Dwara, meaning ‘door’), as it is the gateway to the Indo-Gangetic Plain.
The Terai is home to some of the tallest grasslands in the world.
Down To Earth (DTE) wanted to get to the back story behind the appearance of the tigress in Atkona and several similar instances in the recent past.
DTE spoke to Rahul Shukla on the subject. Shukla wears a number of hats. He has worked as a professor at Lucknow Christian College.
And it was back in 1997, when he was the wildlife warden of Dudhwa Tiger Reserve, that Shukla first noticed the phenomenon of tigers making themselves at home in the vast sugarcane fields of the Terai.
He has conducted one of the world’s longest running personal scientific studies on tigers in the cane fields of the Terai. His research has appeared in the form of a number of books: Sugarcane Tiger: the Phenomenon of Wildlife in Tarai Farmlands (2008), Tigers in the Long Grass: My Link With Big Cats in Sugarcane (2017) and Sugarcane Tigers Of Amaria: Joining The Dots With Rahul Shukla (2022).
Shukla is working on a new book about tigers in the Terai currently. Titled Maneaters after Jim Corbett, it is an advanced research on the phenomenon of maneating tigers in the farmlands of the Terai.
It highlights that whereas Jim Corbett’s maneaters were geriatric, injured by porcupine quills and disabled by broken canines that compelled them to take up maneating as an option, the new emerging maneaters of the Terai are able-bodied and healthy. These new maneaters have cancelled the paradigms set by Corbett on maneating. Shukla analyses the causes that compelled them to take to maneating.
DTE caught up with Shukla and talked with about the ‘sugarcane tigers’ of the Terai. Edited excerpts:
Rajat Ghai (RG): What are the ‘sugarcane tigers’ of the Terai? Do they constitute a separate type altogether, something like the ‘swamp tigers’ of the Sundarbans or the ‘tigers of the snow’ in the Russian Far East?
Rahul Shukla (RS): No crop known to humans — other than maize and sugarcane — grows more than four feet in height.
Seventy per cent of land in the Terai’s settlements is under sugarcane cultivation. One per cent is under maize. The remainder is under pulses, vegetables and cereals.
One will not find wildlife in the Terai’s villages if it were not for sugarcane. This is especially true for tigers which are shy, nocturnal and seek cover. Since everything narrows down to sugarcane, I use the term ‘sugarcane tiger’.
These are very much Bengal tigers (Panthera tigris tigris) and not a separate subspecies.
The phenomenon of sugarcane tigers is restricted to the Terai forests. Tigers in this region usually visit settlements, stay in the cane fields and then go back.
However, there are some that find the sugarcane conducive. These are mostly from litters that were born and brought up in the cane fields. They have seen their mothers hunting in the fields and humans working in them. They have seen how their mothers do not go back to the forest during the harvest but rather shift into another patch of sugarcane.
Shukla (left) and Director-General of Uttar Pradesh Police, Vijay Kumar, on an expedition to rescue a maneater tiger in Behri village, Pilibhit district. Photo courtesy: Rahul Shukla
Interestingly, a sugarcane field is never fully harvested. A sugarcane plant grows into maturity in 9 months. During harvest, a 6-inch ratoon is left behind where a new plant grows.
Hence, if one crop is harvested in November and others are harvested in February, the tigress has enough space to maneuver for shelter. There is no absolute pinch period when the entire field is completely denuded and devoid of cover.
Summers are usually cool in the Terai’s sugarcane fields due to artificial irrigation. Besides tigers, these fields are home to a wide variety of wildlife including wild boar, jackals and nilgai. There are also feral cattle.
In other words, there is no prey base shortfall in the Terai’s cane fields.
When one or two generations of tigers grow up in such an environment, a change in behaviour is seen in the next generation.
When tiger cubs grow in such a landscape, they can no longer acclamatise to the forest. Jungle prey species are wary and tough for tigers to hunt. In a human-dominated landscape like a sugarcane field, a feral cow is weak, defenceless and has enough meat to sustain a tiger for a fortnight.
Tigers become naturalised to human-dominated landscapes because they are able to access more food there than in the jungle.
This type of change is a putative strain. When it emerges in an animal, it makes a jungle tiger a ‘farmland tiger’, a separate ecotype.
RG: Is the settlement of refugees from Pakistan in the Terai during the 1950s responsible for creating the phenomenon of the ‘sugarcane tigers’?
RS: Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel wanted to rehabilitate the refugees from Pakistan in Jammu and Kashmir for strategic reasons. But Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was against the idea. He asked the then Chief Minister of the erstwhile United Provinces and the first Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Govind Ballabh Pant to settle the refugees in the Terai.
In the initial phases of settlement, the (mostly Sikh) refugees bought great chunks of land from local landowners at throwaway prices. Many Sikh farmers thus own huge tracts of land. They have also managed to hold on to these land parcels despite land sealing laws.
Since sugarcane is a very popular cash crop, there are more than 3,000 crushers and over 200 sugar mills in the Terai.
Many of the refugee-owned farms are over 100 acres in size and resemble the huge Terai grasslands they replaced. Tigers easily find shelter in these inviolate, undisturbed spaces, well-irrigated by water channels.
In 1997, a tigress killed a feral cow in Kalupurwa village near Dudhwa Tiger Reserve. The locals poisoned the carcass. The tigress and her four subadult cubs consumed it and died.
It led to an uproar. The then governor of Uttar Pradesh, Romesh Bhandari, called a meeting of the Tiger Protection Cell that he chaired and I was a part of.
I attended the meeting. I mooted an idea that the owners of farms that were home to tigers should be made ‘tiger guardians’. They should be given a certificate and recognition and should protect the tigers on their farm.
The idea appealed to Bhandari and he asked it to be implemented. Eighteen guardians were subsequently appointed. It was a win-win situation for both, humans and tigers.
I remember meeting a Sikh farmer, Gurdial Singh Nagra, who said he had become a ‘grandfather’ and the tigress that had birthed a litter on his farm was his own daughter. He also thanked me for starting the scheme. It was the best compliment I have received so far.
RG: Similar instances of leopards breeding in sugarcane fields has been seen in south Gujarat and Maharahtra’s sugar belt. Sugarcane fields being a home for wildlife is then not restricted to tigers alone, right?
RS: True, sugarcane crops are cultivated across India. And yes, they do attract other wildlife including sympatric predators such as leopards.
But the phenomenon of ‘sugarcane tigers’ is a unique one. One cannot compare a leopard and a tiger here. The leopard, although an impressive animal, is after all a smaller cat than a tiger. It is also highly adaptable and can live off food waste generated by human settlements as well as animals that live near them such as free-ranging dogs. It is also arboreal and has a much wider prey base than a tiger, as it can survive on smaller prey.
A tiger, on the other hand, is a ‘mega predator’. An adult tiger can consume 40 kilograms of meat in a single sitting.
That a human-dominated landscape such as the Terai cane fields can support tigers and they are usually left unmolested is what makes this phenomenon unique.
RG: The instances of these tigers appearing in habitations across the Terai is increasing. What policy measures should wildlife planners and conservationists take so that there is minimal conflict?
Acknowledge ‘tiger guardians’. Protect forests. Also remember that the Indian religio-cultural ethos is significant. All animals find a space in our belief system and spirituality. The survival of wildlife in farmlands is easy because of our spiritual ethos. Hence, the phenomenon of ‘sugarcane tigers’ will endure.
May be such farms can also be opened to tourism. Of course, with legal permission.
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