According to official records, Bengal tigers have killed about 3,000 people in the last 50 years in the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest, spanning 10,000 square kilometers across India and Bangladesh.
Local experts put the number of deaths by tiger attacks at twice that number over the same period. There are about 270,000 people living in the Sundarbans, along with approximately 226 Royal Bengal tigers that roam the Sundarbans.
The Indian government is very proud of the growing number of Bengal tigers. They have parceled out the Sundarban Tiger Reserve (STR) in coastal West Bengal, India, a region that can only be entered with permission from the forest service.
This is a problem, because the primary food the residents eat is fish and crabs. They can only be caught by boat. And herein lies the biggest problem facing the 150 forest fringe villages of the Sundarbans. To catch the crabs and fish, you need a Boat License Certificate (BLC). With 70,000 people making their living as crab fishermen alone, the locals game the system so that people can survive.
“There is a nexus between the BLC owner and fishing businessmen who control the BLC and decide whom to give it to,” said Jaykrishna Haldar, the secretary of the fishermen’s union. “The majority of marginal fishing and crab-catching folk are unable to collect BLC, which leads them to issues like seized boats, physical harassment, and fines by the forest department.”
The owners of the BLCs don't fish themselves. They make a lot more money renting the BLC out. It's not cheap. A fee of from $1,200 to $1,500 is required. The cost of fishing without a BLC is jail, plus a hefty fine.
Traversing the shallow river and creek waters is extremely dangerous. The big cats lie in wait along the shore, hiding in the mangroves, waiting for an unwary fisherman to come along. It's easy pickings for the tiger.
The statistics of dead and injured residents are unreliable because of conservation laws that make any tiger-human interaction a maze of regulations and rules that have to be navigated for any widow or family to receive compensation.
After interviewing 25 tiger victim families, I noticed a typical pattern. First, no compensation is provided to those who ventured without a BLC. Second, no compensation is granted if the victim’s body is not recovered. And third, compensation is only granted if the Forest Department investigation confirms the incident occurred within the buffer zone and the victim held a BLC.
Those who claim compensation face nearly impossible bureaucratic hurdles: A family member must submit numerous documents including a post-mortem report, and death certificate, with official signatures from the Gram Panchayat (village government), Panchayat Samiti (regional government), Fisheries Extension Officer, Police Station, and Block Development Office.
In 2022, I spoke with Prabir Mishra, a human rights activist and vocal advocate for fishing and forest rights, who contributed to a fact-finding report on “tiger widows.” Prabir said that the present government “has deteriorated rights-based policies and is not willing to democratize forest governance.” He added that the government’s real intention is “promoting tourism, which is harming the natural ecosystem and serving the interest of the elite class, but not issuing fishing rights to marginal local people.”
If the victim or his family is not holding a BLC, there will be no compensation for a tiger attack. Victims even refuse to go to the hospital because of the Byzantine paperwork requirements, and the probability that the government will blame the victim for the human-tiger interaction.
"The wives of victims who die from tiger attacks face social stigma, branded with derogatory labels such as 'husband eater' or 'tiger widow.”' Many suffer from severe poverty and psychological trauma. This stigma perhaps comes from their traditional belief system, which suggests that the husband’s fate depends on the wife’s ritual practices," notes anthropologist Amir Sohel, author of the Sapiens piece.
Sohel observes, "The present conservation model assumes that the local people are a threat to biodiversity." Until that changes, the people of the Sundarbans will continue to endure a subsistence living, sharing it with a truly magnificent animal that sees them as food.
