With winter on its way out, the mercury level has been rising steadily across the state. This has brought back the memories of last year’s devastating fires in several forest areas of the state. Similipal national park, the first and the most famous tiger reserve of the state, suffered extensive damage due to forest fires last year.
Hence, forest officials are already mobilizing resources to fight such fires with focus on the protection of major wildlife habitats. According to highly placed sources, district-level action plans for preventing and controlling forest fires have been laid out for 23 districts, and GPS mapping of vulnerable points has also been done. With the state government adopting a Forest Fire Free (3F) strategy this year for every panchayat, emphasis is on maintaining fire lines and reaching out to villages on the fringe of forests.
The Forest department has reportedly sought to mobilize funds from various sources to tackle wildfire hazards in Similipal and other forests this year. The use of CAMPA funds for the purpose is not being ruled out.
The Similipal national park had faced manpower problems last year after slashing of funds under Project Tiger for the 2021-22 fiscal. The park had reported 428 fire points between January 1 and March 4 last year. The park authorities want to be better prepared this time. More than 2,000 fire lines have already been created, while around 700 fringe villages have been identified in Baripada, Karanjia and Rairangpur divisions of the park for awareness generation.
Around 150 fire squads, 550 protection assistants and 200 field staff of the department have been mobilized while 400 fire blowers have been kept in readiness to tackle forest fires in the state’s biggest tiger reserve and national park.
Tackling forest fires are important not only from the point of view of saving wildlife but also ensuring the livelihood sustainability of the communities living close to the forests. Most of these are tribal communities which depend almost exclusively on forest produce for livelihood.
Although too much dependence of these communities on neighbouring forests is not good, as this can adversely affect the food stock of animals, it is important that people living in the periphery villages draw required sustenance from the forests. This is possible only if forests remain healthy. One good example is the Chandaka-Dampara sanctuary where a large stretch of the reserve forest had turned into a virtual scrubland about a decade ago following over-exploitation of resources. Excessive human interference had also begun to have a negative impact on the wildlife inhabiting this forest.
This is the situation also in several other forest areas of the state. Things can turn worse in such forests in the event of a wildfire which must be avoided at any cost. The state government is being wise by taking all possible steps to prevent the recurrence of what happened in Similipal last year.
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