Ambegaon’s farmers fear raiding bison

It was a foggy morning in July 2021 when farmer Shivram Gawari arrived at his fields bordering the Bhimashankar Wildlife Sanctuary and found over five guntha (about 0.125 acres) of his paddy crop half-eaten. The rest had been crushed to the ground.

“I had never seen anything like it before,” he says, the shock still fresh in his mind. He followed the footprints of animals which led him into the forest, and the gava (Bos gaurus and sometimes called the Indian bison) suddenly appeared. The largest of the bovines, they present a forbidding picture – males are well over six feet tall and weigh anywhere between 500 and 1,000 kilograms.

When a herd of heavy weight bison trample fields, they create huge craters which completely annihilate both crops and saplings. “Gava have destroyed my crop every season for three years now. Abandoning cultivation is my only option,” says Shivram. He is seated in front of his tin-roofed home in Don where a herd of gava has been camping since 2021.

The village is one of many settlements surrounding the Bhimashankar Wildlife Sanctuary in Maharashtra. The sanctuary is populated by deer, boar, sambar, leopard, and the rare tiger. Now in his sixties, Shivram has lived all his life in Ambegaon. He says crop losses caused by wild animals straying out of the forest have never been so devastating. “The animals should be captured and taken away,” he says.

Worried about losing his crops to them for the third year in a row, he stopped cultivating his fields over a year ago. Many other farmers have also let their land lie fallow, and have switched to collecting and selling firewood and hirda, a fruit used in ayurvedic medicines, as their primary source of income. A 2023 union government report, Guidelines for Human-Gaur Conflict Mitigation, attributes the foraging of crops by these animals to loss of food and habitat due to diminishing forests and climate change.

In 2021, the herd near Don village was small – just three to four animals. In 2024, their number has doubled and so have their invasions. Empty farms send them wandering into villages, creating an atmosphere of fear among locals.

Most farmers in the village cultivate only for sustenance. They farm on plain patches of land, no more than a few acres, available at the foothills. A few farmers have dug their own wells; and only a handful own borewells as agriculture here is rainfed. The bison attacks have injured their annual harvest and food security.

Budda Gawari cultivates three gunthas of land adjacent to his house. Like others in the village he grows local varieties of rice like raibhog in monsoon and lentils masoor and harbara in winter. “I was going to plant newly cultivated saplings on my farm. They [gava] destroyed these saplings and my entire harvest was gone. I lost the main crop my family eats. Without rice, it will be difficult for us this whole year,” says the 54-year-old farmer.

Budda belongs to the Koli Mahadev community, listed as Scheduled Tribe in the state. “I don't sell any of my produce. I don’t cultivate enough to sell,” he says. He estimates the annual value of his crop at Rs. 30,000 - 40,000. Input costs are around Rs. 10,000 to 15,000. What is left is not enough to feed his family of five for an entire year. The paddy he lost would have ensured the family’s food security.

Both Shivram and Budda contacted the forest department after suffering crop losses and recorded panchnama (investigation report). After more than six months, Shivram received Rs. 5,000 and Budda Rs. 3,000 as compensation – less than 10 per cent of their losses. “I spent at least 1,000 - 1,500 rupees going from one government office to another to get compensated for my loss,” says Budda. Sitaram Gawari, the upa sarpanch, mentioned that the rules laid down by the Ministry of Agriculture are not being followed.

Balkrushna Gawari, Budda’s son, says, “as an additional source of income MNREGA would have been extremely beneficial to us. We could have built water storage such as wells.” Less MNREGA work (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee) has pushed the farmers of Don to work as labourers in others’ fields, in the adjoining areas of Manchar and Ghodegaon. Here the fields are more fertile and there is abundant water from the downward flow of the Sahyadri hills. Yield from traditional crops such as varai and sawa, which require less attention, has ensured some sustenance for them.

Shrinking forest cover, increasing animal population and unnatural climate events are making food scarce for a lot of animals, says Dr. Amol Waghmare, a local activist and Pune district president of the All India Kisan Sabha. “These animals could have migrated from other parts of the forest in search of food and water,” he adds. Incidentally, the gava were spotted in the early summer months of 2021 when food is usually scarce in the forest, say the people of Don.

Dr. Waghmare adds, “there are very few chaukis of the forest department near Don or in the adjoining areas. Most of the forest department officials live in the taluka which is 60-70 kilometres away,” speaking about the role of forest department in mitigating the human-animal conflict. “In case of emergencies, such as when leopards have entered people’s homes, it has taken considerable time for them [officials] to arrive. They also hesitate to come to villages at night,” he says.

Sitaram Gawari, the deputy sarpanch of the village, who also incurred crop loss due to gava attacks, says that he has taken up this issue with the forest department multiple times. The department proposed to build a fence near the village to restrict the movement of the gava, after constant nudging. “This was unacceptable because the livelihoods of people are connected with the forest,” he says.

The hungry bisons are still hanging around, and so Shivram and others will not prepare their fields for the coming cropping season. “I don’t see any reason to suffer the same devastation every year. I have suffered enough,” he says.