Adjoining the city of Bangalore, the Bannerghatta National Park is 250 square kilometers of dense forest and scrub lands. The park is part of the wildlife corridor for elephants connecting with the BRT Wildlife Sanctuary and the Sathyamangalam forests to the south. Loosely these forests connect the wildlife habitats of Western Ghats to those of Eastern Ghats, making them some of the most crucial wildlife migration routes in India.
Surrounding the Bannerghatta National Park are the forest buffer zones - areas demarcated to reduce and control the interaction between people and the wildlife. The buffer zones are further seen by conservationists as protection against “development” too close to the forest. In recent years there has been tremendous political pressure to open up these buffer zones for development activities, which range from the construction of residential layouts to granite mining. Last year the Government of India responded to the demands of the state government of Karnataka and significantly reduced the buffer zone area around the forest. Commercial mining, stone quarrying and stone crushing operations are banned in the buffer zone, though the park has been threatened for years now by a number of illegal granite quarries operating around it. The reduction of the buffer zone last year by about a 100 square kilometers puts the park at further risk with legal development activities becoming viable much closer to the park.
The forested valleys and granite hills of the Bannerghatta National park has been home to a number of tribes like most forested regions in South India. A number of old temples dot the Suvarnamukhi hills in the park area, a testament to the cultural significance of these forest lands in the history of South India. The modern Indian state has made efforts to move tribal populations out of reserved forest and national parks sometimes by building consensus and at other times, coercively. There are now small and diminishing tribal hamlets in the buffer zone around the Bannerghatta National park. These tribal communities, among them Hakki Pikki tribes and the Irula tribes, live precariously with development activities ramping up around the forest. Migration of the younger generations away from the forests also threaten their language, identity and custom.
Many activists and conservationists believe that the fate of the forest lands and that of these local communities including the tribal populations here are interlinked and that conservation efforts around the forest must include them. To them it hardly seems to be a coincidence that these communities are disappearing at the same time as the forest is being threatened by urban expansion. While these communities have a close relationship with the forests and a deep knowledge of local fauna and flora, there is little to keep the younger generations around the forest and a number of factors pulling them away from it towards the city of Bangalore and its suburbs. It seems reasonable to fear a near future where the deep knowledge of the forest, its flora and fauna that the tribes and other local populations have nurtured over generations - apart from the unique culture, language and traditions - will be completely lost as they lose their connection with the forests and become assimilated into the overwhelming urban culture around them.
In this environment, Buffalo Back Collective is exploring measures to strengthen the communities in the area by experimenting with sustainable economic activities in the buffer zone. The Buffalo Back Collective is a Bangalore based not-for- profit that has worked for years now with organic farmers helping them bring their produce to urban markets such as Bangalore.
In the words of Vishalakshi Padmanabhan (Vishala), Buffalo Back Collective is a "platform where people take ownership of what they do – there is no hierarchy and each individual maintains the sustainability standards of the collective. It is a farming collective which aligns the needs of the urban with the traditional knowledge of the rural”.
At the collective’s workshop / farmhouse located in the area, women from the nearby villages in the buffer zone (including women from tribal communities) come together to produce, at a small scale, among other things, Ragi (finger millet) cookies, cooking vinegar, peanut butter and soaps. This produce is then brought to market by the Buffalo Back Collective to be sold largely in urban areas such as Bangalore. Vishala hopes that these products can be marketed locally in the future, creating a self-sustained local loop.
To begin with, the collective sees these activities as an essential step of empowering the local communities, especially the women. For the collective this is the pathway towards conservation in the region - by creating a viable rural environment populated by empowered communities, who have a stake in protecting their natural heritage.
One of the main activities that the local women are involved in is making ragi cookies. Ragi is grown extensively in Karnataka and is especially suitable for the drier parts of the state as it can be grown with little water when compared to other staples such as rice.
Local communities including the tribal populations in the area have always shared a close relationship with forests. This relationship can serve as a great strength supporting conservation efforts in and around the Bannerghatta National Park - one of the few forest areas remaining around the ever expanding city of Bangalore, which continues to cause and face widespread environmental degradation.
One of the women we met at the Buffalo Back workshop told us about the rich diversity of edible greens that the forest ecosystem supports. This knowledge is extremely local and is fast disappearing as tribal and other rural communities around forests disappear. This workshop and other similar efforts are our last lines of defense against this permanent loss.
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