The Royal Chitwan National Park represents the first National Park of Nepal, subsequently established just after the enactment of the Wildlife Conservation Act, 1973. The exclusion and violation of human rights was prior to the establishment of the larger park. The park has been established in the Chitwan valley which was once home to the Tharu indigenous communities. After the1950s because of malaria and floods reason, many people came down from the hills to the Tarai valley, including the Chitwan region, starting to illegally occupying the Padampur area (originally inhabited by the Tharu) [5]. Many Tharu people got denied the use of their land because of the exploitation of hills people and further because of conservation policies, under which both the indigenous Tharu and the other people were expelled from the Chitwan area. The final establishment of the Chitwan National Park in 1973, further reinforced those restriction policies, creating much resentment among local people, as the access to park resources were consequently denied. They were entirely dependent on field cropping, using timber, fodder, thatch and supplementing grazing from the park. The establishment of the park was never carried out in consultation with the communities who always felt excluded by the wildlife conservation management approach by the wildlife warden. For this reason, although the park limits were established, people continued to overpassed the territory for collecting their sustenance material and use the needed resources [5,6,7]. This generated conflicts between the larger purpose of wildlife conservation and local people’s need. It is estimated that about 20.000 Tharu people were relocated from the park for conservation reasons [9]. However the history of the relocation before the establishment of the park has not been entirely recorded, but according to some literature, it is recounted that it was a very violent process, ‘the soldiers forcibly removed all the villages located inside the designated boundary of the park. Houses were burned down, fields and houses were trampled by elephants, men, women and children were threatened sometimes at gunpoint" [6]. Among the villages relocated the one primary affected by the move were the villages of Jayamangala and Bankatta, which were slowly relocated consequently to flood devastation in 1994 in the area of Saguntole, which was renamed as New Padampur. At that time it was given land and compensation to the 1000 people affected by the move, but this was not sufficient to ensure a life of dignity to the Tharu people, who continue today to suffer by the damaged caused by the conservationist policies and the inefficiency of the administration to cooperate with the people’s need [6]. It has been recorded that in order to mitigate the conflict the government tried implementing some new strategies such as in 1976 the park opened up for annual grass cutting season for 20 days in January, which was later reduced in two weeks. They were also attempted to generate employment park activities, to work as a tourist guide and other related work to conservation, but all these were always carried on in an exclusionary manner and the activities did not really cover the real need of the people [8]. Moreover, without people consultation, the park got extended from an earlier 544 sq km to 932 sq km in 1978 and included in 1984 in theUNESCO World Heritage List [8]. Other measures for community-conservation management were further taken in the early '90 with the establishment of a buffer zone. Under this legal framework, the locals were encouraged and supported to take revenues from alternatives activities, such as tourism and giving them the rights to use forest resources in the buffer areas [9]. |