MAMMOTH PROJECT
SONIA JABBAR, TEA PLANTER AND WILDLIFE CONSERVATIONIST
It was 2012. Sonia Jabbar had just finished planting a 35-acre plot in her tea estate. That night, around 10 pm, a guard rushed in with the bad news: about 60 elephants had entered the estate and moved into the newly-planted area. They were sure to flatten the delicate, young saplings. The guards suggested scaring the animals away with firecrackers and “mashaals” (torches). But Sonia’s love of wildlife intervened. She felt less damage would be done if the animals were left undisturbed. After spending a sleepless night, she ventured out at dawn to find the herd leaving. Inspecting the section, she found that of over a hundred thousand plants, only seven had been destroyed. “Imagine what a group of 60 men would have done in similar circumstances,” she says.
Sonia inherited her family’s 1,200-acre Nuxalbari Tea Estate in Darjeeling district in 2011, and noticed that the number of elephants visiting her tea estate was growing with each passing year. Elephants have a traditional migration route through the TeraiDooars belt when travelling between Assam and the Mahananda basin to Nepal and back. With Nepal having constructed a 17 km long fence along the border with Bengal at the Mechi river, the elephants were hitting a road block and getting diverted to her tea estate and neighbouring farmlands. Additionally, a rash of development activities—new colonies, flyovers, highways, factories and railway tracks—were disrupting traditional elephant corridors, bringing them into direct conflict with humans.
Sonia acquired her love for the wilds from her father, a keen shikari whom she accompanied on hunting expeditions ever since she was a baby, and her uncle, the late Ashok Kumar, a famous wildlife conservationist. Realising that elephants had very little forest cover left in the area and were chased wherever they went, Sonia decided to welcome them whenever they entered her estate. “The elephants know how to move in between rows of tea,” Sonia explains. “Had it not been so, my estate wouldn’t have survived.”
Over the past six years, Nuxalbari estate has served as a safe resting place for elephants, with fruits and shoots to eat. Sonia has developed a threepronged programme to help the elephants. The first is to train the estate’s security personnel to stop outsiders from entering the property to chase and harm the elephants. When the animals enter, the guards create a 400 m wide corridor for them to pass through. Even estate workers are kept away and told to be silent so not to disturb the animals. The second is an ambitious re-wilding project to create a 100-acre native species forest on the estate, both to conserve biodiversity and to afford shelter and forage for the elephants. Third is the Haathi Saathi Nature Club for the children of estate workers, for which 130 children have signed up. “Even if five of them grow up to love and protect the environment, our planet has half a chance,” she says.
Sonia is also attempting a pilot crop insurance project for neighbouring farms. Neither private nor government insurance covers crop loss from animal depredation. “So, we’ll need to register as a self-help group and raise funds,” Sonia says.
For her efforts, the University of Montana and WFEN, US, have awarded the estate Certified Elephant Friendly Tea Estate and the Wildlife Trust of India declared it a Green Corridor Champion of North Bengal.