Social Ecological Projects for Environmental Preservation

June 13-14,2007
On Wednesday we travelled three hours to a village called Swai Madhopur to visit the Prakratik Society and Ranthambor Sevika. Ranthambhore National Park, once the hunting reserve of the Jaipur Royalty became a Wildlife Sanctuary in 1955. There are 96 villages surrounding the national park and because of the dire poverty the villagers use the forest to graze their cows, harvest the grass, and hack the trees for firewood. Poachers have also been illegally hunting the tigers to sell in Asian markets for their various parts, including China and Lasa, Tibet. Each tiger with its separate parts can fetch up to $50K on the black market and as a result the tiger population has decreased down to two dozen tigers.
While poachers have confessed and officers have been occused of being complacent with poachers, there have been no prosecutions by the government. The Prakratik Society started by Dr. G.S. Rathore, the son of the world famous tiger man Fateh Singh Rathore WITH DR. FATEH SINGH RATHORE
was started as a social ecological project with the aim of protecting the forest and the tiger by providing alternatives means of livelihood to reduce the villagers' dependence on the forest and its resources. To reduce the villagers' dependence on firewood, Prakratik created alternative energy sources such as the Biogas Project, in which the villager is encouraged to stall feed one or two cows, instead of several, and deposit their manure into biogas units which then generates methane gas that can be used for cooking. There are now 482 biogas stations in the villages and growing BIOGAS UNIT
Another project is Artificial insemination of cows to create a better stock of cows to produce more milk, the surplus of which can be sold.
Yet another project is family planning, in which women who have 2 children are encouraged to get sterilized and if they do so their children will be able to attend the Fateh Public School, another project started by the society. FATEH PUBLIC SCHOOL
Education to village girls is absolutely free and for boys it's at a reduced price compared to urban children. Fateh Public School is a modern state of the art school in a rural setting that provides the future generation of village children education and an opporutnity for upward mobility.
Tiger Watch, an associated NGO helps provide the poachers rehabilitation, medical help and trains them to understand the significance of the forest and the tiger and trains them to become guards against other poachers.

To gain the trust of the surrounding communities, Dr. G.S. Rathore opened a state of the art rural hospital before establishing all the other projects to provide much needed medical services to the 96 villages, including Family Planning, general outpatient services, Ophthalmic clinic, OBGYN services, Antenatal and postnatal care, and general surgery.

After meeting with Fateh Sign Rathore, we travelled to one of the villages to interact with the villages. They were welcoming and curious about us as usual and we took some great pictures with them. Sophia brought animal cookies for them which thrilled them to no end.