In Arunachal Pradesh, hitting bulls-eye with anti-airgun initiative

‘Reverse sermon’ helped Arunachal Pradesh Minister Mama Natung motivate many to give up their animal-killing airguns; UNESCO recognises ‘Airgun Surrender Abhiyan’ as a model wildlife conservation programme

How do you stop people from hunting? By advising them to hunt.

In March 2021, Environment, Forest, and Climate Change Minister Mama Natung made an impromptu announcement in the 60-member Arunachal Pradesh Assembly that he would wean people away from hunting “rare animals and birds getting rarer by the day”.

For a second, he thought he had made a mistake. Stopping people from hunting — a tradition for many among the 140 tribes and sub-tribes across the 83,743 sq. km State with about 80% forest cover — was easier said than done.

“My mind said it was impossible but my heart said otherwise. Then and there in the House, I decided to launch an airgun surrender programme from my village Lamdang [near Seppa, the headquarters of East Kameng district] because charity begins at home,” Mr. Natung told The Hindu.

He knew asking people not to hunt would be counter-productive. He advised them to maintain the tradition, but in the old style — with bows and arrows or any other weapon their forefathers used.

“With a bow and arrow, a hunter can at most kill six birds and animals, mostly for food, in a year. But an airgun makes him hunt 200 or more animals in a day, and that needed to stop because we have been losing our fauna, many not found anywhere else on earth,” he said.

The ‘reverse sermon’ worked. On March 17, about a week after his announcement in the Assembly, villagers of Lamdang gave up 46 airguns. The Airgun Surrender Abhiyan, recognised at the UNESCO’s International Conference on Biosphere Reserves in Malaysia in November, took off.