In Kerala’s eastern belt, wildlife conflict is usually discussed as an environmental problem or a compensation issue. Elephants destroy crops, wild boars raid fields, monkeys damage houses, and leopards trigger fear. The state responds with fences, compensation claims, patrols, and occasional political theatre. What is rarely acknowledged is that wildlife conflict is fundamentally a labour and livelihood design problem. Vision Kerala 2047 must reframe coexistence not as protection versus people, but as a question of how work, time, income, and risk are structured in landscapes shared with wildlife.
The eastern belt is not a pristine wilderness interrupted by humans. It is a lived landscape where agriculture, forest, settlement, and movement overlap daily. People do not encounter wildlife randomly. Conflict happens during work. Farmers are attacked while guarding fields at night. Plantation workers face risk during early morning shifts. Women collecting firewood or fodder encounter animals during predictable hours. Crop loss occurs because labour cannot be present continuously. These are labour design failures, not just ecological ones.
Treating wildlife conflict as a labour policy problem changes the toolkit completely. Instead of asking how to eliminate animals or compensate loss after damage, policy begins by asking how work can be redesigned so that humans are less exposed and livelihoods remain viable. Vision Kerala 2047 must adopt this lens if coexistence is to be real rather than rhetorical.
The first shift is recognising time as a risk factor. Most wildlife encounters follow patterns tied to dawn, dusk, night, and seasonal migration. Yet agricultural labour in the eastern belt often demands presence precisely during these high-risk windows. Traditional farming calendars assumed large family labour pools and collective vigilance. Today, labour shortages, ageing populations, and fragmented households make continuous guarding impossible. Expecting individuals to bear this risk is unreasonable.
A labour-centred coexistence policy would redesign work schedules. Collective guarding shifts, paid night-watch labour pools, and time-bounded cultivation windows can reduce exposure. This requires treating wildlife risk as an occupational hazard, not a personal misfortune. Just as factories redesign shifts for safety, agriculture in wildlife zones must redesign labour patterns.
The second shift is income diversification as risk mitigation. Wildlife conflict devastates livelihoods because households depend heavily on a single crop or activity. When that crop is destroyed, income collapses. Vision Kerala 2047 must treat diversification not as development advice but as conflict prevention. Households with multiple income streams are less likely to engage in dangerous guarding or retaliatory behaviour.
This means promoting livelihoods that are compatible with wildlife presence. Agroforestry, seasonal processing work, remote service roles, forest-compatible crops, and non-field-based income sources reduce exposure. The goal is not to abandon agriculture, but to reduce the hours and seasons when people must physically defend vulnerable assets.
Compensation policy must also change. Current compensation systems reward loss, not adaptation. Claims are slow, politicised, and often inadequate. Vision Kerala 2047 should introduce risk-linked livelihood support rather than damage-linked payouts. Households in high-conflict zones should receive predictable support for adopting safer labour practices, such as switching crops, investing in shared storage, or participating in community watch systems. This shifts incentives from confrontation to adjustment.
Another neglected dimension is mental labour. Living with constant wildlife threat creates chronic stress. Fear alters work choices, school attendance, and social life. This invisible burden is never compensated. A labour-focused approach acknowledges psychological risk as part of occupational hazard. Community-level support, predictable safety systems, and reduced uncertainty improve not just safety but productivity and well-being.
Wildlife coexistence as labour policy also reframes fencing and technology. Fences are often seen as permanent solutions. In reality, they fail, break, and shift conflict elsewhere. From a labour perspective, fences are tools to reduce required human presence, not to eliminate animals. Temporary fencing, seasonal barriers, and mobile deterrents aligned with cropping cycles make more sense than static infrastructure. The question becomes how to reduce labour exposure, not how to build walls.
Education and skill policy must align with this reality. Youth in wildlife zones often leave because agriculture feels unsafe and unrewarding. Vision Kerala 2047 should support skill pathways that allow people to remain economically connected to their land without being physically present at all times. Digital work, cooperative enterprises, processing units, and service roles linked to local ecosystems allow income without constant exposure.
There is also a governance dimension. Forest departments and agriculture departments operate in silos. Wildlife policy focuses on animals. Agriculture policy focuses on crops. Labour policy focuses on factories and offices. No one owns the space where these intersect. Vision Kerala 2047 must create institutional coordination that treats human–wildlife landscapes as work environments. Safety standards, risk assessment, and labour design must apply here just as they do in industrial zones.
Importantly, this reframing reduces hostility toward wildlife. When people are forced to choose between safety and survival, resentment grows. When systems reduce risk structurally, tolerance increases. Coexistence improves not because attitudes change, but because exposure decreases. This is a far more reliable path to conservation.
There is also a gender dimension. Women often bear disproportionate wildlife risk through unpaid labour such as fodder collection, water fetching, and home-based agriculture. These activities are invisible in policy. A labour-based approach recognises them as work and designs protections accordingly. Alternative fuel access, fodder banks, and community services reduce daily exposure dramatically.
Critics will argue that this approach normalises wildlife presence at the cost of agricultural tradition. This is a false binary. Tradition has already changed due to labour shortage, climate stress, and market volatility. Vision Kerala 2047 does not romanticise the past. It designs for the present.
Implementation must be local and participatory. Wildlife risk varies by valley, slope, and season. Labour redesign cannot be imposed uniformly. Panchayats, cooperatives, and local institutions must co-design schedules, support systems, and diversification pathways. The state’s role is to fund, coordinate, and standardise safety principles, not to dictate crops.
Metrics of success must also change. Today, success is measured by compensation claims paid or animals relocated. Under a labour framework, success is measured by reduction in human exposure hours, decline in night guarding, stable incomes, school attendance, and reduced retaliatory incidents. These indicators reflect real coexistence.
This policy also intersects with climate adaptation. As climate change alters vegetation and animal movement, conflict patterns will intensify. Labour systems that rely on constant human vigilance will collapse. Designing low-exposure livelihoods now is a form of climate resilience.
There is a moral clarity in this reframing. Asking poor farmers to physically confront wildlife to protect crops that barely sustain them is unjust. A society that values conservation must absorb some of that burden collectively. Labour policy is how societies distribute risk. Vision Kerala 2047 must extend this logic beyond factories into forests.
The eastern belt has lived with wildlife far longer than policy has acknowledged. People here understand coexistence intuitively. What they lack is institutional support that aligns work with safety. Reframing wildlife coexistence as labour policy respects lived intelligence instead of imposing abstract solutions.
By 2047, human–wildlife conflict will not disappear. But it can become manageable, predictable, and less traumatic. That happens not through fences alone, but through redesigning how people earn a living in shared landscapes.
This is an uncommon policy because it breaks bureaucratic boundaries. It asks labour policy to enter forests and wildlife policy to enter fields. But real life has always ignored departmental lines. Vision Kerala 2047 must do the same.
Coexistence is not an attitude. It is a work design.
