India’s Indigenous people pay price of tiger conservation

Officials celebrated just hours away from several of India’s largest tiger sanctuaries when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced in the southern city of Mysuru that the country’s tiger population has grown steadily to more than 3,000 since the flagship conservation program began 50 years ago amid concerns that the the number of big cats decreased.

“India is a country where protecting nature is part of our culture,” Modi said in his speech on Sunday. “That’s why we have a lot of unique conservation achievements.”

Modi also launched the International Big Cats Alliance, which he says will focus on the protection and conservation of seven big cats: the tiger, lion, leopard, snow leopard, cougar, jaguar and cheetah.

But indigenous peoples, known as Adivasi in India, say conservation projects have displaced members of their community over the past half century. Adivasi communities in Karnataka organized protests last month to highlight how their people, who have lived in forests for centuries, have been kept out of conservation efforts.

Project Tiger began in 1973 after a census of the big cats found that India’s tigers were rapidly becoming extinct due to habitat loss, unregulated sport hunting, increased poaching and retaliatory human killings. Lawmakers and officials tried to address these issues, but the conservation model revolved around creating protected reserves where ecosystems can function undisturbed by humans.

Several Indigenous groups say conservation strategies, heavily influenced by American environmentalism, have led to the uprooting of countless communities that have lived in the forests for millennia.

Members of various Adivasi groups have formed the Nagarahole Adivasi Forest Rights Establishment Committee to protest evictions from their ancestral lands and seek a voice in how the forests are managed.

“Nagarahole was one of the first forests to be brought under Project Tiger, and our parents and grandparents were probably among the first to be evicted from the forests in the name of conservation,” says JA Shivu, 27, who belongs to the Jenu. Kuruba tribe. “We have lost all rights to visit our land, our temples or even collect honey from the forests. How can we keep living like this?”

The less than 40,000 Jenu Kuruba people are one of 75 tribal groups the Indian government considers particularly vulnerable.

Jenu, which means honey in the South Indian Kannada language, is the tribe’s main source of income. The members collect it from beehives in the woods to sell. Adivasi communities such as the Jenu Kurubas are among the poorest in India.

Experts say conservation policies that try to create pristine wilderness have been influenced by prejudice against local communities.

The Indian Ministry of Tribal Affairs has repeatedly said it is working on Adivasi rights. Only about one percent of India’s more than 100 million Adivasis have been granted any right to forest land, despite a government forest rights bill passed in 2006 that aims to “undo the historic wrong” to forest communities.

Indigenous peoples are also losing their land to climate change, with wildfires becoming more frequent due to extreme heat and unpredictable rainfall.

India is home to more than 75 percent of the world’s wild tiger population. India has more tigers than its protected areas can hold, and the cats now live on the outskirts of cities and in sugar cane fields.

Tigers have disappeared from Bali and Java, and the Chinese tigers are probably extinct in the wild. The Sunda Island tiger subspecies is found only in Sumatra. Many have hailed India’s efforts to protect this endangered species as a success.

“Project Tiger hardly has a parallel in the world as a plan of this scale and magnitude has not been more successful anywhere else,” said SP Yadav, a senior Indian government official in charge of Project Tiger.

But critics say the social costs of fort conservation, where forest departments protect wildlife and prevent local communities from encroaching on forest lands, are high.

Sharachchandra Lele of the Bengaluru-based Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment said the conservation model is outdated.

“There are already successful examples of forests managed by local communities in partnership with government officials, and tiger numbers have actually increased, while people in these regions have benefited,” he said.

One who would agree is Vidya Athreya, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society of India, who has been studying interactions between big cats and humans for the past two decades.

“Traditionally, we always put wildlife before people,” Athreya said, arguing that the best way to protect wildlife in India is to work with local communities.

Shivu wants to return to a life where indigenous communities and tigers live together.

“We regard them as gods and we as stewards of these forests,” he said.