In India’s reserves: tiger takes it all

“We are not ready to move. Where will we go? We’ll have to wander around like homeless people,” says Munnalal Kurmi. He is a farmer in Sarsela Ryt – one of 93 villages in the process of being swallowed up by India’s 54th tiger reserve – Veerangana Durgavati (VDTR) in Damoh district of Madhya Pradesh. A new dimension: cheetahs too are expected here anytime.

VDTR is among the most recent of the 58 tiger reserves dedicated to tiger habitat; the cheetah gets to share two. These reserves are inviolate spaces – only for wild animals.

To create these reserves – now covering almost 80,000 square kilometres or roughly 10 per cent of India’s forest cover – a total of 257 villages have been relocated, displaced from their homes, the Union Minister of State for Tribal Affairs Durgadas Uikey informed the Lok Sabha in December 2025. And 730 villages also located within reserves, are next in line for ejection.

Daba is another village in Damoh that will be swallowed up by the new reserve. “Where will we live? What will we eat?” asks Radha Rani Gond from the village that lies on the edge of the Nauradehi sanctuary. Seated in her courtyard in the winter sun, her hands running through the wheat harvest that has come in, the 75-year-old is visibly upset.

The basis of reserves is ‘fortress conservation’ – exclusionary protected areas for wildlife. Ecologists point out that it follows an oversimplified narrative that tigers and people cannot coexist. Fact: India’s forest dwelling communities have always lived in close proximity to wild animals. “We are the ones who take care of the jungle and the animals. They are throwing us out, and right here they will build a tourist guest house,” says Janka Bai, in her fifties. Her village Umrawan was swallowed by the expanding Panna tiger reserve in 2015.

Displaced communities most often comprise India’s poorest Adivasis, Dalits and Other Backward Classes (OBC). It is they who lose their homes and ties to the land. The delicate balance of earnings dependent on the forest abruptly ends, social ties snap, and political voices die out.

It’s not just reserves that cause Adivasi displacement – but they seem to be a fast unfolding factor right now. While Adivasis account for 8.6 per cent of India’s population, they are 55 per cent of all Indians displaced since Independence. Uprooted for “the construction of dams, mines, industrial development and the creation of wildlife parks and sanctuaries.”

In the VDTR expansion of core area for the tiger and now cheetahs to come, Munnalal’s six acres of land, his wells and oxen, and his home, will all go. The 50-year-old is seething with anger at the compensation money of Rs. 15 lakh. “What can you do in 15 lakh So, we are not going to move. Even if they give one crore it will not be enough.”

PARI found that in nearby Damoh town, Rs. 15 lakh will buy roughly 500-700 square feet of land – the size of one room in his current home.

“In any of the villages here, you will not get good farmland with access to water for less than 10 to 15 lakh [rupees] an acre,” says a resident of Sarsela Ryt who prefers to stay anonymous to protect his state job. “Even poor-quality land is five lakh rupees an acre.”

Clearly the National Tiger Conservation Authority’s (NTCA’s) relocation package of Rs. 15 lakh per adult is not the bountiful compensation that it is made out to be.

Those who take it can only afford half-finished homes, with water and sanitation needs still unmet. This was Shanti’s (name changed) recent experience. “There were huge craters on this land that had to be filled, and it cost us over a lakh. And nine lakh rupees to build this house. The money was nowhere near enough. We will have to take a loan to finish the house,” she told PARI.

In Rehli village, Sagar district, farmer Hamir Yadav paid Rs. 13.5 lakh for an acre in 2024. “Now it is 15,” he said when we met him in December 2025. “Aaj kachu toh kal kachu [today one price and tomorrow a completely different and higher one].”

Yadav, his four brothers and their families are in the process of moving out of Patnamohali, a hamlet in the sanctuary where they say basic amenities like healthcare and access to schools was minimal. Since the five families decided to pool their money, they have managed a slightly better deal – in both land and housing, and a balance in the bank. Only households like theirs, with more adults, do relatively better. However, the compensation is standardised per individual adult. There is no separate compensation for land, cattle and other assets the families lose. The Munnalals of the sanctuary area will be big losers.

But keeping cattle – an important part of Yadav family life – will be tough. “We only drink milk from our own animals,” his wife, Pinky Yadav says smiling. But now with no access to the forest for grazing, this will be an expensive and difficult proposition.

Janka Bai’s careful household economy of growing channa, masoor, wheat and til, and fetching aachar, mahua, amla, tendu from the forests, along with vegetables, roots and herbs in the monsoons, ended when she was evicted. “We relied on the jungle,” she told PARI.

Across the country, 275 million people depend on forests to supplement their livelihood, and they are still unable to rise out of poverty. Overnight they become at best marginal farmers, but mostly cheap wage labour.

Janka Bai summed up her displacement experience saying: “Eent dikha kar pathar marte hain in log [they show you bricks for building but eventually all you get are rough stones].”

India’s forests, India’s tribals and India’s underground mineral wealth lie on top of each other – a perfect overlap. The passwords to gain access are: ‘national security,’ infrastructure, ‘development,’ and renewable energy. The bounty is land, bauxite, manganese, iron ore and more.

Another way in is by calling for tiger and cheetah parks, summoning national pride in the wild cats. But ironically, it is here that infrastructure projects get the go ahead: 60 square kilometres of core area in Panna tiger reserve will drown to link rivers; a critical wildlife corridor in Shahbad will become a pumped storage reservoir, and Sariska reserve’s buffer zone shrunk to allow mining.

Madhya Pradesh has the maximum number of reserves for the tiger – nine in total. These villages to be displaced are inhabited by people critically dependent on non-timber forest produce (NTFP). At least one in three Adivasis in MP are landless. Even the Niti Aayog reports that one in five people in MP are multidimensionally poor.

In the nearby Boria panchayat, Ghasi Ram Adivasi does not want to move out as his access to the forest – his main income – will end. “Abhi toh jungle band kar diya hai, aur bus bhi ruka diya [They have closed the jungle to us. They have also stopped the public bus which would come to our hamlet],” he says, revealing different ways in which locals figure out they have no option.

In Daba, electricity has never come to this Adivasi hamlet in Damoh. So despite her advancing age, Lakshmi Rani Gond, says she will relocate to finally get basic amenities for her children and grandchildren.

Before the Wild Life (Protection) Act 1972, and Project Tiger, forest areas were primarily seen as revenue spaces for timber. “The forest department’s main job was to control biomass, NTFP and MFP, log timber, use labour for tasks, and cultivation,” says Professor Mahesh Rangarajan, leading environmental historian, speaking to PARI.

“The FRA [Forest Rights Act 2006] tried to correct this historical top-down approach, but NTCA arrived and changed all that by creating critical tiger habitats (CTH) in which the FRA had no power,” adds Rangarajan. “It became very difficult to secure rights under the FRA.”

In India’s forests, NTCA holds many cards. It was established in 2006 as a statutory body of the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change. In its first year of existence, it added 25 reserves for the tiger. Buffer zones where people had lived for centuries overnight became ‘core’ zones of critical tiger habitat, leading to loss of livelihoods and displacement.

“Why were we thrown out [of the jungle]?” ask India’s forest dwellers like Raghulal Jatav, a Dalit who grew up in the forests of Kuno, Madhya Pradesh. He asks because he and his family along with 16,000 others were moved out in 1999 for lions who never came. Over two decades later, cheetahs arrived instead.

Their displacement caused them immense distress and 27 years later, these mostly Sahariya Adivasi and Dalit communities are still struggling to survive – the compensation money was inadequate, and promises of arable land and civic amenities remain out of reach.

But parks and animals do better. A reserve gets top budget, and state forest departments benefit. NTCA’s budget (2025-2026) mentions Rs. 153 crore to be used for increase in salaries of staff, better amenities for them, relocation packages and more.

Tigers get the lion’s share of conservation budgets and so, “there has been an over-eagerness to declare tiger reserves,” points out biologist Professor Raman Sukumar. He spoke to PARI shortly after returning from the March 28, 2026, meeting of the Standing Committee of the National Board for Wildlife (NBWL).

A third of India’s 3,682 tigers (Panthera tigris) live outside protected areas, and their future cannot be secured in isolation from the future of millions who live on the fringes.

In 53 years of Project Tiger, the tiger count has gone up from less than 2,000 to almost double. In the same period, India’s human population has almost tripled. The pressure on land is intense, and conflict is a given.

“The goal has been to increase the tiger population, without planning for the success of it,” says Ashraf Shaikh to PARI. A wildlife biologist, he has been working in and around Tadoba Andheri sanctuary and around where he says roughly 250-300 attacks on humans have been noted in the last year (2025). “The natural instinct of the tiger is to move, and they cannot survive as isolated populations in reserves,” warns Shaikh, who has written about the danger of shrinking corridors encroached by development projects.

Every week, viral videos and frontpage photos capture images of big cats in homes, in public spaces, crossing highways, drowning in rivers, and more. From January to March 2026, 45 tigers have died, roughly half of them outside reserves (NTCA).

But ironically, those living inside the reserves rarely see them. Munnalal in Damoh questions the presence of wild animals: “They [forest department] say there are 25 tigers in Nauradehi, but you would think we would have laid eyes on at least one, but we’ve never seen even one. Not even the nishan [pug mark] of one.”

Like him, many who live near forests, in what were earlier buffer zones, see no reason to move out.

“History has shown that even with tribals and other communities inside reserves, tiger population can increase,” says Sukumar, pointing to the rise in tiger numbers in Sathyamagalam [Tamil Nadu] and Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple [Karnataka] reserves.

“There are many tiger reserves without tigers, so why not focus on restocking there, before we rush to relocate.”

The reporter would like to thank Chandan Lal of Damoh, and Devashree Somani from Panna, for their generous help while reporting this story.