Taking on India’s tiger ‘conservation cartel’
‘The kind of conservation being done in the name of Project Tiger is wrong – it is not serving the people, the forest, nor the wildlife,’ Rajan tells me over the phone from Odisha in eastern India. Rajan is a non-Indigenous member of the Community Network Against Protected Areas (CNAPA), a coalition of groups resisting forced displacement of Indigenous populations in India.
Since 1973 the Indian government has created 55 national tiger reserves under ‘Project Tiger’, a campaign involving systematic clearances of Adivasi communities from their ancestral homes without their consent or consultation. In July, an information request filed by CNAPA to the National Tiger Conservation Authority revealed plans to intensify eviction plans across the country, putting nearly 400,000 Adivasi at risk.
CNAPA have since mobilized an unprecedented level of organized resistance between previously unconnected Indigenous communities. In September, seven hundred Adivasi people from 25 villages gathered at the entrance gates of Nagarhole, one of India’s best-known tiger reserves in Karnataka state, demanding a judicial review into rights violations under Project Tiger.
Many communities are evicted by force, without warning. Support rarely materializes, even in cases where the government offers settlement packages, says Survivor International campaigns director Sophie Grig. Many displaced Adivasi end up living in slums and working on plantations but the overseers of Project Tiger refuse to acknowledge this process as anything other than ‘voluntary’.
Grig describes this approach to conservation as a ‘fortress model’, where reserves are violently cleared and guarded by militarized forces as a colonial practice. CNAPA is working to counteract the colonial narrative that frames Indigenous groups as a danger to local biodiversity – not only because it is used to justify violence, but because it doesn’t work.
‘Study after study has shown that if you recognize Indigenous people's land rights you get just as good if not better conservation outcomes,’ Grig says, citing the recognition of the Soliga tribe’s forest rights as one example.
Critics of Project Tiger refer to those involved in the Project – the Indian government, the NCTA and the multinational conservation organizations like WWF and WCS – as the ‘conservation cartel’, due to their corrupt ties to the mining industry and the nationalist Hindutva, as well as their economic motivations for the mass evictions.
Tiger reserves, when cleared of the Indigenous population, create opportunities for mass tourism and profit. The Kaziringa reserve in Assam, one of the most militarized conservation spaces in India, was recently valued at nearly $31bn.
‘There’s an economic value that’s being fixed to the forest, to the land, to the tiger, to every other form of biodiversity,’ Rajan explains. ‘That is what is being resisted.’
The CNAPA-led protest movement, which has seen demonstrations across India throughout September with many more planned, demands an end to evictions and justice for the harm done to Indigenous communities under Project Tiger. They also want to see the overturning of the entire conservation model and the complete withdrawal of conservation organizations from designated reserves, allowing tiger populations to flourish under the care of the traditional keepers of the land. This mass mobilization has given Indigenous communities a sense of hope, says Rajan.
The ‘conservation cartel’ have so far remained silent on the recent unrest, but Grig is optimistic.
‘If these protests are successful in challenging the government to either prove that they got consent for these reserves or to give [Indigenous] land back, it’s a rallying cry that could be picked up by Indigenous people around the world. It will send shock waves around the conservation industry,’ she said.
— Paula Lacey (@pllcy)