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’.