On a hot, muggy day in July this year, Rakesh Kumre and I rode into a dense forest patch in the vicinity of Khairi, a village of 130-odd households in the Seoni district of Madhya Pradesh. After many miles along a jungle road, Kumre slowed down next to a trail that callously branched off into the adjoining wilderness. Hearing the grunt of our engine in this sanctuary of quiet, a short, stocky man emerged frantically from the other end of the trail, wearing rubber chappals, khaki, and a hand towel wrapped around his forehead. I would later learn that he was Ganesh, the resident chowkidar, or forest guard. “Good that you have arrived, bhaiya, come fast, the ox is not very far,” Ganesh said, looking at Kumre first, and then me, a little inquisitively.
Ganesh breathed heavily as he led the way, explaining the exact time and circumstances of the ‘gara.’ This word was new to my ears. In vernacular, gara means livestock depredations by wild carnivores, especially tigers and leopards. A stench caught my nostrils as we pushed forth. Not long and we came upon a group of six to seven village men standing around the body of the ox in what was a minor rivulet, or nala. The predator had hamstrung the ox and, possibly, broken its back with a few swift blows. Bottle green flies hummed around us. Though the atmosphere was grim, I would soon be given a glimpse into the conservation efforts of frontline workers such as Kumre and Ganesh in a tribal homeland that was witnessing a veritable ‘tiger boom.’
Geographically speaking, we were in the middle of the Kanha-Pench Corridor (KPC). The KPC is a landmass of approximately 5,895 sq. km, straddling the Kanha and Pench National Park of Madhya Pradesh. It includes 446 villages, spread across the three districts of Seoni, Balaghat, and Mandla. According to the 2011 census abstract, the total Scheduled Tribe (ST) Population averages 34 per cent in the aforementioned districts, with the Gonds being the most populous. Wildlife is not less. A 2023 area profile put forth by the Coalition for Wildlife Corridors confirms that wild dogs, bears, hyenas, jackals, foxes, otters, birds, snakes, leopards, and, last but not least, tigers actively use the corridor.
”Till a few years ago, tigers were numbered here,” Sukrat Uikey of Ratanpur, a neighbouring village, told me. ”But things have rapidly changed, we keep stumbling into them now,” he added. Fearing that I might dismiss this as village conjecture, Kumre drew my attention to the 2023 report of the All India Tiger Estimation (AITE). This report puts the actual figure of tigers in the KPC at an astounding 97. No other corridor comes close. In fact, many national parks doubling up as tiger reserves fail to match up. According to the same report, there are 45 tiger reserves in the country, out of the total of 58, which hold fewer tigers than those within the KPC. This includes Pench, which is home to 77 tigers. Kanha holds 105 tigers in comparison, apart from being one of the oldest and most prized reserves in the country.
The relative success of tiger conservation in the KPC shifts the question of criticality from one-sided fears of wildlife endangerment to the increased threats faced by rural society, if not places us between both sets of dilemmas. A lesser-known programme called the Immediate Relief Scheme (IRS), under which Kumre is hired, appears to offer alternatives.
In the early 2000s, the government’s record at compensation was not impressive. Residents in Khairi and the surrounding villages of Pandrapani, Ratanpur, and Pipardon variously shared that it could take close to a year for the department to dispense the compensation. Sometimes the compensation was said to be lower than a tenth of the market value of the dead cattle. According to the versions of park officials and wildlife organisations around Kanha, livestock owners had resorted to lacing the bodies of their dead animals with pesticides at the time. Sensing the angst of forest dwellers, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), India, inaugurated the IRS in 2009. As part of the Scheme, WWF set out to hand Rs 900, later revised to Rs 1,200, to the concerned cattle owner within 24 to 48 hours. This interim relief, or ‘rahat rashi’ as it is called by the village residents, was intended to serve as a timely reprieve, arresting antagonistic sentiments towards wildlife in the face of insignificant and delayed disbursements.
The entirety of the KPC includes 32 forest ranges, or administrative units that the forest department relies on to manage plantations, soil and moisture regimes, and wildlife. The IRS was first initiated in the villages and forest ranges around Kanha, and then gradually extended to those extending towards Pench, in the southwest. Kumre and his peers, Mahaveer Goswami, Mohanlal Uikey, Ravin Mahle, and Jeetinder Jhangre, are allocated a fixed number of ranges considering the location of their resident villages spread across the corridor. When a gara takes place, the herder or livestock owner reports the matter to the chowkidar, who then communicates it to the beat guard or ranger, who, in turn, informs the IRS team member overseeing the concerned range, bringing the latter to the spot.
Riding pillion to such sites of conflict with Kumre and other IRS team members, I learned an early lesson: speed was not the optimal way to beat time. In a typical scenario, an IRS team member would take off on a metalled road in response to a call. But afterwards, they would desert the metalled road for a jungle trail. These desolate byways, bereft of fellow commuters, would frequently cut through shallow streams, steep slopes, dense forests, and the fringes of dam reservoirs, saving kilometres and hours alike. To me, these adventures of riding pillion in tiger land proved to be no less exciting than those narrated by noted writers accompanying more famous tigerwallahs. I have in mind Geoffrey Ward’s travels with the legendary Fateh Singh Rathore in Ranthambore, or Prerna Singh Bindra’s sojourns with Billy Arjan Singh around Dudhwa.
This grassroots cadre has also been trained by WWF to put up camera traps at the site of cattle kills, as part of wildlife monitoring and crime control. Thanks to this, they too spoke of the individual characteristics and traits of tigers, to the point of mulling personal idiosyncrasies. On many such rides, I learned of tigers that were more attached to their territories, tigers that were of a roving disposition, tigers that killed more than one animal in a frenzy, tigers that chewed up camera traps, and tigers that ate in dire secrecy.
At the same time, the cultural moorings of the IRS team members made them very different from the standard tigerwallah, be it a Rathore, Singh, or a Thapar, whose image dominates much of the literature on the subject. The IRS team members hail from Adivasi, Dalit and Other Backward Class backgrounds. They are forest dwellers amongst forest dwellers. Their labours serve to disturb problematic binaries that tend towards debates such as ‘tigers versus tribals.’ Devoid of camouflage dress, expensive binoculars, and sturdy jeeps, they boasted of a simultaneous awareness of indigenous dependence upon wild flora, bee hives, pristine springs, pastures, and last but not least, sacred shrines. Evidently, there were no hard and fast lines to segregate matters of science from the lore of the land.
This exemplifies a hybrid approach, very much desired in our times. For instance, when we were at Khairi, a village elder suspected that the tiger that had brought down the ox was an ‘evil spirit,’ one that could change form and size. Kumre engaged the elder in the shared Gondi dialect. ”It might be a tigress with cubs,” Kumre politely pointed to impressions of varying sizes on the forest floor. ”The cubs might have carried away the head of the ox,” he politely added.
No sooner had the above conversation died out than we heard a few muffled cries in the distance. When Kumre and I rushed in the direction they were coming from, we discovered that it was Bhuvesh Yadav, the ox’s owner. Bhuvesh had trenched upon the head of his ox. This had proven to be the final nail for a man who was already aching over his loss. ‘My ox had a very beautiful face,’ the youngish Yadav whispered. If Kumre had shunned beliefs of evil spirits only a little while ago, he now sought to console Yadav in a manner that was entrenched in local beliefs. ”Nothing happens without the permission of Banjari, even a leaf cannot stir without her will in this forest, what to say of a tiger quenching its hunger?”Kumre solemnly expressed. This charity of a few words, centred around a prominent forest goddess, worked like magic, and Yadav slowly gathered himself.
If the IRS has provided the fertile grounds for such a synthesis of worldviews, scientific and indigenous, it has also done a great deal of good for state-society relations beyond the site of immediate human-wildlife conflict. Whereas no cases of poisoning have been reported from the corridor in the longest time, local angst, if any, shows an increasing tendency to get (re-)directed at the forest department, with the chowkidar being the first and most immediate target. This transpired mostly when the forest department was not able to present itself in due time. “Once the tiger has eaten up the cattle, there is no evidence left, then the forest department will suspect us of making a false (farzi) case,” a herder at Khairi shared. Perhaps this was the reason that the likes of Ganesh were the most relieved on the arrival of an IRS team member. ”Had bhaiya (i.e., Kumre) not come on time, these people would not have been so kind and respectful to me,” Ganesh shared on the side lines.
It is easy to blame such higher-ups in the forest establishment for their laxity, and quite another thing to acknowledge that government response has greatly improved since the early 2000s. The State Wildlife Action Plan (2023), for instance, reports that 12,492 cattle heads succumbed to predatory attacks between 2019 and 2022. In response to the same, the Madhya Pradesh Forest Department (MPFD), the nodal agency for dealing with human-wildlife conflict, dispensed Rs 10.1 crore as economic compensation. In keeping with a conservative estimate, nearly half of the above figures pertained to the KPC. Despite this, the MPFD struggles with shoelace budgets, lack of functional vehicles, and inadequate staff to manage an ever-growing portfolio of government responsibilities. “What is worse is that I have only two staff members under me. My staff strength is not increasing at the pace with which garas are increasing in this corridor,” a ranger lamented in all sincerity.
In light of the above, the foresters are made to appreciate the swiftness with which the IRS team members move to the sites of conflict as a neutral, third party. This makes them a valuable auxiliary force. At the other end of the spectrum, IRS team members help livestock owners plan the different ways in which the sum of Rs 1,200 can be used, not excluding transportation costs to make follow-up visits to the forest department and apply the requisite pressure. “The file of a claimant can get stuck in the range office for as many reasons, in which case they often call us, and we feel obliged to pursue matters on their part with forest officials,” Kumre explained. This was particularly true for remote village residents who could sometimes be 30 to 40 km from the range office. The camera also plays an important role in this, serving to subvert, as opposed to reinforce, existing hierarchies. “The camera is not merely for surveillance,” Kumre clarified. I learned that cameras serve to generate proof of the specific circumstance of the gara and increase the acceptance of the case by the forest department. In a village like Khairi, which has been recording close to 20 cattle deaths every year, the camera was instrumental in the quick disbursement of government compensation.
I learned only later that the IRS is in the process of being scaled down in the corridor and expanded in other corridors where the number of tigers is low, and oftentimes in single digits. On account of this shift in priority, the IRS team reached out to a comparatively low number of 352 households in the financial year of 2024-25. Despite this, the IRS can be credited for laying deep foundations for community-based conservation in the region. Not infrequently, the whole process of recording the details of the gara to facilitate the transfer of Rs 1,200 ends up creating space for dialogue. The grim settings of a gara can transform into a site of brainstorming. At Khairi, for instance, a herder gave vent to the increasing number of wild dogs and how they might be depleting the prey base of the tiger. A little later, the same village elder who had suspected the presence of an evil spirit shared how forest fires drove ferocious carnivores to the fringes of roadside villages. Evidently, this elder had joined Kumre’s spirit of empiricism. Others pondered, in a manner not very different from conservation scientists, if tigers were not growing more fond of cattle. It is another thing that this came across in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, when someone stated, “tigers have started treating our cattle like halwa,” a delicacy.
As of now, the government does not seem to have a clear roadmap for dealing with the increasing number of tigers in human-dominated corridors. The IRS offers a way out. Apart from the promise of instant economic relief, it serves to tap into local knowledge and secure community participation. It provides a tentative foundation for such participation by mediating state and society relations. Most of all, it nurtures tigerwallahs from within the rural milieu, who know best how to reconcile a scientific conservationist spirit with traditional beliefs.
Varun Sharma is a social sciences researcher based in Tezpur, Assam
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth