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This article has been updated.
For millennia, humans have lived within wilderness mosaics—agricultural fields interspersed with forests, grasslands, and streams—supporting a diversity of wildlife. Even today, many tribes and farming communities share landscapes with wild pigs, primates, and leopards that move freely through villages, orchards, and farms. Many of these animals have not seen undisturbed forests for generations; they have adapted to human-dominated environments. Urbanisation, agricultural expansion and commercial land use have created new types of landscapes. Simultaneously, the creation of wildlife sanctuaries has cordoned off certain areas as “natural,” reinforcing an ecological separation that did not historically exist.
The reality is more complex: humans and wildlife still inhabit an intertwined mosaic. Understanding this mosaic is essential for designing effective policy. There is now growing evidence that a key driver of escalating conflict is behavioural rather than purely ecological: many wildlife species have lost their instinctive fear of humans. For most of evolutionary history, humans were apex predators. Wild animals learned, over generations, to avoid human presence. This behavioural trait acted as a natural buffer—even in shared landscapes, animals kept their distance and direct confrontations remained rare. When the Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972, came into being, India’s wildlife was indeed threatened by over-hunting and poaching.
The wildlife policy framed in the 1970s was essentially a strategy for disaster management. Over time, this emergency response solidified into long-term policy. While it successfully enabled population recovery for several species, for two or three generations of animals, humans have ceased to represent a threat. Tourism compounds this behavioural shift. The Act, however, has not adapted to the behavioural and ecological complexities of the present. To correct this, we propose two major shifts. The first pressing need is to make compensation protocols simple, realistic and farmer friendly. It is inevitable to employ targeted hunting of selected species in some areas as an immediate short-term measure. Over time, a new long-term policy should take over.
The more challenging, and often contentious, reform involves reintroducing controlled, scientifically guided hunting in specific landscapes. The goal is not population reduction. Instead, research from behavioural ecology shows that predation pressure helps maintain avoidance behaviour in prey and even in carnivores. Several countries use carefully regulated hunting to ensure that wildlife continues to keep a respectful distance from human settlements. In India, a calibrated system, built with strict oversight, ecological criteria, and community participation, could help restore healthy behavioural boundaries between humans and wildlife. Over time, as human avoidance behaviour returns, coexistence becomes far more feasible.
The debate is not conservation versus livelihoods. India cannot afford such binaries. Economic realities and ecological imperatives must reinforce one another, particularly in a country where wilderness and human livelihood form an inseparable mosaic. Modern science—ecology, behavioural research, and socio-economic analysis—offers tools to rethink wildlife policy for the next fifty years. To move forward, policies must evolve beyond sentiment and symbolism. They must reflect how wildlife actually behaves, how people actually live, and how landscapes are actually being reshaped. A future where wildlife thrives alongside human communities is possible. But it demands that we confront uncomfortable questions, embrace scientific evidence, and redesign policy with both compassion and clarity. Only then can conservation succeed—sustainably, ethically, and for the long term.
Attacks by tigers and leopards in urban areas, and far from wildlife reserves, often draw national attention. But this crisis has not appeared overnight. The warning signs have been visible for years, only to be ignored until conflict spilled into spaces that urban India could no longer overlook. Meanwhile, across the country, wild herbivores continue to raid farms with increasing regularity.
The financial consequences are staggering. A recent study by the Centre for Sustainable Development at the Gokhale Institute estimates that farmers in Maharashtra alone lose tens of thousands of crores annually to crop depredation. Livestock losses, though devastating for rural households, rarely receive comparable attention.
In Chandrapur district, attacks by tigers and leopards in and around villages have reached levels reminiscent of the man-eaters Jim Corbett wrote about. Yet such incidents have often remained under-reported. When leopards enter cities, however, they become headline news. This asymmetry reveals an uncomfortable truth: some of India’s poorest communities bear the costs of wildlife protection, while many of its benefits—tourism, aesthetic pleasure and conservation prestige—are enjoyed far from the front lines.
From an economic standpoint, these are classic negative externalities: costs imposed on communities that have not been adequately factored into policy. Some degree of human-wildlife conflict is unavoidable in a country as densely populated and ecologically complex as India. But that cannot become an excuse for allowing rural families to absorb the losses indefinitely.
Policymakers must now confront a difficult question: should farmers and forest-fringe communities continue to pay the price for a model of conservation whose benefits are enjoyed disproportionately by others? Tiger tourism, wildlife photography and conservation prestige bring revenue, visibility and moral satisfaction to urban India. But those living closest to wildlife often face crop loss, livestock loss, injury, fear and, in the worst cases, death.
If conservation is to remain ethically defensible, it cannot rely on the silent endurance of the poorest. A system that protects animals while leaving rural communities financially and physically vulnerable is neither fair nor sustainable. Compensation is therefore not charity. It is a necessary correction in a policy framework that has long failed to account for who actually pays the cost of coexistence.
Conservation debates often explain rising conflict through habitat degradation, fragmentation and human encroachment into forested areas. These are serious problems and need urgent attention. Yet they do not fully explain the pattern of conflict we see today. In several regions where habitats have been protected, restored or expanded, conflict has increased rather than subsided.
The Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve and its surrounding villages illustrate this paradox. Despite being one of India’s better-managed tiger habitats, the region experiences some of the country’s highest levels of human-wildlife conflict. This suggests that conflict cannot be understood only as a consequence of disappearing forests. It must also be understood as a consequence of how animals behave in shared landscapes.
Part of the problem lies in our assumption that “natural” and “human” habitats are fundamentally distinct. This separation is relatively recent and largely human-made. Historically, people and wildlife occupied overlapping landscapes: fields, forests, grasslands, streams and settlements formed a continuous mosaic rather than neatly divided zones. Wildlife policy must begin by recognising this reality instead of imagining that humans and animals can always be kept apart.
This dynamic began to change after the Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972 effectively ended hunting across India. The Act was necessary in its time. India’s wildlife was under severe pressure from overhunting and poaching, and several species needed urgent protection. But five decades of protection have also produced an unintended behavioural consequence.
For two or three generations of animals, humans have ceased to represent a threat. As a result, many species now enter farms, villages and peri-urban areas with increasing confidence. Farmers who could once deter wild pigs or herbivores with noise or physical presence often find such methods ineffective. Carnivores, especially leopards, move more boldly through human settlements, frequently in search of feral dogs or livestock.
This does not mean that wildlife protection should be abandoned. It means that protection alone is no longer an adequate policy response. Behavioural change is now central to human-wildlife conflict. A species that no longer fears people will not respect administrative boundaries, reserve limits or compensation forms. Policy must therefore move beyond population recovery and begin to address how animals behave in human-dominated landscapes.
The first reform must be immediate and practical: compensation protocols should be simple, realistic and farmer-friendly. For affected households, delayed or inadequate compensation deepens resentment and weakens public support for conservation. A farmer who loses a season’s crop or a family that loses livestock cannot wait months for paperwork to move through the system.
Researchers have already proposed workable models using rapid assessment tools, digital reporting, independent verification and transparent payout systems. These should be implemented at scale. Compensation must reflect real losses, be easy to access, and reach claimants quickly. Without this, conservation will continue to impose disproportionate costs on those least equipped to bear them.
But compensation is only the first step. It offers relief after damage has occurred; it does not prevent conflict from recurring. Broader policy reform must therefore combine social justice with behavioural science. New approaches in regulatory policy increasingly focus on shaping behaviour rather than merely responding to harm. In wildlife policy, this means designing interventions that restore caution among animals while protecting conservation gains.
The more difficult question is how to restore a healthy distance between humans and wildlife. Any such approach must be scientifically guided, locally specific and subject to strict oversight. It cannot be driven by anger, politics or indiscriminate killing. But neither can policy pretend that protection alone will produce coexistence.
Targeted, limited and adaptive interventions may be necessary in specific landscapes, especially where conflict has become chronic. The purpose would not be population reduction, but behavioural correction: to ensure that animals once again recognise human-dominated spaces as risky and avoid them where possible. Over time, as human-avoidance behaviour returns, coexistence becomes more feasible.
India’s conservation policy must therefore evolve beyond sentiment and symbolism. It must ask not only how many animals a landscape can support, but how those animals behave, who bears the costs of their presence, and what kind of coexistence is socially just. Conservation cannot succeed by protecting wildlife from people while leaving people unprotected from wildlife. A durable future will require compassion, science and the courage to confront uncomfortable questions.
Milind Watve is an independent researcher; Gurudas Nulkar is Director, Centre for Sustainable Development, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune
This column was originally published as part of the cover story Conflict in the backyard in the May 16-31, 2026 print edition of Down To Earth