Legal Aid Meets Wildlife: NALSA’s Role in Tackling Man-Animal Conflict in India

Recent studies have shown that less than one percent of losses caused by wild animals are compensated.

NALSA's 'Scheme on Access to Justice for Victims of Human-Wildlife Conflict, 2025' initiative can potentially force a rethink of our current approach to conservation of wildlife and wild lands.

(Photo: Altered by Vibhushita Singh/The Quint)

Wildlife preservation in India runs on rather weird principles. Here wild animals have more rights than human beings. Dangerous animals including tigers, lions, bears, elephants, pigs etc. are free to roam the country and do, deliberately or by accident, what they are built to do: attack people and livestock or destroys homes and crops.

The Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972 provides that wild animals are the property of the State (section 39) and are protected against hunting-without-permit on every inch of the country. Even driving them away needs a permit as “hunting”, as per this law, also includes “driving” animals away and “every attempt to do so”.

Only government authorities have the power to prevent potential dangers to the public, but they rarely act timely and effectively because they are not obliged by law to do so. They may occasionally order the capture of a tiger or a leopard that has developed a fancy for human flesh but do virtually nothing to protect livestock, homes and crops.

In fact, even authorities have no power to interfere with some common crop-raiders, like elephants and blackbucks, because they are in Schedule I of the Act.

Meanwhile, victims of human-animal conflict, whose numbers are in the thousands, are often left in the lurch. For instance, a new 2025 study has shown that less than one percent of losses caused by wild animals in Maharashtra have been compensated. It is with the view to aid the rehabilitation of such victims that the National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) has launched a new scheme, which can potentially force a rethink of our current approach to conservation of wildlife and wilderness.

Man-Animal Conflict: The Human and Financial Cost

Approximately 1,500 persons are killed and several thousand are maimed by wild animals annually in India. They also kill 25,000 to 30,000 heads of livestock each year. The amount of damage they do to crops is unimaginable, and growing. Rather than going all out to contain the dangers and damages, states are content to provide ex-gratia financial assistance to the victims. However, these compensation schemes, expectedly, suffer from the usual flaws and people get paid only a small fraction of the losses incurred.

NALSA's initiative—the Scheme on Access to Justice for Victims of Human-Wildlife Conflict, 2025—aims to provide "a step-by-step framework" for legal services authorities at both state and district levels, panel lawyers, and paralegal volunteers to ensure "timely and effective legal aid, compensation, and support" for such victims.

Until a few months ago, we had no idea about the colossal scale of the losses caused by wild animals and how little was compensated. But now we know. Conducted by researchers Milind Watwe and Vaidehi Dandekar, the study from Maharashtra shows how the compensation is nothing as compared to the losses borne.

The total agricultural income loss due to wildlife is estimated to range between Rs 10,000 crore and Rs 40,000 crore per annum for Maharashtra alone. Projecting this loss to the national level, it would amount to anything between Rs 1.15 lakh crore and Rs 4.61 lakh crore. Then there are thousands of human and livestock casualties each.

Even if we think this is an exaggerated estimate, we can factor it down as much as we like, but it will still not be a negligible number, and definitely not one we can afford to compensate.

But the State is morally and legally obliged to compensate these losses as the animals are their "property".

The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC)'s 2025-26 budget is only Rs 3,412.82 crore—and the Wildlife Division is a miniscule part of this ministry.

The NALSA intervention aims to ensure every victim of man-animal conflict is compensated correctly. But, if that really happens, the expenditure will not peak at just Rs 4.61 lakh crore. It will keep rising as wildlife populations rise—and the payment systems become more efficient and transparent. Forget India, even wealthy nations like the US cannot find so much money every year.

Obviously, the long-term goal in that case must focus on reducing the losses and human casualties.

Rethinking Conservation Through a Socio-Legal Lens

The loss of human lives, limbs, and property due to man-animal conflict is not a natural calamity.

Of late, a few court decisions have treated casualties and losses caused by wild animals as a violation, by the State, of the fundamental right to life guaranteed by Article 21 of the Constitution of India.

The NALSA scheme has taken note of this development. It says, "...the High Courts of Bombay and Kerala have held that failures to prevent or adequately respond to wildlife attacks constitute violations of fundamental rights—and have called for—'lasting solutions' beyond ex gratia relief."

This means that paying a compensation, whatever the amount, to the victims is not going to be enough. Obviously, the State shall no longer be able to ignore such directives, with NALSA ensuring “compliance with judicial directives”.

Incidentally, the courts have not yet examined all the constitutional and criminal implications of the man-human conflicts in depth.

For example, not preventing destruction of a private property by wild animals also amounts to a violation of Article 300A, guaranteeing the fundamental right to property. Articles 21 and 300A say that the State cannot divest any person of his life or property without following due process of law. But here it does, through its pets.

Going further, not taking effective steps to prevent animal attacks on people, while knowing that such attacks are possible, amounts to several offences punishable under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS). They include knowingly omitting to take sufficient measures regarding owned-animals to prevent danger to others, culpable homicide, voluntarily causing hurt/grievous hurt, endangering life or personal safety or causing hurt through rash or negligent acts regarding animals.

Similarly, not preventing depredations on crops or livestock can be interpreted as theft, and mischief (to knowingly cause destruction of any person’s property or diminish its value) by the state (through the animals owned by it).

Can NALSA Bring a Paradigm Shift?

Somehow, these implications of man-animal conflict have escaped the judicial eye so far. This is going to change, and when that happens, our conservation authorities will be in deep trouble. Even the conservation NGOs will be culpable for abetting these crimes and constitutional violations.

With NALSA now providing free legal aid to the victims of wildlife depredations in claiming compensation, more cases are going to end up in courts. As a result, the chances of the courts imposing penalties on authorities are likely to grow with time. As NALSA has already stated that “failures to prevent wildlife attacks constitute violations of fundamental rights”, holding the authorities concerned criminally liable for such violations is just one step away.

Thus, the entry of NALSA into this domain creates two possibilities that can force a rethink of our conservation strategy, namely:

• Burden of paying compensation to the victims becomes unbearable for the country

• Courts start imposing penalties, including jail terms, on authorities

To prevent this from happening, we ought to do the following:

• Conduct a public safety audit of our wildlife conservation policy and rework it to make public safety its core requirement

• Generate economic benefits for the vulnerable communities from wild animals, through regulated hunting and photographic tourism, so that any wildlife depredations become a rather rare side-effect of a public welfare programme

The cornerstone of this approach would restrict wild animals from running free beyond their designated spaces. The spaces dedicated to wildlife conservation, ie, protected areas (PAs), may be managed to maximise wildlife densities, and diversity, but animals will be allowed access to other spaces only to the extent they are useful and safe for neighbouring communities.

Controlling Wildlife Population

This is the “lasting solution” the courts are expecting from the authorities. This will need continuing and strengthening all that we are already doing—barriers, community involvement, compensation, repellents, deterrents, and hazing. But, above all, wildlife populations shall have to be actively managed outside PAs.

Incidentally, our current conservation framework was primarily designed on the premise that animals breeding inside PAs would disperse into the surrounding forests as the populations inside grow. That they will also spill into croplands and villages was never factored in.

Perhaps we never gave any thought to the fact that the forests outside PAs are also a part of the local people’s habitat. Therefore, filling this space with wild animals is clearly counterintuitive. Perhaps, back then, we never believed that these spaces would ever have any significant wildlife populations.

Now that almost as many animals live outside PAs as inside and a large number even live outside forests, clearly it is time to rework our conservation paradigm.

Secondly, periodically exchanging a few animals between PAs to improve the genetic vigour of any species of concern is no longer a big deal. Therefore, rather than keeping PAs with open boundaries, we can consider fencing them off, which would also keep poachers out.

Of course, we can keep open boundaries if we really want animals outside PAs for utilisation. But not if the animals cause only trouble. In fact, sustainable use of wildlife, particularly outside PAs, is the bedrock of wildlife conservation across the world. Globally, more PAs are fenced than not.

India does not allow wildlife utilisation presumably on the premise that it is difficult to regulate. However, regular reports of flourishing wildlife meat markets in South and Northeast India and growing wildlife crime in the country are clear proof that outright bans are equally, if not more, difficult to enforce. Therefore, a review of this policy is in any case overdue.

Thus, in order to reduce the burden of compensation, and to avoid criminal liability for destroying people’s lives and properties, the government has to recast the legal and policy framework related to conservation of wildlife. PAs, sustainable use of wildlife outside PAs, and public safety shall be the heart of the new regime.

Perhaps, the recent insertion of the word “conservation”, which implies sustainable use, in the preamble of the Wild Life (Protection) Act is an indication that the paradigm shift has begun. If the entry of NALSA into the man-animal conflict space expedites this process, it will go down in history as one of the biggest changemakers of our time.

(Dr HS Pabla is a retired Chief Wildlife Warden of Madhya Pradesh and has spent 35 years working in the Indian Forest Service. He is the author of several books on wildlife and conservation. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)