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Until last month, 29-year-old Shivu JA never had the chance to live on his ancestral land in Karadikallu Attur Kolli, a tribal hamlet deep inside Karnataka's Nagarahole Tiger Reserve.
On 5 May, he was among 150 members of the Jenu Kuruba tribal community who reclaimed the forest they were evicted from more than 45 years ago by the Karnataka Forest Department. Their removal came without compensation or rehabilitation because the Indian law itself had no such provisions back then.
Shivu had been working as a bonded labourer in a nearby coffee plantation, earning just Rs 300 for a 10-hour workday, enduring verbal abuse from landlords, unable to take leave even when ill, and stripped off the freedom to celebrate his cultural festivals.
“At the plantation, they exploited us by paying meagre wages and charging exorbitant interest on the money they lent. They even seized our Aadhaar and voter ID cards.”Shivu JA
He grew up hearing tales from his father and grandfather about the dense forests and their ability to provide sufficient resources. At the coffee plantations, where landlords trapped workers with fake money deeds that never freed them from debt, Shivu dreamt of returning to his ancestral lands.
“At the plantation, we aren’t even given six feet of land to bury our dead. We no longer want to live such a life, in fear and in oppression,” Shivu told The Quint.
Life in the Forest
Ever since Shivu and his community returned to the Nagarhole Tiger Reserve—one of India’s premier tiger habitats—tensions have remained high. On 18 May, the state’s Forest Department demolished six out of 13 makeshift shelters the community constructed.
The Supreme Court ordered that no further construction or land alteration be carried out in the tiger reserve until 23 July 2025. The court’s status quo has offered a temporary calm, even as the underlying conflict remains unresolved.
“The Supreme Court order on maintaining the status quo has nothing to do with the implementation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006, and recognition of people’s rights. The status quo was for the Forest Department regarding construction activities, and not for withholding the FRA process,” Rajan, a volunteer at the Community Network Against Protected Areas, a voluntary group advocating the rights of indigenous people, told The Quint.
Bidding farewell to life in plantations, the Jenu Kuruba community—who live in close association with nature and believe that the spirits of wild animals protect them—have returned to a life rooted in their traditions.
"We work from 9 am to 1 pm, collecting spinach, bamboo shoots, and edible leaves. It feels good to not eat ration rice, but instead tubers and mushrooms straight from the soil,” said Shivu.
For honey collection, the community’s primary skill, they enter the forest for two days at a time, only after closely observing the movement of tigers, their birth cycles and mating patterns.
The Karnataka government fears that the community’s presence could spark human-wildlife conflict—a concern the Jenu Kuruba do not share. “How will there be a conflict when we know how to coexist with animals? We worship them. Baraguru, our supreme deity, is a tiger god,” Shivu said.
For over four decades, when the community lived away from their ancestral lands, they still kept coming back to conduct their sacred rituals and to bury their dead, despite denial of permissions from the Forest Department.
Timeline
1972: Under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s leadership, there was strong political will to strengthen wildlife conservation in India. This led to the enactment of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. The law provided the legal framework to declare protected areas such as wildlife sanctuaries and national parks, and later became the basis for establishing tiger reserves under Project Tiger, launched in 1973.
The community alleged that they were evicted after the 1972 Act.
1988: Nagarahole, which was already a wildlife sanctuary since 1955, was declared a national park.
2006: India enacted the FRA to correct historical injustices faced by Adivasi communities, many of whom were displaced from their lands.
2007: On the basis of tiger conservation initiatives, Nagarahole was officially notified as an independent tiger reserve.
2008: The FRA was notified for implementation across India. This allowed particularly vulnerable tribal groups such as Jenu Kuruba to claim habitat rights (rights to reside, cultivate, and collect forest produce).
What Went Wrong?
Jenu Kuruba tribal communities allege that the Forest Department has treated them unfairly since colonial times. They demand that under the FRA, an expert committee must establish that human-wildlife coexistence is not possible before the creation of inviolate space within the tiger reserve. However, the Karnataka Forest Department admits no such report exists.
“There is no need for a committee as tiger reserves are governed by the Central government,” J Ananya Kumar, Assistant Conservator of Forests, Nagarahole sub-division, said. However, Rajan contends that it is a pattern seen across all 58 tiger reserves in India where no such expert committee report exists.
Four years after the enactment of FRA, 2006, the community members have been claiming for their recognition of forest rights.
“Since 2010, the people of Karadikallu Attur Kolli village have been claiming their forest rights. It's been 15 years and their claims are being arbitrarily rejected on the grounds that neither the people nor the village never existed.”Rajan
The Nagarahole Wildlife Subdivision, in a press statement, however, said that the claimants who are seeking individual forest rights in Karadikallu Attur Kolli forest area of Nagarhole have never been in possession of the claimed forest land. The department further said that there is no such village called Karadikallu Attur Kolli within the jurisdiction of the Nagarhole Tiger Reserve, and alleged that the hamlet was “specifically created on record to illegitimately claim forest rights.”
Citing Section 4(3) of the FRA, 2006, which requires that claimants must have been in possession of the land prior to 13 December 2005, Kumar told The Quint that multiple records show no evidence of the hamlet's existence.
“The Nagarahole management plan and satellite imagery show no indication that the Jenu Kuruba lived there. There are 64 recognised tribal hamlets in the reserve land; we are not against them living here. We just believe they never lived in this particular location.”J Ananya Kumar, Assistant Conservator of Forests, Nagarahole sub-division
The community members said that they have made two attempts in the past 16 years to recognise their rights under the FRA. The third attempt is going on now.
“The revenue officials have been denying the verification process even though we have submitted the necessary documents. Our hamlet’s name is mentioned in the ration cards yet the department calls us illegitimate dwellers of the forest,” said Shivu.
Jenu Kuruba members say that the Forest Department is peddling a blatant lie about their claim to the ancestral land.
“We have submitted all the claims relating to it and they even conducted an on ground survey as part of the joint verification process. Now they say we don't exist?” questioned Shalini, a Jenu Kuruba woman.
"For people who ask for evidence that we lived here before, we have shown them our agriculture fields, our sacred space (Atturu Wodati) that we still worship, and the burial space of my parents. What more evidence is expected of us? Should we dig out graves? "JK Putti, an elder woman of the village
Conservation Vs Coexistence
The larger issue is that indigenous people are often viewed as threats to conservation. In 2017, the National Tiger Conservation Authority issued a directive to states, instructing officials to suspend the granting of rights under the FRA in all Critical Tiger Habitats.
Experts working with indigenous communities say the current conservation model is exclusionary and alienating.
“Conservation is just one aspect of the multi-dimensional situation which involves an outlook from social, institutional, and cultural aspects. Removing local people makes our conservation models socially unjust,” professor Nitin Rai, who's a political ecologist, said, adding that the Forest Department is removing certain kinds of people and reintroducing others such as researchers, tourists, and the department staff in the tiger reserves.
In a 2012 paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Neil Carter, Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, and others, investigated wildlife-human dynamics in Chitwan National Park, Nepal. Using 76 motion-triggered camera traps across two seasons, they found that tigers and people frequently use the same trails but at different times.
"There appears to be a middle ground where you might actually be able to protect the species at high densities and give people access to forest goods they need to live," Carter observed.
In India, there is evidence to show that people and wildlife can occupy the same landscape.
“In the Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple Tiger Reserve, where I worked for 20 years, the Soligas lived with limited access to the forest—they continued collecting amla, honey, and other smaller produce. There are about 20,000 people living within the 540 sq km reserve. Around 3,000 acres of coffee are owned by four big companies. There is a temple, tourist lodges and many other establishments in the temple area.”Nitin Rai
Rai added that their existence had not threatened the tiger population. “Since 2010, the number of tigers increased from 35 to 86 in 2018, as per the National Tiger Conservation Authority. This is a story that is true for many tiger reserves with people in them.”
In Nagarahole Tiger Reserve, the Forest Department often seeks the help of the Jenu Kuruba community to gather information about wild animals. “Yet, the Forest Department excludes the very people who are masters of conservation,” he concluded.
(Laasya Shekhar is an independent journalist from Chennai with 10 years of experience in print and digital media, predominantly covering environmental, energy, and women's issues.)