Tribespeople illegally evicted from ‘Jungle Book’ tiger reserve
AYUSH Adivasi Yuva Shakti
Tribespeople illegally evicted from ‘Jungle Book’ tiger reserve 14 January 2015
Tribal people have been forcibly and illegally evicted from India’s Kanha Tiger Reserve – home of Kipling’s The Jungle Book – in the name of tiger conservation. Across India, many more face a similar threat.
Evicted tribespeople report that the Forest Department threatened to release elephants to trample their houses and crops if they did not leave immediately.
The area is the ancestral home of the Baiga and Gond tribes, who face a desperate future without their forests.
The families were harassed for years to leave the reserve. When they were finally evicted, they received no land or help in establishing their lives outside. Months after their eviction, families report that they have received only a fraction of the compensation they were expecting – others have received nothing.
“We got some money, but we are lost – wandering in search of land. Here there is only sadness. We need the jungle,” a tribesperson evicted from Jholar village in Kanha said.
The communities have now been scattered among the surrounding villages. Their rights to stay in, live from, and protect their forests are enshrined in Indian law.
One Baiga man told Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights, before the eviction, “They want to give us money. We don’t want money. We want land. Money doesn’t mean anything to us. It comes and it goes.”
Watch moving interviews with the residents of Jholar village in Kanha tiger reserve, who have now been evicted (filmed in 2012):
Tribal families evicted for “tiger conservation”Moving first-hand accounts by the residents of Jholar village in Kanha tiger reserve, who have now been evicted (filmed in 2012)
Survival has written to the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), which has been providing infrastructural support, training and equipment for frontline Forest Department staff.
Tribal peoples are the best conservationists. Survival’s "Parks Need Peoples" campaign challenges the current model of conservation. Conservation programs must stick to international law, protect tribal peoples’ rights to their lands, ask them what help they need in protecting their lands, listen to them, and then be prepared to back them up as much as they can.
Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said today, “What’s happening in Kanha epitomizes the ugly side of the conservation industry – thousands of tourists career through the park in noisy jeeps, clamoring to take photos of the beleaguered tigers. Meanwhile, Baiga communities that have carefully managed the tiger’s habitat over generations are annihilated by forced evictions. The irony appears to be lost on the conservationists. If India doesn’t allow the Baiga and Gond to return and prevent further villagers being kicked out, these communities will be completely destroyed. Evicting tribes won’t save the tiger.”
Notes to editors:
- In a similar eviction in December 2013, 32 Khadia families were moved out of Similipal Tiger Reserve in Odisha state and were living in dire conditions under plastic sheets. They have not received the compensation they were promised.
- Read Survival’s letter to WWF (pdf, 454 KB)
- Read Survival’s letter to the National Tiger Conservation Authority concerning the illegal evictions from Kanha and Similipal Tiger Reserves (pdf, 482 KB)
- Indian and international law require that the authorities must prove to the communities that their co-existence with the wildlife is impossible; that communities’ forest rights are processed; and that they have given their free, prior and informed consent to the move. None of these conditions were fulfilled in Kanha.
AYUSH Adivasi Yuva Shakti
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AYUSH | adivasi yuva shakti
Mass evictions from tiger reserves: French TV
Thousands of tribal people from Kanha Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh ‘evicted’ in the name of forest conservation. The investigation is sure to trigger a debate.
A special undercover investigation by French TV channel Canal Plus has exposed the illegal eviction of thousands of tribal people from Kanha Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh in the name of conservation, while more than a hundred thousand tourists are welcomed in every year.
The investigation is sure to trigger debate over what is described as skewed conservation policy of displacing indigenous people but attracting hordes of tourists to stay in wildlife reserves.
A reporter of the TV channel visited families of the Baiga tribe who were evicted from Kanha- home of the “Jungle Book”- in 2014, and found that their lives were devastated after being forced from their homes against their will. The tribes people have been struggling to survive after being scattered in surrounding villages, according to a note released by Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights on Wednesday.
Sukhdev, a Baiga man, was killed after his village was evicted from Kanha in 2014, the report says. His body was found after he attempted to buy land for his family. In an interview to Survival International, in 2012, Sukhdev had said: “We won’t find another place like this. How will we set up home there? How will we raise our children? We need our fields and homes … Won’t we die?” (filmed in 2012)
Sukhdev’s brother told Canal Plus: “We were one of the last families to resist. But the people from the reserve [Forest department] forced us to leave. They told us they’d take care of us for three years, but they didn’t do a thing. Even when my brother was killed, no one came to help us.”
Studies have found that tigers thrive in areas inhabited by people, the report says. And while the Baiga tribe people have lived alongside the tiger for generations and regard the animal as their “little brother,” Kanha’s mass tourism has been called “incompatible and detrimental” to conserving the species by conservation experts.
The French TV crew gained access to a confidential official report which lists the systematic resettlement of 22,000 people from tiger reserves across the region. Under Indian law, tribal peoples’ consent is required before such evictions, but they are often harassed into leaving.
Survival International’s Director Stephen Corry said, “So-called ‘conservation’ continues to destroy tribal people as it has for generations. They’ve never threatened the tigers, who would do better if the tribes remained and the tourists stopped. Tribal peoples are generally better conservationists anyway than industrial-sized NGOs like World Wide Fund for Nature which stand by in silence while the parks forcibly evict people like Sukhdev and his family. It’s time these evictions are stopped and this scandal exposed.”