India’s Indigenous Demand Land Rights as Tiger Counts Rise

Prime Minister Narendra Modi headed to Mysuru in southern India and announced on Sunday that the country’s tiger population has been increasing over time. This is due to their conservation program, which started 50 years ago when tigers were decreasing in number. Everyone was very happy about this great news.

Prime Minister Modi said that India is a place where taking care of nature is part of our traditional culture. Because of this, the country has made some cool progress when it comes to saving our wildlife.

Modi also made an International Big Cats Alliance which aims to protect seven big cat species like tigers, lions, leopards, snow leopards, pumas, jaguars and cheetahs.

On Sunday, protesters gathered near the announcement telling their stories of how they had to move away over the past 50 years because of conservation projects for wildlife.

In 1973, India made Project Tiger to save tigers from the danger of dying out due to habitat loss, hunting activities, and poachers. People thought there were only 1,800 tigers left at that time, but experts are now saying that it was likely an exaggeration since counting methods back then weren’t accurate enough. To keep tigers safe, laws were put in place as well as creating special places where they could live without disturbance from humans.

Some Indigenous people are saying that the plans for taking care of forests in their country were based on American ideas and this led to the removal of a lot of communities living here for centuries.

Indigenous people from different groups created the Nagarahole Adivasi Forest Rights Establishment Committee in order to fight against being kicked out of their ancestral homelands and also to have an influence when it comes to managing the forests.

J. A. Shivu, 27 years old, belonging to the Jenu Kuruba tribe said: “Nagarahole was one of the 1st places chosen for Project Tiger and our parents and grandparents were made to move out of the forests for conservation. We can no longer visit our sacred lands or temples, nor collect honey from the forests. We want an end to this situation”.

The Jenu Kuruba tribe consists of fewer than 40,000 people in India who are one of many special groups called ‘Adivasi communities’. They earn money by collecting honey from beehives in the forests and selling it. Sadly, these tribes are among the poorest communities in India.

Certain people think that laws to conserve nature are sometimes influenced by someone not wanting local villagers to benefit. The government of India insists that they are trying to help the Adivasi people, who make up 1% of the country’s population and have yet to get what they deserve from a law which passed in 2006 and promised them proper rights over forests.

India is home to a large population of tigers – over 3,100! That’s way more than all the other countries in the world put together and almost 76% of all tigers on Earth!

Unfortunately, tigers have disappeared from Bali and Java Islands, while China’s wild tigers are thought to be extinct. The only place you can find the Sunda Island tiger is in Sumatra. But India is doing great things to take care of their tigers, which many people have praised!

SP Yadav, an important Indian government employee working on ‘Project Tiger’ said that this project is really special since no other place in the world has achieved such great success. On the other hand, some people believe that if forests are strictly preserved and locals can’t come inside them it could be bad for those communities.

Sharachchandra Lele from the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment says that the old way of preserving forests is not working well. He states that some areas have made it possible for residents to benefit from the forest and still increase the number of tigers living in those places.

Vidya Athreya, the director of Wildlife Conservation Society in India, has studied how tigers and humans interact for 20 years. She said that usually wildlife is put on a higher level than people, but she thinks it’s best that we work with communities to protect animals in India. Shivu, who is from the Jenu Kuruba tribe, wants to go back to how things were when Indigenous people used to live peacefully with tigers.

Aniruddah Ghosal from New Delhi, India said: “We think of forests as something that we look after and protect, like gods.”

Also, Sibi Arasu has a Twitter account called @sibi123.

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