How rising tiger population has made life dangerous for families in Uttar Pradesh

Escalating human-tiger conflicts near Dudhwa Tiger Reserve are attributed to deforestation, habitat fragmentation, and the lure of village livestock.

A tiger on the wall of a house in Pilibhit district on December 26, 2023. For families living near the lush forests and sugarcane expanses, the rising tiger population has meant clear and present danger to their lives. | Photo Credit: PTI

The crisp November air in Manjhrapurab, a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri district, carries the sweet scent of ripening sugarcane blended with more than a tinge of grief and loss. Barely a month ago, Ram Dulare, a 50-year-old farmer, became yet another statistic in the escalating tiger-human conflict plaguing the district.

Sugarcane has been the lifeblood of farmers for generations in this district, which borders Nepal. With its vast tracts of forested land, the district is also home to a significant tiger population. And for families living near the lush forests and sugarcane expanses, the rising tiger population has meant a clear and present danger to their lives.

The tigers range in the Dudhwa Tiger Reserve, a protected area spanning 1,284 square kilometres, one of the four tiger habitats in Uttar Pradesh, the others being in Pilibhit, Amangarh, and Ranipur. Dudhwa is ranked fourth among tiger reserves in India thanks largely to its contribution to the rising tiger count. According to a Statewide census, Uttar Pradesh recorded an 18.49 per cent rise in the total tiger population between 2018, when it had 173 tigers, and 2022, when the number rose to 205. This is an 88.07 per cent increase since 2006, when there were 109 tigers in the State. However, this has come at a price for the rural communities living near the reserves, and the mitigation efforts of the forest department have not been up to scratch.

Kunta Devi, Ram Dulare’s widow, is bitter about the lack of response from forest department officials. “They knew the tigers were here. Several others had been attacked, yet they did nothing to protect us. Just empty promises of fences and patrols,” she said.

Kunta Devi’s pain echoes through Manjhrapurab, Manjhra, Chaudhripurva, Aundhayi, Dumera, and Solapurva villages situated near the reserve. A conservation officer tries to explain that man-animal conflict is a complex issue and that habitat loss pushes tigers closer to villages. For the villagers, however, these explanations are cold comfort. The “striped monks”, as some conservationists call tigers, are no longer objects of awe but symbols of terror.

Ram Dulare’s death puts the spotlight on the fragile balance between human progress and wildlife conservation. It is 50 years since Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister launched Project Tiger in 1973. As a result, India now has close to 3,000 tigers, which is around 70 per cent of the world’s tigers spread across 17 countries. The project allocated funds for tiger conservation and to deal with issues such as habitat loss, poaching, and lack of prey, but it virtually turned a blind eye to villagers living in or around tiger reserves, particularly the need to relocate them.

Ram Dulare of Manjhrapurab was killed by a tiger in October 2023. Kunta Devi, his wife, is bitter about the lack of response from forest department officials. | Photo Credit: Ismat Ara

In November 2023, tension erupted in a village in adjoining Pilibhit district after a tiger killed a farmer, Om Prakash, 45, leading to local people blocking the Pilibhit-Madhotanda road. Prakash, they said, was working in his field close to the Mahof forest range of the Pilibhit Tiger Reserve. The villagers alleged negligence by the forest department in failing to address the issue despite repeated complaints.

Naveen Khandelwal, Divisional Forest Officer of Pilibhit district, blamed the villagers for entering the core area. He told reporters that the attack happened 200 metres inside the forest range where the farmer had taken his cattle for grazing. He alleged that the villagers removed Om Prakash’s body from the core forest area to hide this.

Escalating human-tiger conflict

Experts point to several factors contributing to the escalating human-tiger conflict. Deforestation and habitat fragmentation, for instance, are forcing tigers into closer proximity with human settlements. Additionally, the lure of easy prey, such as livestock grazing in the forests, also attracts tigers. This often leads to fatal encounters with humans.

In Manjhrapurab, Laxmi Devi, a middle-aged woman with a mental health issue lost her husband, Sita Ram, 55, to a tiger attack in 2022. Her condition has worsened since, and the couple’s 10-year-old son is in the care of Sita Ram’s brother Rampal. He had to quit farming since the event because of the fear of tigers and take up daily wage work. “I now have two families to take care of. I had to stop going to the farm, and I have no other skills,” he said, justifying his taking up wage labour.

Many people in at least 80 villages in and around Manjhrapurab and Kharatiya have left farming for the fear of tigers. Jawahar Lal, who owns 3 acres of land in Manjhrapurab, has not grown anything for the past three years and goes for daily wage work. “The department tells us that we should form a group to go to our fields. It is not feasible. People have their own work, and most importantly, they are scared,” he said.

Pratap, a villager, said his family would have to relocate to another place if the fear persisted. “But starting a life in new place will take money and resources,” he said. “Slowly, entire villages are moving away from farming and taking up daily wage work.”

Rekha Devi, 15, listening intently chimed in. “For us kids too, tigers have become a big problem. Going to school is risky. We cannot even go out to play. Our mothers tell us that a tiger will come if we don’t sleep,” she said.

Ram Gulab Yadav, 65, lost his younger brother, Avdesh Kumar Yadav, to a tiger attack in 2022 in Manjhrapurab. He is bitter about the forest department not providing fencing to villages and the fields therein. “In some areas where there are rich farmers, they have done fencing. But what can we poor people do? We can only wait for the department to do something. The tiger is just an animal; we cannot control it. But the department can do fencing or patrol,” he said.

In the nearby Kharatiya gram panchayat, private fencing by “rich” farmers seems to provide a modicum of safety to the villages. However, there too villagers have been victims of tiger attacks. “Within the past year, we have lost at least 10 people in this block to tiger attacks. The forest department must ensure that they don’t come out of the forest to attack humans,” Pragat Singh, pradhan (village head) of Kharatiya, told Frontline.

The villagers also complained that relatives hardly visit them because of the fear of tigers. They also said that after a tiger killed the head priest of a temple in their panchayat, they had a hard time finding a new priest. “We had to come together to get a boundary built for the temple’s protection,” a villager said.

Ram Pal, the pradhan of Manjhrapurab, said there had been 30 tiger-related deaths in 2023 in the region. “Women have been widowed. Farmers have left behind small children. They have stopped farming,” he told Frontline.

He said the government should provide the affected families with land and jobs in addition to the monetary compensation of Rs.5 lakh. While the forest department claims that it has provided Rs.1 lakh to each of the affected families, along with the revenue department’s Rs.5 lakh, many villagers say they are yet to get the compensation.

Jaswant Yadav, a former pradhan of Manjhra block, said it had become difficult to find labourers for the farms. “Tigers killed four of my cows. I have acres of land but no labour to work on them,” he said.

According to Sanjay Biswal, District Forest Officer, Lakhimpur Kheri, the spike in tiger-related deaths has to do with increased farming activities near the forest. There are nearly 120 villages adjacent to and interspersing the tiger reserve. “Kheri has plenty of water sources, so farming thrives here. Many of the villagers are poor and dependent on the forest for their sustenance,” he said, adding that over 90 per cent of the cases are accidental deaths. Man-eaters are generally sent to zoos, many of which are functioning at their maximum capacity.

Highlights

• The Dudhwa Tiger Reserve, one of four tiger habitats in Uttar Pradesh, is home to a significant tiger population. The population has increased by 18.49 per cent since 2018, with 205 tigers in Uttar Pradesh.
• The tiger-human conflict in the villages nearby highlights the delicate balance between human progress and wildlife conservation. Experts cite deforestation, habitat fragmentation, and easy prey as factors contributing to the conflict.
• Many people in at least 80 villages in and around Manjhrapurab and Kharatiya have left farming for the fear of tigers. The villagers accuse the forest department of negligence in addressing the issue.

Forest department’s challenges

The National Tiger Conservation Authority has a detailed standard operating procedure on its website that all States are expected to follow when dealing with tiger conflicts. But the forest department has its own challenges, ranging from budgetary constraints to being short-staffed. Several officials said that forest guards and patrolling personnel were expected to work with minimal safety equipment and their demand for better equipment had gone unheeded.

Forest officials catching a tiger prowling near Mallihabad village near Dudhwa, a 2012 picture. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives

According to Biswal, in 2022 and 2023, at least 30 people in the district were killed by tigers and leopards. The main reason for this, he says, is the tall sugarcane grass, which the tiger confuses for the forest. “We have time and again advised villagers not to do farming near the forest because of this reason.”

In Mohammedi block in Lakhimpur Kheri, the forest department has trained villagers to inform the department when they see a tiger. This has led to fewer cases of human-tiger conflict. “They are even trained to understand the behaviour of other animals that may indicate a tiger’s presence. It’s all about creating awareness,” said an official. The “Bagh Mitra” initiative by the State includes training local people to identify tiger presence, take preventive measures, and assist in rescue operations.

Poor or absent sanitation facilities are said to lead to tiger attacks. While the government claims the State is “open defecation free”, at least 30 per cent of the villages in Kheri do not have toilets and residents are forced to use the fields, according to Jawahar Lal. His wife, Sri Devi, said she makes several trips to the fields accompanying her children for defecation. Senior officials in the local Forest Department office told this correspondent that when people squat in the fields, the tigers confuse them for small animals.

Another reason villagers venture into the forests is to collect wood for fuel. While many villagers have gas cylinders at home, they said they could not afford the refills.

Shekar Dattatri, an Indian herpetologist and wildlife filmmaker of The Truth About Tigers, said the reasons for the human-tiger conflict were several and complex, but “in a nutshell, human-tiger conflict often occurs when an old tiger is pushed out to the forest edge by a younger tiger taking over its territory, or when grown cubs start dispersing away from their mother’s territory in search of territory for themselves, and either end up at the edge of a reserve or beyond it. Humans venturing into a wildlife reserve for grazing cattle or collecting non-timber forest products may also conflict with tigers.”

He added: “The most important thing the general public needs to understand about tigers is that when their habitat and prey base are well protected, tigers are prolific breeders. So the removal of a few problem tigers from wildlife reserves will not affect the overall status of tigers in India. Timely removal of problem tigers will ensure that local people don’t take the law into their hands and also help ensure that other tigers are not killed in retaliation.”

Dattatri anticipates that conflict situations will likely increase in the future. “In a country of 1.5 billion people, some of whom live cheek by jowl with wild animals, conflicts are bound to occur and have to be managed. This is a simple fact of life. As wildlife reserves become more successful in tiger conservation and reach their carrying capacity, we are likely to see more conflict situations, and must be well prepared to deal with them.”