Maharashtra: The Forest They Stole in the Name of the Tiger Conservation

— ✍️ Prakash Priyadarshi

Every year on the fifth of June (The World Environment Day), the world performs its ritual of environmental grief. Governments issue statements. Corporations plant saplings and photograph them. Universities across the globe performs the plantation drive. Resort chains announce eco-packages. Celebrities post from their private jets about carbon footprints. And somewhere from the core and buffer zone of tiger reserves like Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve, Maharashtra, where 79 villages from Buffer Zone and 6 Villages from the core areas has been dispossessed and relocated in the vicinity of minimum 15 to 45 km. This dispossession has been conducted in the name of tiger conservation where the existence of tribals and other forest dwellers has been declared illegal which is backed by the state ideological apparatuses. Explicitly there is an inherent brutality and lack of compassion in the aesthetics of neoliberal conservation which commodifies nature parallel to the Veblen goods which is a luxurious and conspicuous consumption for leisure class (Veblen, 1899).

Today this plantation drive is going on in many of the universities and other institutions including mine where I am associated which is in fact a good sign. But I want to draw the attention to a very crucial question that is there any difference between environmental justice and social justice? Do you think that merely plantation drive is going to fulfil the aspirations and one of the objectives of World Environment Day like Environmental Justice? Don’t you think that it would easier for the realization of environmental justice if the basic rights and social justice is realized first?

Now Let me begin with a simple fact that rarely appears in wildlife documentaries or conservation reports. In and around the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve in Chandrapur, Maharashtra, seventy-nine villages have been displaced from the buffer zone. Six villages from the core area namely, Botezhari, Kolsa, Jamni, Navegaon, Palashgaon, and Ramtalodhi have been formally relocated. The people who lived in these villages were not encroachers. They were Gond, Kolam, and other Adivasi communities who had lived inside this forest for centuries, who knew every stream, every tree, every seasonal path. The tribals and other forest dwellers whose labour has shaped the forest landscape of Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve, and in return forest was providing them with their livelihood, until unless forest dwellers’s rights were not encroached.

History has been witnessed that the people have been evicted for the primitive accumulation first by the Britishers’ appetite for the raw material for the industrial revolution and the injustices the then in the name of ‘white Man’s burden’ and now the name has been changed to the ‘conservation’ where forest dwelling communities are thrown into the situation like  what Giorgio Agamben (2005) said the ‘State of Exception’ by employing the ‘Necro-Political State Apparatuses’, where people’s lives are  systematically cheapened and habituated to loss (Mbembe, 2019). The alienation of these communities from their land is an example of the, in my opinion, is ‘the higher stages of the barbarian culture’ (Veblen, 1899) which is being done for the consumption of the leisure class for the accumulation of capital at the cost of millions of the people whose livelihood is dependent upon the forest ecosystem.

Now in order to realize this, I want you to sit with that for a moment. Not with the tiger. Not with the safari. But with the local and so-called resettled people. The grandmother who gathered mahua flowers from the same trees her grandmother gathered them from. The farmer who knew which soil held water and which didn’t. The child who grew up knowing the forest not as a tourist destination but as home. All of them were told: leave. The tiger needs this space. The state will take care of the relocated communities but eventually they became, in the words of Agamben (2005) homo sacer not in principles but in practical sense which reduced them to the bare life by introducing the State of Exception.

The Timeline of Introducing the relocation through ‘The state of Exception’

When the families of Botezari to Bhagwanpur: 79 families (2007); Kolsa: 49 families (2007), 48 families (2012-2016), 80 families (2022); Nawegaon (also referred to as Ramdegi): 240 families (2013); Jamni: 200 families (2014); Palasgaon Singru: 142 families (2019), were relocated, the government made specific commitments.  Irrigated agricultural land. Permanent, sturdy houses. Schools, healthcare centres, clean drinking water. Compensation for everything they were losing. These were not informal assurances. They were the minimum the state was obligated to provide under its own resettlement guidelines.

What these families actually received was what I visited and found something else. The communities were given unirrigated land unsuitable for cultivation, sometimes land that other communities already had claims over. The houses that were built cracked within months of construction particularly in Botezhari. There was no school within walking distance. There was no clean water source. The compensation was either inadequate or simply did not arrive for years. And the forest — the source of food, medicine, income, and identity that these families had depended on for generations was now fenced off behind a boundary that treated them as trespassers. The Forest Rights Act of 2006 was Parliament’s acknowledgment that this kind of dispossession had a history, and the motto was to undo the historical injustices. The Act gave Adivasi communities and other traditional forest dwellers the legal right to land they cultivated, to collect and manage Non-Timber Forest Products, and to consent to or refuse any project affecting their habitat. Around Tadoba, this Act has been treated as a bureaucratic inconvenience rather than a legal obligation. FRA claims have been rejected without proper hearings. Community forest resource rights remain unrecognised. Women who once supplemented their family’s income by collecting mahua, tendu, hirda, beheda, and bamboo have been effectively criminalised for entering the forest. The ecological economy that sustained these communities has been dismantled not because it was unsustainable, but because it stood in the way of a more profitable economy built on exclusion.

However, because of leisure class presence the profitable economy is visible at Tadoba’s gate every morning. By six o’clock, twenty to thirty safari jeeps line up for the morning slot. Sixty diesel vehicles a day enter the Critical Tiger Habitat. The basic resorts charge Rs.7,000 a night. The medium-range properties charge Rs.15,000. The premium jungle lodges — with their infinity pools and curated menus — charge Rs.30,000 to Rs.50,000. Each safari trip costs Rs.7,500 for three hours (Data, Resort’s websites). The Gond woman from Botezhari, resettled fifteen kilometres away on land that cannot grow enough to feed her children, has no longer accessibility to bring those NTFPs for the consumption and sell which was a major source of cash income.

Manufactured Consent and the Fiction of Pristine Wilderness

The tiger reserve system, as it currently operates across India, is a masterclass in what the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci would call manufactured consent — the ideological work of making a particular arrangement of power appear natural, inevitable, and even morally necessary. We have been persuaded, through decades of conservation messaging, wildlife documentaries, and NGO campaigns, that Adivasi communities are threats to wildlife, that exclusionary protection is the only scientifically valid approach, and that the displacement of forest-dwelling communities is a painful but unavoidable price for ecological survival. None of this is true. What is true is that the tiger reserve system, as organised under Project Tiger since 1973 and massively expanded under the Wildlife Protection Act, has been extraordinarily effective at transferring ecological wealth from the poor to the wealthy. The Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve in Chandrapur, Maharashtra, is the clearest case study available. Here, seventy-nine villages have been displaced from the buffer zone alone. Six villages from the core area — Botezhari, Kolsa, Jamni, Navegaon, Palashgaon, and Ramtalodhi — have been formally relocated. These were not settlements on the edge of the forest. They were communities embedded within it, with centuries of ecological knowledge, seasonal practice, and cultural relationship with the landscape.

Environmental Justice Is Social Justice

The starvation that haunts Adivasi resettlement colonies in Jharkhand, the malnutrition that has persisted in Melghat’s resettled Korku communities for decades, the grinding poverty that has followed the displaced families of Tadoba to their new locations — these are not development failures. They are policy outcomes. They are what happens when a state deliberately removes communities from their means of survival, refuses to settle their legal rights, and then measures success by tiger-sighting statistics and tourism revenue.

The law's failure to shield the communities of Botezhari and Kolsa, or the other dispossessed villages in Tadoba, is not a implementation problem — it's a law designed to protect only them and their homes for the benefit of all others. It is the corrosive effect of forests laws and modifications of those laws, routinely demanding tariffs for issue of land and other forest rights, that most of these plaintiff groups win little from. As per the Campaign for Survival and Dignity (CSD) and Adivasi Adhikaar Rashtriya Manch, 100,000 people have been displaced due to the creation of protected areas and the National Tiger Conservation Authority has recently called for expediting relocation of 64,801 people from core tiger reserve areas (Campaign for Survival and Dignity (CSD) and Adivasi Adhikaar Rashtriya Manch, 2025). CSD also pointed out that forest rights claims were rejected without providing adequate reasons to the claimants or concerned Gram Sabhas. They were also denied the opportunity to appeal or present additional evidence.   Other Traditional Forest Dwellers have seen a high rate of rejection overall. As per the records accessed from the Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs, until January 31, 2025, as many as 1,806,890 claims have been rejected (DTE, March, 2025). Giorgio Agamben called this bare life: the condition of people who are legally visible enough to be dispossessed but never protected enough to matter. That is precisely where India's forest dwellers have been placed — not by accident, but by the accumulated weight of laws written, amended, and corrupted to serve everyone except them."

This is where the argument must be made plainly: environmental justice is nothing but social justice. There is no version of ecological protection that is morally serious while it simultaneously destroys the communities that protected the ecology in the first place. You cannot have one without the other. The tiger and the Gond woman both need the same forest. The idea that saving one requires removing the other is not a conservation insight. It is an ideological convenience that serves capital. Karl Marx described capitalism’s foundational move as primitive accumulation — the removal of people from their land so that land can be turned into a commodity. What happened to the villages of Tadoba is primitive accumulation in its most literal form. First, remove the people. Then fence the forest. Then sell access to the forest back to those wealthy enough to afford it at Rs. 7,500 for three hours and the medium-range properties charge per night Rs. 15,000. The premium jungle lodges — with their infinity pools and curated menus — charge per night Rs. 30,000 to Rs. 50,000. Thomas Piketty’s data on inequality tells us this pattern does not self-correct. It compounds. The resort owner’s wealth grows. The resettled Gond family’s precarity deepens. The distance between them widens with every safari season.

The forest is made “cheap” by removing its human caretakers, so it can be sold at a premium to those who can afford to experience the resulting silence. The labour of those caretakers the generations of ecological knowledge, the seasonal practices, the community management of forest resources is simply erased from the accounts.

Conclusion

The corporate interests eating through Hasdeo Arand’s forests in Chhattisgarh, the mining companies working Niyamgiri in Odisha, the resort developers multiplying around Tadoba — none of them act alone. They operate with state facilitation, legal cover, and the ideological support of institutions that have successfully made exclusionary development and exclusionary conservation appear to be the only rational options. Breaking this arrangement requires political will that is currently absent from mainstream conservation discourse. It requires the full, unobstructed implementation of the Forest Rights Act — every claim settled, every community forest resource right recognised, without bureaucratic delay or departmental sabotage. It requires recognising gram sabha consent as a genuine veto over projects affecting forest communities. It requires the redistribution of eco-tourism revenue to the communities whose displacement created the tourism product. It requires that displaced families receive what they were actually promised: irrigated land, functional housing, schools, healthcare, water, and real livelihood alternatives. And it requires an honest reckoning with what conservation means and who it is designed to serve.

The people of Botezhari and Kolsa did not leave willingly. They were told to leave for the tiger, and then the state abandoned and thrown into the state of exception. They are living now on dry land that cannot support their families, in houses that are falling apart, without access to the forest that was their home, their medicine, and their income. Their children are growing up without the ecological knowledge that sustained their communities for generations. This is not an unfortunate side effect of a successful conservation programme. This is the conservation programme’s actual cost, paid by the people least able to afford it, so that the people most able to pay can drive through a forest in a diesel jeep and call it a wildlife experience.

Environmental justice will remain a slogan until we are willing to build the welfare state that makes it real  a state that recognises its obligations to its most vulnerable citizens, that implements the laws it has already passed, and that refuses to let corporate profit and leisure class (Veblen, 1899) consumption continue to be subsidised by the dispossession of the poorest. Until that happens, every World Environment Day statement, every conservation success story, every safari brochure is built on the same foundation: the lives of people like the communities of Tadoba, sacrificed quietly, in the name of the tiger.

The celebration of the World Environment Day by the leisure class or Bourgeoisie class doesn’t yield anything until unless social justice is not being realized to the marginalized such as tribals and other forest dwellers with respect to the environment.

The Author Prakash Priyadarshi, is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at ISEC (Institute for Social and Economic Change), Bengaluru.