Nagarahole national park, Karnataka: At sundown, as the air began to cool and the beasts came out of the shade, K. Ullas Karanth drove slowly through this sprawling park in southern India. Elephants nibbled on the grass. A sunbird dashed across the sky. Then, Karanth nearly froze in a start. “Tiger, tiger,” he whispered.
Just ahead, a large male lumbered across the path, stopping to turn and look at Karanth’s jeep and its passengers before continuing his languid march into the bush.
Ideal playground: A recent estimate shows that Nagarahole and its two neighbouring parks have one of the densest concentrations of tigers.
The research by Karanth, a wildlife biologist who runs the India programme of the Wildlife Conservation Society, suggests that this and its neighbouring nature reserve hold one of the largest concentrations of tigers in the world.
But to make these wilds healthy for the fabled tiger is a success 20 years in the making, with crusading forest officials driving out hunters and loggers and ultimately trying to resettle hundreds of families who have lived in these woods for generations.
That fact has earned Karanth as many enemies as friends. And it is raising an increasingly pressing question for this crowded nation of 1.1 billion people: What price should India pay to save its rapidly diminishing forests, and for whom — a trophy animal like the tiger, or its original inhabitants?
That debate has taken on new urgency with a long-contested law that came into effect this year granting formal land rights to those who have lived in the forest since 2005, including but not limited to the indigenous people known as tribals.
Advocates for forest people seized on the law as overdue redress for communities denied rights to their traditional domain since the British colonial era. Conservationists saw it as a threat to the country’s vanishing wildlife.
It is a debate that affects not only the tiger, which needs precisely what India has little of — large, empty swaths of land in which to roam and hunt — but also those who have shared these woods with them for generations.
Karanth insists that their presence inevitably produces “incompatible human uses” that leave tigers no chance to live: logging, gathering of forest produce and especially hunting. In the end, the government included in the land rights law a measure that allowed for the expulsion of settlements from areas deemed “critical wildlife habitats,” but with the explicit consent of villagers. Like many compromises, it left neither side happy.
With Karanth’s help, park officials here have driven out poachers, cracked down on cattle-grazing and pushed hundreds of villagers out of these woods. Today, the wild boar and deer are so plentiful in this 250 sq. mile park that Karanth calls it a “supermarket” for tigers. His research suggests that there are 60-80 tigers in the park, depending on breeding fluctuations.