Today, she and her sister, Bagya cultivate only a small patch of pumpkins and beans in their yard. Bharati’s husband is a social worker in a town just outside the park. Bagya works on a nearby coffee estate. They cannot afford to rent a home outside the park. Good real estate has become expensive in India’s economic boom.
The sisters wonder how long they can hold on here, not because of pressure from forest guards, but for sake of opportunity. Bharati dropped out of school after the eighth grade because her parents had no money, and she wants her daughter, Prakriti, now in the seventh grade, to continue her education.
One day, she hopes, her daughter will have a government job. “I can’t ruin my daughter’s life the way I’ve ruined my life by not studying further,” she said. Bagya, for her part, was not optimistic. “Our kind of people,” she said, “continue to have trouble outside”.
Indeed, the road to relocation, despite good intentions, is paved with difficulties. There are unkept government promises. The buffaloes that come as part of a relocation package die of disease. Farming is a gamble anywhere — and here, even outside the park, there is the menace of elephants that trample crops, and sometimes people.
About a third of the 1,000 families who live inside Nagarahole Park have moved out in recent years. They were given boxy houses along the road and something they never had inside — legal title to land — but also problems they never had before.
J.K. Nagesh was a mahout, an elephant handler, inside the park who lost his job when he came down with tuberculosis. His land now lies fallow. He has no money to buy seed. His wife, Vasanthi, works on other people’s farms, and that is how they get by. His neighbours, a couple — Kamala and Bomma — who moved here five years ago, said they were divided about the move from the forest.
Kamala is still bitter about having to leave. “The forest grew because of us,” she said, recalling how she watched her father plant teak saplings and then sow crops in their shade. “Now we are being thrown out.” Her husband, Bomma, shook his head. He said he was happy to have legal claim to land and schools and hospitals in closer reach. “When I go to the forest now, I wonder why I was there for so long,” he said.
Kamala, sitting on her porch at twilight, reminded him of the new scarcities they face. The neighbourhood shares one well, and its water tastes foul. Electricity was promised when they moved, she said, but it still had not come.
Explaining their decision to leave the park, her husband shrugged and said, “We didn’t have anything to lose.”
Then as night settled over the hamlet, he put on a uniform and marched through the fields with a flashlight to peddle the one skill he had learned from living inside the park. On behalf of bigger, more prosperous farmers in the area, whose crops are frequently damaged by animals who range out of the forest, he stays up to chase elephants off the land.
©2008/THE NEW YORK TIMES