Mudumalai Tiger Reserve: Mudumulai, in the misty Nilgiri Hills to the extreme west of Tamil Nadu and neighbouring the national parks in Bandipur (Karnataka) and Wayanad (Kerala), is part of a thickly wooded region that is celebrated by travel guides and wildlife enthusiasts as the “sanctuary of the south”.
Wildlife ranging from macaques and langurs to sloth bears and sambhar deer, elephants, leopards, civets and tigers thrives in Mudumulai, whose name translates as the ancient hills.
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It is also home—and a source of livelihood—for 377 mainly tribal families, or 1,538 people, spread across 30 settlements. And it is a focal point of the country’s latest man-animal conflict, pitting land and resource rights of forest dwellers against the cause of wildlife conservation.
One day in July, more than 1,000 people joined a hunger strike to protest the declaration of Mudumulai as “critical tiger habitat” by the ministry of environment and forests that forbade human habitation in the area. They were also protesting a ban on the collection of forest produce including firewood, a ban on grazing and night restrictions on vehicular traffic clamped as part of the declaration.
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M. Ganeshamurthy, a shy tribesman in his early 20s, didn’t need much persuasion to travel more than 500km by bus to join the protest. Ganeshamurthy sympathizes with the cause of the Mudumulai people because he is a resident of Kalakkad-Munduthurai Tiger Reserve, a declared critical tiger habitat and where, too, forest dwellers face the threat of eviction.
“We are tied to this land,” he said. “Every time we go down to the plains, our first thoughts go back to the village.”
The two reserves are among 36 wildlife parks nationwide that have been designated critical tiger habitat, requiring people dwelling in the forests and their vicinity to move out.
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There are about 1,500 villages populated by 65,000 families, or 325,000 people, in the so-called core and buffer areas of these parks, which are also home to 1,411 of the big cats, according to the latest tiger census and the Tiger Task Force report-2005.
Mudumulai itself is populated by 38 tigers, according to the forest department. Buxa Tiger Reserve in West Bengal and Satpura Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh have also seen tribal protests in recent months against the parks being declared critical tiger habitat.
Tiger scientist Ulhas Karanth says that for the survival of the tiger, whose diminishing numbers have been a cause of mounting concern among conservationists and policymakers, it is vital to keep the animal’s habitat inviolate.