About a month ago, around 6 in the morning, when the sun had only just begun to press its heat into the fields of Pilibhit in Uttar Pradesh, Chameli Devi, 60, stepped out for rakhwali—her daily work of keeping watch over the standing crop, warding off stray cattle, nilgai, and whatever else the forest might send into the fields. The wheat, brushing against the edge of the forest fence, stood ready for harvest.
That morning, the fields somehow felt hostile. Then a low, guttural roar cut through the stillness. Chameli froze. About 15 metres ahead, well inside the field but partly concealed between the standing wheat and the thinning tree line, stood a tiger.
“It was almost camouflaged in the cereal grass,” she says. “It was only when I looked closely, in the direction of the sound, that the black stripes began to stand out.”
“The roar hit me like a bolt, right there, under my feet. I just made sure I didn’t lose my calm.” Years of working these lands had taught her how to hold her ground, even when the boundary between the forest and field dissolves without warning. She stood still—until the tiger turned away. Only then did Chameli break into a run, fleeing the farm.
Encounters like Chameli’s are not rare here; if anything, they are part of the rhythm of life in the Pilibhit forest belt. Across the world, an estimated 46.7 million people live alongside tigers, but the forests of Pilibhit and their surrounding areas support among the highest human population densities of any tiger conservation landscape. Located in the Terai belt, where the Himalayan foothills slope into the Indo-Gangetic plains, the region forms part of the Terai Arc Landscape, with the Pilibhit Tiger Reserve anchoring this network through its sal forests and grasslands.
A long, narrow forest hemmed in by villages and farmland, the landscape is frayed. Cultivation has steadily replaced what was once wild. And this proximity between a shrinking forest and expanding agriculture has made such encounters increasingly common.
Over the past two decades, the rapid spread of sugarcane cultivation has further reshaped this terrain. With over 70% of land in the Terai’s settlements now under sugarcane cultivation, the crop rises tall and dense, mirroring the region’s grasslands and offering tigers both cover and prey. Conservationists and locals have come to call them “sugarcane tigers”—big cats that move through farmland as easily as they do through forests. Tigresses are known to give birth in these fields, while others follow livestock and wild prey that stray into cultivated land.
Amid this shifting landscape, the region has emerged as a hotspot for human-tiger conflict, often with devastating consequences. According to Mohammad Kasim, a Pilibhit-based conservationist who has been working on human-wildlife conflict and tiger conservation in the region for over a decade, more than 60 people have been killed in tiger encounters in the area since 2010. With over 80% of the district’s population dependent on agriculture, the risk is embedded in everyday work, in fields that double up as shared habitat.
It is in this landscape of risk that women work alongside men—guarding crops, tending cattle, irrigating farms and working in sugarcane fields where tiger movement is common. But much of the women’s labour remains poorly paid, or folded into household farming itself, without recognition, wages or land ownership. With no land ownership or bankable source of income, women live in a state of perpetual anxiety of losing a loved one and their livelihood.
When the Tiger Walks Out
In many tiger landscapes, the biggest problems arise when people go into tiger territory. Pilibhit’s main challenge to coexistence is tigers leaving the protected area.
The Pilibhit Tiger Reserve was officially notified in June 2014. Since then, a combination of increased prey base, investments in monitoring technologies, and stronger anti-poaching patrols has allowed tiger numbers to recover rapidly. The population rose from around 25 in 2014 to nearly 65 by 2018, according to data from WWF India, marking one of the fastest recoveries in the region. This growth earned Pilibhit the inaugural TX2 Award in 2020, given by a consortium of international conservation agencies to sites that have successfully doubled their tiger populations within a decade.
Pilibhit is a narrow tiger reserve, leaving limited space for an expanding population. Tigers are highly territorial—dominant individuals occupy and defend prime areas, pushing younger or weaker ones to disperse. “Once territories fill up, the sub-adults or female tigers have no choice but to move out,” says Kasim.
The expansion of sugarcane fields has made this transition easier. “If it weren’t for sugarcane, you wouldn’t find tigers in the Terai’s villages,” says Rahul Shukla, a tiger conservationist and author of the 2008 book Sugarcane Tiger. “Its height gives them the cover and camouflage they need, which crops like wheat simply cannot provide. This is especially true for tigers, as they are solitary predators.”
Increasingly, some tigers have made the cane fields part of their permanent range. Shukla attributes this adaptation to learned behaviour passed across generations. Many of these tigers were raised in sugarcane fields by mothers that hunted there, making agricultural landscapes a familiar part of their lives from birth.
This is made possible by the structure of sugarcane cultivation itself. The crop matures over nine months, and even when harvested, a six-inch ratoon is left behind, allowing rapid regrowth. With staggered harvesting cycles from November through February, fields are never entirely cleared. Irrigation keeps these fields relatively cool through the summer, while their density provides continuous shelter and a steady prey base, including wild boar, nilgai, jackals and feral cattle.
Underscoring how far this habitat now extends beyond the forest due to the reserve’s overpopulation, surveys conducted by the Pilibhit Tiger Reserve in 2025 identified over 79 tigers within the core of the reserve, with estimates approaching 100 tigers including surrounding sugarcane fields as shelter.
Work Can’t Stop
With the rising tiger population spilling into the fields, the uncertainty of an encounter with a tiger has become part of everyday farm work.
In April, the predator threat goes down to some extent. When the wheat is being harvested, the fields are cleared and the sugarcane is still barely ankle-high. “You can see around,” says Anjali Devi, 32, who cultivates sugarcane on an acre of land with her husband, Dhirendar Kumar. But this is temporary. “In a month or two, the crop will rise to 2-3ft and then it becomes a spot for tigers.” Winters, with fog reducing visibility, are the hardest.
Over time, farmers have developed their own ways of negotiating this risk. Anjali’s mother-in-law used to walk around the farms banging a thali to alert the big cats. Now the farmers play Govinda-era Bollywood music or the occasional Punjabi song on speakers. More importantly, she adds, one has to learn to read the land. “You have to look carefully for pug marks. Even the trees you read them. If the bark is scratched, it means a tiger has passed. Sometimes it also means it has marked its territory… then it’s very possible you will see it again in the coming days in the same area.”
Still, there is only so much one can control. “A tiger can appear anywhere—if Shivji wills it, who can stop it? But you can’t stop going to the fields. If we don’t grow, what will we eat?” asks Anjali.
Though agriculture accounts for over 61.87% of female work participation in the district, according to the 2011 census, only a few women like Anjali are recognised as farmers in their own right.
“Women in Pilibhit are rarely independent farmers. Much of the work that women do unfolds on the fields of large landholders,” says Pilibhit-based journalist and conservationist Amitav Agnihotri, 50. “Or they typically work alongside family members—most often their husbands—on small family plots.” He adds that most of their labour is pushed into casualised roles such as guarding fields, tending cattle, cleaning, or assisting during sowing and harvest seasons
According to the 2011 Census—the latest publicly available disaggregated data at the district level—women in Pilibhit remained only a small fraction of cultivators: of over 2.1 lakh cultivators, only about 16,000 were women (roughly 7-8%). Even among agricultural labourers, where their presence is more visible, women numbered just over 26,000 out of more than 2.1 lakh, (12–13%) of the workforce.
But even in households where women work the land alongside their husbands, the labour rarely translates into control over income. “The money goes into the house,” says Anjali with a shrug, when asked if she had any independent claim over the income from the crop she helps cultivate. “What comes, comes in his account. Then everyone spends from it according to need. ”
Like many women in the region, Anjali describes household finances as a shared obligation structured around the authority of men. Expenses for seeds, fertilisers, children’s education, marriages or medical needs are discussed within the family, but the final decision is usually taken by husbands. “We work together,” she says. “But men handle the outside matters.”
For women, this arrangement creates a peculiar contradiction: they bear the equal risks of farming in the threat of tiger encounters without necessarily possessing formal rights over land, income or agricultural decision-making. Their labour sustains the farm economy, but their relationship to both land and earnings often remains mediated through the family.
Only Labour, No Ownership
Although the household income from farming is largely handled by Anjali’s husband, the acre of land that they cultivate belongs to neither of them. It is registered in the name of his mother, Chameli Devi, who for the last 10 years has been working as a guard on fields owned by others, watching over 5-7 acres at a time. The work is relentless.
“You have to keep moving,” Chameli says, describing the slow, circular patrols along the edges and through the middle of the field, checking for any intrusion from the wild. “The job is difficult… you are always on alert.” Encounters with animals—sometimes far more dangerous than stray cattle—are not unusual. “Last year too I spotted a tiger,” she says.
For most of her married life with her husband, Ganga Ram, she cultivated it herself, growing wheat and rotating crops with sugarcane. But over the years, as her two sons married and started families of their own, the small parcel of 2 acres effectively passed into their hands. “They have families to sustain now, grown children,” she says. “How many people can depend on one or two acres of land?”
Chameli works as labour in the fields of a Sikh landlord—Sikh farming families today own much of the larger landholdings across Pilibhit’s Terai.
Many of these families arrived in the region after Partition, displaced from regions such as Sialkot and Sheikhupura of East Punjab, Pakistan. As part of post-Partition rehabilitation, leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Uttar Pradesh’s first chief minister Govind Ballabh Pant encouraged settlement in the forested Terai, allotting land to refugee families while simultaneously expanding cultivation into the wilderness. Over time, as these lands turned fertile and productive, the region drew more farmers from Punjab—they could sell one acre back home and buy nearly 10 acres in the Terai.
As cultivation expanded deeper into the Terai’s forested landscape, so did everyday proximity with wildlife. “Tigers were always there,” Chameli says. “But earlier, we did not hear of so many incidents in the fields.” The danger, she says, has become more visible with time. For an entire cropping cycle—nearly six months from sowing to harvest— Chameli is paid in grain: roughly seven quintals for months of labour stretching from early morning until dusk. At current market rates, that amounts to barely ₹17,000-20,000 for half-a-year’s work.
Chameli says she prefers guarding fields to other forms of farm labour because there is increasingly little work left for women in the fields. “Most of the farming is now done by tractors and combines,” she says. “Labour is only needed at certain times.”
In parts of Pilibhit, the landscape now looks like the agriculturally affluent parts of rural Punjab: large houses rise amid expansive wheat and sugarcane fields. Agnihotri notes other similarities: large landowning households rely heavily on mechanised farming, curbing demand for manual labour except in peak season. Economist Bina Agarwal, writing in the International Labour Review, in 1981, on Punjab’s Green Revolution economy, argued that the effects of mechanisation were unevenly distributed, with women workers and casual labourers bearing the sharpest decline in employment opportunities.
Writing for the International Labour Organization, Govind Kelkar, a political economist and the executive director of the GenDev Centre for Research and Innovation, a feminist research and policy analysis organisation, also observed that men tend to “appropriate knowledge, skill and services of the new agrarian technology,” while women are “relegated to primitive, non-technological and non-wage subsistence tasks.” In such settings, women’s work often remains absorbed within household farming structures instead of being recognised as independent wage labour.
The farms themselves remain overwhelmingly male-managed spaces, with cultivation decisions, market dealings and supervision of labour largely handled by men. Much of the day-to-day agricultural work, meanwhile, is carried out by hired local labourers.
It is within this unequal agrarian landscape that another displaced community entered the region’s labour economy, many of them women.
The Other Migration
Pilibhit is home to nearly 1.25 lakh people of Bengali origin, many of whom arrived between 1958-74, displaced first by Partition and then by the Bangladesh Liberation War, under refugee rehabilitation programmes initiated by the Union government. Several displaced families had been resettled across parts of the Terai on leased agricultural land.
The Sikh farmers arrived with agricultural capital, and gradually consolidated large and secure landholdings in the Terai. But the Bengali refugees displaced from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) were more commonly settled in clustered rehabilitation colonies on smaller agricultural plots, often under lease arrangements rather than permanent ownership.
Reports on refugee rehabilitation in Pilibhit note that these leased allotments remained legally unresolved for decades. Families cultivated the land for generations but were denied pattas or ownership documents, restricting access to institutional credit, welfare schemes, compensation, and long-term agrarian security. Even more than six decades later, thousands of Bengali refugee families in Pilibhit are only now being considered for formal ownership rights over the land they were originally allotted after migration.
The question of land regularisation also remains closely tied to citizenship documentation. In recent years, policy discussions around the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and refugee regularisation has renewed attention on Bengali refugee settlements across the Terai.
This unequal trajectory continues to shape the rural economy of the Terai. While large Sikh-owned farms came to dominate much of the region’s commercial agriculture, many Bengali-origin families remained concentrated within marginal farming and agricultural wage labour—particularly in settlements along forest edges and sugarcane fields.
“This relative lack of secure and large landholdings within many Bengali refugee households means women often participate more directly in agricultural labour, more on small family plots and as seasonal workers on others’ farms,” Agnihotri notes.
Seeking Work Elsewhere
In Neoria Colony, at the edge of the forest, Anita Biswas, 30, sits outside the mud-plastered house her in-laws’ family has lived in for nearly seven decades, rolling beedis for a local contractor while the Bengali song Koto Sukhe Acho Tumi plays softly from her phone. The houses in the settlement sit within open courtyards lined with bamboo fencing, fruit trees and kitchen patches—built in a distinct Bengali style with raised mud plinths, sloping tin roofs and walls repeatedly coated with fresh clay after every monsoon.
Similar architectural forms are now consciously replicated in some of the safari lodges emerging around the tiger belt to evoke a “rustic” forest aesthetic. But here, the houses are less aesthetic than inheritance and survival. Electricity infrastructure remains patchy in parts of the settlement and Anita says even a short spell of heavy rain can cut the basti off entirely. “Once it rains properly, the road disappears into mud,” she says. “Sometimes nobody can come in or go out.”
For every 1,000 beedis, she earns ₹170. “It’s not much,” she says, “but at least there is no tiger in this work.”
The colony, a cluster of eight houses pressed against the forest boundary, is home to landless Bengali families. Anita says several families in the settlement still lack complete documentation. “Most people here still don’t have voter cards. My mother never had one. Neither do I,” she says. “We have been here for years, but paper trails have remained incomplete.”
In Neoria colony darkness comes early—and with it, the sense that the forest is never too far away. Anita says after dark, no one steps out, not even in their own courtyard. And working in someone else’s field while constantly looking over your shoulder for a tiger is simply not worth the trouble anymore, she adds.
Her fears are not unfounded. In February, her aunt and neighbour Parul Rai left for the fields early evening and did not return. The village searched through the night, but it was only in the morning that her body, killed in a tiger attack, was found at the edge of the forest.
Twice a year, during paddy season, Anita and her husband migrate to districts in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana for farm work. They transplant paddy, weed the fields, and harvest crops as a husband-wife labour unit, hired seasonally by owner farmers. “Of course we miss the peace and silence here but the income there is much more stable,” she says.
In Pilibhit, agricultural work is often irregular and concentrated around peak seasons, with labourers earning barely ₹350-450 a day when work is available. In contrast, Anita says the couple can together earn close to ₹900-1,200 a day during intensive paddy work in the south, especially during transplanting and harvesting cycles. Over a migration cycle lasting two-three months, the household can make ₹60,000–100,000 before expenses, a sum difficult to earn locally through irregular farm labour.
Everyday Anxieties
Entering the field is an unavoidable risk. When the sugarcane crop stands tall, irrigation often depends on the erratic electricity supply. “Sometimes there’s no power for two days,” Anjali says. “And then suddenly it comes in the middle of the night. You have to go to the fields to pump water.” When the danger of a big cat attack is high, it is usually her husband who goes out.
Fear settles into routines, in small unexpected sounds and sights and reshapes everyday relationships. Anjali’s brother–in-law was killed in a tiger attack around four years ago in neighbouring fields, so every time her husband leaves home, she is on tenterhooks. Sometimes, she says, she accompanies him to the fields simply because standing together feels safer than waiting alone at home.
Researchers studying human-tiger conflict in the Sundarbans, West Bengal, where rural lives unfold alongside the constant threat of tiger attacks—have documented similar lingering anxiety in households living at the forest edge. While men are more likely to physically confront wildlife during crop guarding or night work, women frequently bear the longer psychological burden of living with the constant possibility of loss, injury or economic collapse within the household. In many settings, fears around wildlife become inseparable from fears around survival itself.
While the landscape in Pilibhit differs from the tidal forests of the Sundarbans, women here describe a similar undercurrent of fear around agricultural labour in tiger-prone fields. The anxiety is not only about encountering a tiger; it is also about what losing a husband, a son or an earning member would mean in households where women often lack independent land ownership, stable incomes, or control over agricultural decisions.
Resolving Conflict
Kasim points to the need to send the tigers back into the forest by closely tracking their movements and ensuring that forest officials respond swiftly whenever signs of a tiger are detected in agricultural fields. “That is the one way conflict can be reduced, if not fully solved,” he maintains.
While conservationists broadly agree that the presence of tigers in sugarcane fields lies at the heart of the conflict, some argue that a longer-term solution may require rethinking land use itself, like replacing sugarcane with crops that do not create the tall, grassland-like habitat that allows tigers to hide close to human settlements.
Samir Kumar Sinha, director and chief ecologist at the Wildlife Trust of India, says the expansion of sugarcane cultivation has inadvertently created ideal habitat for tigers outside protected forests. “In the long term, we may need to think about changing cropping patterns and land use,” he says, adding, “It is well established that sugarcane provides excellent cover for tigers. Had sugarcane never expanded across this landscape, the scale of conflict we see today would likely have been far lower.”
For now, however, authorities and conservationists are focused on measures that can reduce conflict in the short term. Sinha notes that pressure from sugar mills to maintain a steady supply of cane can sometimes lead to rapid harvesting, leaving little time for forest officials to assess fields where tigers may be sheltering.
“A more coordinated harvesting schedule, particularly in high-conflict villages, can help avoid encounters,” he says. Advance information allows forest teams to inspect fields before harvesting begins and, where necessary, safely drive animals away from the area.
Beyond changes in harvesting practices, conservationists say community awareness is an effective tool. Advisories discouraging people from entering fields alone, avoiding fieldwork during dawn and dusk, and teaching villagers to identify signs of tiger presence have all helped reduce risky encounters.
“People need to understand the signs around them,” Sinha says. “Being able to recognise pug marks, alarm calls or other indications of tiger activity can greatly improve safety.”
Agnihotri remembers instances of tigers being killed by the community in Pilibhit but says that people have now started to inform the forest department.
Bharat Kumar, divisional forest officer (DFO) of the Pilibhit forest and wildlife division, says they have adopted a range of measures to reduce conflict, including monitoring tiger movements through Bagh Mitras issuing early warnings to villagers, deploying rapid-response teams, installing solar lights in high-risk villages, and promoting safer harvesting practices. “Our focus is on early detection and timely intervention,” he says. “The more quickly we can identify a tiger’s presence and alert local communities, the better our chances of preventing conflict.”
There is no denying how quickly panic multiplies after a tiger sighting even today. “Half a decade ago, when conflict was high, a lot of energy was wasted on misinformation (about tiger spotting). Sometimes up to 20 cases of misinformation a day from various villagers,” says Mudit Gupta, who heads WWF-India’s Eastern Terai landscape. “The forest department would receive the same alert from multiple teams, and everyone would be running in different directions.”
Naresh Kumar, a senior project and local conservationist for WWF-India at the Pilibhit Tiger Reserve says that fear also breeds paranoia. “A moving shadow, the flick of a cow’s tail, even a yellow sari on a fence—anything can trigger panic,” he says.
To address this, the Bagh Mitra programme was introduced in 2019 by the Uttar Pradesh forest department in collaboration with WWF-India and local communities across the Terai. The programme trains selected villagers as first responders—people who can verify sightings, calm rumours, and coordinate through mobile apps with forest officials during conflict situations.
Today, these networks play a crucial role in tracking tiger movement across farms and settlements in Pilibhit. Using a mix of local knowledge and basic training, Bagh Mitras identify pug marks, monitor movement patterns, and relay verified information to forest teams.
Moreover, when a tiger strays into a field or village, response teams work to isolate the area, guide people away, and where possible, safely drive the animal back towards the forest. While not eliminating conflict, these systems have helped reduce panic, prevent retaliatory harm, and create a more coordinated response.
But participation in such conservation work is shaped by the same agrarian inequalities that structure everyday life in the Terai. Many active Bagh Mitras are landholders who possess the time, mobility and social standing to participate in unpaid community monitoring work alongside farming.
One of them is Sumit Arsingh, who owns around 30 acres in Pilibhit and has been among the programme’s most active volunteers. For him, tracking tiger movement and assisting forest officials has become a matter of community responsibility and personal pride. “If a tiger enters near the village and we manage the situation without panic, it protects both people and the animal,” he says. “I’ve grown up here and we are always on the field.”
There are now nearly 200 Bagh Mitras in the region, only a handful of them women. Chameli laughs when asked whether she would ever join, despite spending far more time in the fields than many others in the programme. Unlike large landholders who move across farms on motorcycles coordinating sightings, Chameli’s knowledge of the landscape comes entirely on foot, through labour.
“Maybe if there was time after work, we could do this as a pastime,” she says. For now, we look for tigers only to stay alive in the fields.”
Anuj Behal is an independent journalist based in South Asia. His reporting spans religion and human rights, labour injustice, and issues of diaspora and migration across the region.