The Tribal Hamlet Inside a Tiger Reserve
A tiger reserve in the Eastern Ghats of Andhra Pradesh has a core area of 480 sq km and a buffer of 300 sq km. Inside the core live 620 people of a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group in two hamlets, with recognised forest rights over 140 hectares. The reserve's tiger population has risen from 9 to 17 in eight years. The National Tiger Conservation Authority has asked the state to complete voluntary relocation. The state offers Rs 15 lakh per family plus a resettlement site 40 km away with a road, a school and a borewell. The community's own gram sabha has rejected relocation 2:1, citing sacred groves and burial grounds inside the core. Meanwhile, three cattle kills and one human injury have occurred in 14 months.
1. How should the state proceed - relocate, co-exist, or a hybrid?
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This is a rights-versus-conservation judgement, and the correct frame is that neither right is absolute.
- Relocation must be genuinely voluntary. The law requires informed consent of the gram sabha, not a majority engineered by a compensation offer. A 2:1 rejection is a rejection. Proceeding against it would be both unlawful and a recipe for conflict.
- Co-existence is feasible here. 620 people on 140 ha of recognised rights inside 480 sq km of core is a low-density footprint. The actual problem is not the people's presence but the interface: free-grazing cattle, no early-warning, no rapid-response team.
- A hybrid is the honest answer: (i) accept the gram sabha's decision and drop forced relocation; (ii) invest in interface management - stall-feeding and cattle-proof enclosures, a community-based early-warning and rapid-response team, compensation paid within 15 days of a kill; (iii) protect the sacred groves and burial grounds as inviolable; (iv) keep the relocation offer open and improved (the 40 km distance and loss of forest livelihood are the real objections) for any family that later chooses it.
Criteria: rights compliance, conservation outcome (tiger numbers can hold with interface management), and reversibility - a hybrid can be revisited; a forced relocation cannot be undone.
2. The NTCA insists on relocation 'to secure the core'. How should the district administration handle the centre-state tension?
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The officer should separate the technical claim from the policy demand and answer both in writing.
- Interrogate the evidence. Ask the NTCA for the specific basis on which 620 people threaten a population that has doubled to 17. If the threat is cattle depredation and interface, say so, and propose interface measures with measurable targets. If the core genuinely cannot hold both, that must be shown, not asserted.
- Do not hide behind the centre, and do not defy it theatrically. The state should reply formally: consent is a statutory precondition; here it is absent; here is the co-existence plan and its monitoring indicators.
- Offer the NTCA a shared monitoring protocol - camera-trap trends, conflict incidents, interface investments - so the disagreement becomes an empirical question reviewed annually, not a turf war.
- Protect the officer's own accountability by recording the advice and the gram sabha resolution in the file.
The tested value is courageous, evidence-based pushback within lawful channels - neither blind compliance nor insubordination.