'Encroachers on Our Own Land': The Fight for Indigenous Recognition in Nagarahole

On January 1, 2026, I was up at 4.30 am, an ungodly hour, not for New Year revelries, but ready to head to Nagarahole forest, four hours away from Bengaluru, the city I live in.

The indigenous people of the region – the Jenu Kurubas, Betta Kurubas, Paniyas, and Yeravas – were reaching the end of a 13-day Padayatra across 29 villages. They had invited citizens, media, activists, and friends to join them in solidarity as they asserted their presence as Nagarahole’s original inhabitants, demanding an end to a conservation regime whose policies, they argue, has criminalised their lives and livelihoods.

I first came into contact with members of the Jenu Kuruba (honey-gatherer) community in 2021, while working on a climate project as a Project Green Fellow. Around that time, I had read about nearly 6,000 Jenu Kuruba Adivasis protesting Project Tiger, an Indian wildlife conservation programme widely regarded as successful. Supported by international NGOs such as the World Wildlife Fund, this model has also been sharply criticised for being anti-people, turning forests into militarised zones, enforcing the idea of forests as “inviolate spaces with no human interference.”

This approach is based on an idea of nature we’ve inherited from our colonial past, one that sees humans and forests as inherently incompatible. Yet, growing research challenges this premise, reminding us that nature has always been peopled.

The vast jungles of the Amazon, for instance, are home to hundreds of indigenous communities who have lived with and nurtured these ecosystems for centuries. Studies increasingly show that the world’s healthiest forests are not those under strict state protection, but in lands managed by indigenous peoples. A 2021 report found that in Latin America, deforestation rates were up to 50% lower in Indigenous territories where land rights were secure, than in areas where they are not. And yet, a narrow, colonial idea of conservation continues to dominate in countries like India, resulting in widespread displacement and human rights violations against forest-dependent communities.

It was in this context that I worked closely with a few members of the Jenu Kuruba tribe to co-create an illustrated booklet ‘Who Are the Jenu Kuruba?’, which tells the community’s story in their own words – how they have lived in reciprocal relationship with the forest, how many were violently displaced in the name of conservation, and how they continue to fight for their rights and ancestral homelands.

Four years later, the fight continues.

On August 9, 2025 – International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples – the community erected a board at one of Nagarahole’s forest entry gates. It read: “Nagarahole is the sacred customary land of the Adivasi clans and families living here… Please behave with respect and dignity in this area.” As Shivu, a community leader, put it: “If the Forest Department and conservation NGOs can put up boards at the gate, why can’t we, the original inhabitants, erect one declaring our presence and customs?”

In conversations with Thimappa, a community elder, he recalled how a school run by the Tribal Welfare Department once operated close to his home in the forest, where he received his basic education. After Nagarahole was declared a ‘Protected Area,’ the region was systematically “de-developed.” Schools, healthcare, and basic services were withdrawn, leaving his children without access to a nearby school. This deliberate underdevelopment, combined with coercion, violence, and the lures of compensation that rarely materialise – is part of a broader strategy to push forest communities out. Cariappa, a Jenu Kuruba man from H.D. Kote was tortured and killed by Forest Department officials after being accused of selling deer meat. Basava was shot for collecting mushrooms.

And yet, despite this hostility, the tribal community remains indispensable to forest protection. “Without tribal guides, celebrated conservationists would never have been able to navigate Nagarahole’s forests,” says Thimmanna, a hamlet chieftain and leader of the people’s movement. “Even today, when there is a forest fire, the department calls us in as fire-watchers. All the mahouts for Mysuru’s Dasara festival come from our community.” In the early 2000s, the Taj Group began construction of a luxury resort deep inside Nagarahole, an idea abandoned only after fierce resistance from the forest’s Indigenous communities.

“They call it conservation,” Thimmanna says, “but really it’s business. They plant teak for commercial use, set up luxury eco-resorts, and send safari jeeps into the forest from six in the morning. And then they point to our presence as the problem. They call us encroachers on our own land!”

Farmers living on the forest’s edge in H.D. Kote have also protested the safari model, blaming it for rising human–animal conflict along Nagarahole’s borders.

In 2006, Indian law formally acknowledged the historical injustice faced by forest-dependent communities with the enactment of the Forest Rights Act. The Act recognises individual, community, and forest resource rights, including the right to habitation for tribal and other forest-dwelling communities. Yet nearly two decades later, its true implementation remains a distant dream, as evident in ‘protected areas’ like Nagarahole.

As I joined the final days of the Padayatra (held between 21 Dec 2025 and 3 Jan 2026), where the community welcomed anyone willing to walk with them, listen, and learn. As we moved from village to village, singing songs that carry memories of the forest and resistance, I witnessed a form of democracy that is both fragile and fiercely alive: hamlet-level gram sabhas asserting rights against an anti-people conservation apparatus. Their demands included a halt on safaris without local consent, a recognition of their long-pending forest rights claims and no more forced evictions.

In an era of accelerating climate breakdown, protecting forests has never been more urgent. But the question is no longer whether forests should be conserved, it is how, and for whom. If there is one thing I take away from Nagarahole as a climate professional, it is that if we are serious about ecological survival, we must begin by recognising, restoring, and standing with the people who have kept these forests alive all along.

Jasanna (also known as Sanjana) is an interdisciplinary practitioner who has worked over the last five years on locally-grounded climate justice, both on urban climate action and community-centered approaches. She has been a volunteer at FridaysforFuture Karnataka since 2019, a collective that frontlines justice- and community-oriented perspectives on climate and has a Masters in Development Studies from IIT Madras.

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