“We are creating empathy for the cause of the forest and its wildlife by creating employment in the park for those who live around it. When the forest becomes a livelihood, then it will be protected,” Bhartari says.

Every Thursday, batches of 30 people from surrounding villages are taken for a tour of the park to sensitise them to what the tiger needs to flourish.

In Choti Haldwani, once the summer retreat of Jim Corbett, a heritage trail has been created. Since 2005, villagers have systematically set up low-cost accommodation where tourists can stay, while some villagers also double up as forest guides.

Saving the tiger while straddling tourist facilities is not an easy process, and there is a terse line between keeping the tiger, a highly territorial animal, happy, and opening up a reserve for commerce.

“I’m not a big fan of ecotourism,” says award-winning conservationist Belinda Wright, also a member of the National Board for Wildlife. “But it can work in specific instances,” she says.

In Corbett, it seems to have worked. “An outsider setting up a resort and employing a couple of local youth is not ecotourism,” points out Imran A Khan, a biologist who runs a private resort, Jim’s Jungle Retreat, in the buffer zone of Corbett Park. Genuine ecotourism is when the benefits of tourism percolate to the local community. The success of ecotourism, however, does not worry the private resorts, he says. “There is a separate niche for a luxury resort. There is space in the market for staying at a resort as well as in a village with the locals.”

... contd.