While Mankar was talking, a tiger was mauling 45-year old Kalidas Gulab Meshram, a leprosy patient at Baba Amte’s Somnath project, 15 km away. His body was recovered on Friday morning. Meshram, a shepherd, had returned to the forest to look for his missing goat when he became the 27th victim of a tiger attack since January 2006. Tigers have killed nine people in the forests near the reserve in the last three months.
Karwa has a typical problem. “We have no state transport bus to the market at Shivni, where we go to fetch our groceries. We have to travel on bicycles or on foot—that takes us anything between 90 minutes and 3 hours. All this while, we pray to god to get us back safely,” said sarpanch Bhaurao Wadhai.
Thick forests flank the road to Shivni, which is often closed during the rainy season. Karwa got its first state transport bus—to Chandrapur-only in December 2006. “But that doesn’t take us to Shivni. Chandrapur is 65 km away and we don’t need to go there often,” said Wadhai. Karwa has only a primary school and children who want to study beyond that will have to stay in ashram schools—the nearest is 13 km away. The primary health centre is at Wasera, 15 km away.
While policy makers in Delhi were framing rules for the Scheduled Castes and Other Traditional Forest-Dwellers (recognition of forest rights) Act—also called Tribal Act that’s now ready to be implemented—and animal activists were lobbying for notification of tiger reserves, Karwa and other villagers understood little. What they understood was that tigers had to be protected; they are not yet asking if it has to be done at their cost. “We have encountered tigers several times. It has killed our cattle but hasn’t attacked us yet. We understand it has the right to be here and all of us have to live together. But what should we...
