India’s prime minister announced that the country’s tiger population is increasing successfully. However, many Indigenous communities claim they are being uprooted in the process.
It was a celebratory atmosphere for officials gathered just hours away from several of India's major tiger reserves in the southern city of Mysuru, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced Sunday to much applause that the country'shas steadily grown to over 3,000 since its flagship conservation program began 50 years ago after concerns that numbers of the big cats were dwindling.
Project Tiger began in 1973 after a census of the big cats found India’s tigers were fast going extinct through habitat loss, unregulated sport hunting, increased poaching and retaliatory killing by people. It's believed the tiger population was around 1,800 at the time, but experts widely consider that an overestimate due to imprecise counting methodsuntil 2006.
Members of several Indigenous or Adivasi groups — as Indigenous people are known in the country — set up the Nagarahole Adivasi Forest Rights Establishment Committee to protest evictions from their ancestral lands and seek a voice in how the forests are managed. The fewer than 40,000 Jenu Kuruba people are one of the 75 tribal groups that the Indian government classifies as particularly vulnerable. Adivasi communities like the Jenu Kurubas are among the poorest in India.
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As tiger count grows, India's Indigenous demand land rightsPrime Minister Narendra Modi announced Sunday to much applause that the country’s tiger population has steadily grown to over 3,000 since its flagship conservation program began 50 years ago after concerns that numbers of the big cats were dwindling.
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