IWN Original Report — Saturday, 11 April 2026

A tiger was recently filmed crossing the road just metres from the entrance to Garjiya Devi Temple — a sacred Shakti shrine perched on a boulder in the Kosi River, in the village of Garjia on the fringes of Corbett Tiger Reserve. It pauses. It looks. Then it walks on, unhurried, as if the temple, the parked vehicles, and the watching humans were simply part of the landscape it moves through.

In one sense, they are. The area around Garjia village sits at the edge of some of the most tiger-rich forest in the country. Corbett Tiger Reserve, according to the 2022 NTCA tiger census, holds the highest density of tigers of any protected area in India — around 14 tigers per 100 square kilometres. That a tiger should appear near the temple is not surprising. What the video captures, without meaning to, is something more complicated: a wild tiger sharing space with one of the most visited religious sites on Corbett’s doorstep, on any given weekend crowded with thousands of pilgrims, on any given festival day swelled with tens of thousands more.

A temple on the reserve’s edge

Garjiya Devi Temple sits on a boulder in the Kosi, 14 kilometres from Ramnagar, in the village of Garjia just outside the boundary of Corbett Tiger Reserve. It is dedicated to Goddess Garjiya, an incarnation of Parvati, and is sacred to communities across Kumaon and the Terai. The devout climb its steps for blessings, protection, and prosperity. During Kartik Purnima — the full moon of October-November — the site draws enormous numbers of pilgrims and a fair is organised in the vicinity. On ordinary weekends, a steady flow of visitors arrives, many combining darshan at the temple with a day safari in the adjacent Garjiya eco-tourism zone.

The temple is not inside the reserve, so no formal permit is required to visit it. Anyone can come, at any time, in any number.

But the forest is right there — and it notices.

According to research by the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) and WWF, published as part of a study on green pilgrimage management across three Indian tiger reserves including Corbett, pilgrims at Garjiya Mata Temple take a dip in the holy Kosi as part of their ritual, and may also draw water, bathe, use the riverbanks for defecation, and in some instances conduct animal sacrifice by the river. The Kosi is not a boundary — it is habitat. It flows through tiger country. The waste, the noise, the festival crowds, the vehicles parked along the approach road on busy days — all of it reaches into a landscape where tigers move, hunt, and raise cubs.

The NTCA mandates that every tiger reserve develop a plan to manage religious tourism. At Corbett, as at most reserves, the challenges of implementation — political, social, and logistical — have kept that plan largely aspirational.

The other flow: cattle, milk, and visitors

Further into the fringe, another older human presence persists. Around 37 settlements of Van Gujjars — semi-nomadic Muslim buffalo herders — occupy core, buffer, and fringe areas around Corbett, with an estimated 340 households in Nainital district alone. Their history in these forests predates the reserve itself; the forest department’s own working plans dating to 1952 document their grazing activity. They are expert dairy farmers, and their large herds of buffalo have for generations been part of the Corbett landscape.

The conservation tension this creates is real. According to a report in National Herald India citing honorary wildlife warden Rajeev Mehta, the adjacent Rajaji Tiger Reserve‘s Shyampur range hosts Van Gujjar families whose livestock has grown to over 9,000 buffaloes, competing for the same grass that sustains deer and wild elephant populations — contributing to forest degradation, canopy loss, and river pollution.

But the human rights dimension is equally real, and conservation discourse has not always handled it honestly. According to a detailed report by Land Conflict Watch, around 1,610 Van Gujjar families still live within Rajaji National Park, while 1,393 families have been relocated over the past 15 years — often without the rehabilitation, land titles, or livelihoods they were promised. Their presence in these forests is not illegal encroachment in the straightforward sense the courts have sometimes suggested; it is the residue of a resettlement process that has repeatedly failed them.

What concerns wildlife managers is a secondary consequence of their presence: the visitors. Families who remain inside the reserve receive dairy customers — people who drive into the forest fringe to collect milk, who bring friends, who linger. This informal visitor flow carries none of the permit discipline of the formal safari system, and generates its own waste, noise, and disturbance.

What the tiger knows

None of this has stopped the tigers. Corbett’s population — 231 individuals as of the 2022 census — continues to thrive. Tigers are regularly sighted in and around the Garjiya zone. The video is evidence of that.

But thriving despite pressure is not the same as thriving because of it. The question India’s forest managers have long deferred is whether the Corbett landscape can sustain these overlapping human uses — religious tourism, pastoral livelihoods, informal visitation — indefinitely at growing scale, or whether the tiger’s continued presence at the reserve’s edge requires a more honest conversation about what that edge actually means.

That conversation will not be simple. It will involve faith communities who have worshipped at Garjiya for generations. It will involve Van Gujjar families who have been failed by every rehabilitation scheme offered to them. It will involve forest officials navigating political pressures that make any regulation around religious sites extraordinarily difficult.

The researchers who have studied this most carefully — from ATREE and WWF to the scholars at Mongabay India documenting Van Gujjar rights — are consistent on one point: sudden prohibition is not the answer. According to a report from Scroll.in covering the ATREE-WWF green pilgrimage guidelines, co-management with multiple stakeholders — forest departments, conservation bodies, faith-based organisations, and communities — is the only approach that has shown durable results.

The tiger at the temple gate crossed the road and kept walking. It is doing what tigers do: using the landscape available to it, adapting, persisting. The question is whether the humans who share that landscape can do the same — with rather more intentionality.

IWN will continue to follow this story.

Sources: Mongabay India — Green Pilgrimage · Scroll.in · Land Conflict Watch · National Herald India · Down to Earth · NTCA