IWN Original Report — 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. The CCTV footage from the early hours of the morning shows an unsuspecting man walking toward the temple’s entrance arch, when he suddenly beats a retreat. He sees a tiger crouching at the kerb to his left — and then it bounds across the road. A second video, shot after sunset, shows a tiger returning along the same path, unhurried, moving past parked vehicles and watching humans as if they were simply part of the landscape it moves through.
In a sense, they are. And in a deeper sense, that is precisely the point.
CCTV footage via @jimcorbettadvisor on Instagram
The temple probably came first
This matters: in a country as ancient and as steeped in faith as India, the forest almost certainly acquired its sacred character long before it acquired its protected status. Garjiya Devi Temple, according to local accounts, was discovered by regional rulers in 1840 and established in its current form in 1940. Jim Corbett National Park — India’s first national park — was established in 1936 as Hailey National Park, created to protect the endangered Bengal tiger. The timelines, in other words, are close — but faith in these forests almost certainly predates the survey maps, the reserve notifications, and the Project Tiger gazette entries that followed.
This is not a detail. It is the central complexity of what India is now trying to manage. The temples are not intrusions into the forest. In many cases, the forest grew its protected status around them.
The area around Garjia village sits at the edge of some of the most tiger-rich forest in the country. Corbett Tiger Reserve holds the highest density of tigers of any protected area in India — around 14 tigers per 100 square kilometres, according to the NTCA’s 2022 census. That a tiger should appear near the temple is not surprising. What the footage captures, without intending to, is something more urgent: these sightings, once a rare and remarkable thing, are becoming more commonplace as India’s tiger numbers grow and as tigers increasingly move beyond reserve boundaries in search of territory. The same pressures driving their dispersal are also concentrating human and wildlife traffic at exactly the same forest edges — the roads, the riverfronts, the temple approaches — where encounters are most likely.
A landscape that once absorbed the occasional tiger sighting is now one where the mathematics of density and dispersal are changing what those sightings mean. And as the NTCA records show, man-eater incidents have been rising alongside tiger numbers. A landscape that was manageable at one level of tiger density may not remain so as that density grows.
Three reserves, three temples, one unresolved question
Garjiya is not an exception. It is an example of a national pattern.
At Ranthambore Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan, the 12th-century Trinetra Ganesh Temple sits inside the historic Ranthambore Fort, five kilometres within the national park’s core zone. According to a 2025 Supreme Court filing, the temple receives over 10,000 pilgrims on Wednesdays alone, around 6,000 on Sundays, and roughly 2,500 on ordinary weekdays. The 6-kilometre approach road from Ganesh Dham to the Jogi Mahal gate — lying entirely within the critical tiger habitat — sees, on certain days, upwards of 7,500 vehicles illegally parked along it. Pilgrims cook food using firewood taken from the reserve. Plastic waste is disposed of in quantity. In June 2025, the Supreme Court constituted a committee to address the situation, directing it to balance ecological protection with the religious sentiments of devotees — an instruction that captures the difficulty of the problem in a single sentence.
The situation at Sariska Tiger Reserve in Alwar, Rajasthan, is equally striking. The Pandupol Hanuman Temple lies deep inside the core zone of Sariska, accessible via a 21-kilometre forest road. According to a report in India Legal, over 8 lakh pilgrims visit annually, with particularly heavy footfall on Tuesdays, Saturdays, and full moon days. The Supreme Court separately formed an expert committee to examine the ecological impact, with the amicus curiae noting that two-wheelers permitted inside the core area had become a principal enabler of poaching — impossible to radio-tag, impossible to regulate in the volumes arriving on auspicious days.
Further south, Sabarimala — one of the world’s largest annual pilgrimages — draws millions into the forests of Periyar Tiger Reserve in Kerala each year. In Kalakad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve in Tamil Nadu, the Sorimuthu Iyyanar temple festival draws pilgrims who camp for eleven days in the forest, with research by ATREE and WWF documenting river pollution, animal sacrifice waste, and forest degradation that takes months to recover. A 2019 ATREE-WWF study across Corbett, Ranthambore, and Kalakad Mundanthurai documented 352 religious sites within just part of Ranthambore’s critical tiger habitat, receiving a combined 2.2 million pilgrims annually — 1.2 million of them at the Trinetra Ganesh Temple alone.
The forest doesn’t have a permit system for this
The formal safari system — permits, vehicle caps, guide requirements, zone closures during monsoon — represents decades of effort to manage tourist pressure on India’s tiger reserves. It is imperfect, as IWN has reported, but it exists and has structure. Religious access is categorically different. Temples that predate a reserve’s notification carry protected visitation rights. The state cannot simply close them to pilgrims on ecological grounds without consequences that are political, legal, and social in ways that wildlife management is not equipped to handle.
According to the ATREE-WWF research, reported by Mongabay India, a growing proportion of temple visits in protected areas today are not driven by religious devotion at all, but by recreational tourism dressed in the grammar of pilgrimage. The remoteness that once kept these sites ecologically self-limiting has been dissolved by better roads, cheaper transport, and the packaging of tiger safari plus temple darshan as a single day trip. The footprint has grown not because faith has grown, but because access has.
The NTCA requires every tiger reserve to develop a plan for managing religious tourism. The challenge of executing those plans — against the political weight of faith-based access rights, the logistical complexity of millions of visitors, and the absence of any legal instrument that treats pilgrims the way it treats safari jeeps — has kept implementation largely aspirational at most reserves.
What the tiger knows
Corbett’s tiger population — 231 individuals as of the 2022 census, the highest count of any reserve in India — continues to thrive. A tiger filmed at a temple gate at dawn is, in one reading, evidence of exactly that success. The reserve is full. The tigers are spilling outward. They are using every edge, every corridor, every approach road.
But a tiger at the kerb of a busy temple entrance, with an unsuspecting man walking toward it, is also a data point in a different story — one about what happens when the pressure of growing numbers, inside the reserve and outside it, concentrates at the same contested edges at the same time.
CCTV footage via @NikhiilDiariies on YouTube
The Supreme Court has now intervened at two of India’s most celebrated tiger reserves over this precise question. A third — Periyar — has been the subject of High Court orders for over a decade. The pattern is clear enough. What remains unclear is whether India’s forest managers, its state governments, and the institutions that manage its sacred sites can find a form of co-governance that serves both the devout and the forest before the courts are forced to find one for them.
The tiger at the temple gate crossed the road and kept walking. It is doing what tigers do. The question is whether the humans sharing that road — pilgrims, planners, priests, and wildlife managers — can find a way to share it that the forest can sustain.
IWN will continue to follow this story.
Sources: Mongabay India — Green Pilgrimage · India Legal — Pandupol Sariska · Live Law — Ranthambore Supreme Court 2025 · Down to Earth — Kalakad Mundanthurai · Scroll.in — ATREE WWF Green Pilgrimage · NTCA