IWN Original Report — Monday, 4 May 2026
Corbett Series — Part 2. Read Part 1: The Tiger at the Temple Gate →
The entry gate to the Phato eco-tourism zone — a reserve forest adjoining Corbett Tiger Reserve — is officially named Mohan Nagar Gujjar Jhala. Jhala is a Van Gujjar settlement. The gate into one of Uttarakhand’s newest wildlife tourism zones is, in its very name, an acknowledgement that this forest has long been someone’s home.
On a December morning, I was in a safari jeep on the forest road beyond that gate. What I saw on that road is the starting point for this piece.
What was on the road
Ahead of our jeep: other open safari gypsies carrying permitted tourists, a forest department vehicle moving freely through the corridor — and a motorcycle loaded high with plastic-wrapped bundles, pushing deeper into the trees. No permit. No guide. No accountability structure of any kind. All of us on the same unmetalled track, raising the same dust, moving through the same tiger country.
The motorcycle is the detail that matters. Dairy husbandry accounts for over 80% of Van Gujjar income. The economy of milk and dairy products moves in and out of their forest settlements daily — on motorcycles exactly like the one ahead of us, on roads exactly like this one. Around Corbett’s core, buffer, and fringe areas, there are an estimated 37 Van Gujjar settlements and 340 households, the majority in Nainital district. Each one generates its own flow of supply runs, dairy pickups, and — inevitably — the visitors who trail behind them.
The safari permit system, for all its complexity, counts and limits every jeep that enters through a formal gate. This other traffic is invisible to it entirely.
A century of presence, a decade of broken promises
The Van Gujjars did not arrive in these forests recently. The forest department’s own working plans, dating to 1952, document their grazing activity in what is now Corbett Tiger Reserve. They are semi-nomadic buffalo herders who have practised transhumance — seasonal migration between the Terai lowlands in winter and the alpine meadows of the upper Himalayas in summer — for generations. The Phato zone’s very gate name is the cartographic evidence of how long they have been here.
The conservation case against their continued presence centres on livestock pressure. According to a report in National Herald India citing honorary wildlife warden Rajeev Mehta, the Shyampur range of adjacent Rajaji Tiger Reserve hosts Van Gujjar-owned livestock that has grown to over 9,000 buffaloes, competing directly with wild prey species for grass and contributing to canopy loss and river pollution. The ecological argument is not fabricated.
But the human argument is equally well-documented, and considerably less often told. In 2012, the Uttarakhand government relocated around 1,200 Van Gujjar families from Corbett and Rajaji Tiger Reserves. According to Mongabay India’s correspondents, of the 181 families promised land and full rehabilitation packages, only 157 received land — and 84 families who were promised monetary compensation received nothing at all. A decade on, families who brought their buffaloes with them from the forest found no grazing areas at the resettlement sites, no space for the animals, and no forest access. Many watched their herds — their entire livelihood — simply diminish and die.
The families who chose not to relocate, or who were not covered by the scheme, remain in the forest. They are, according to a fact-finding report by Kalpavriksh, in a precarious position: their rights under the Forest Rights Act 2006 not yet settled, High Court orders demanding eviction pending against them, and no completed or proper relocation process in sight.
The unintended economy
Here is what the relocation debate rarely acknowledges: the informal visitor traffic that reaches these settlements is not a cause of the Van Gujjars’ presence in the forest. It is a consequence of it. And their presence, in turn, is substantially a consequence of a resettlement process that failed them.
Dairy customers come to collect milk. They bring companions. They linger on forest roads. They generate the same noise, dust, and disturbance as safari vehicles — without any of the regulatory framework that safari vehicles operate under.
What the governance looks like from a jeep
The morning we drove through Phato, the forest department vehicle ahead of us moved with the same unhurried ease as every other vehicle on the road. No checkpoint stopped the supply motorcycle. No enforcement distinction was made between a permitted tourist jeep, a government vehicle, and an informal supply run into a settlement that exists in a legal grey zone.
Corbett has the highest density of tigers of any protected area in India, at around 14 tigers per 100 square kilometres. They are doing what tigers do: using the landscape available to them, adapting, persisting. The tiger at the temple gate crossed the road and kept walking.
What a solution will require
What the correspondents and researchers who have studied this most carefully — from ATREE to WWF India to the teams at Mongabay India and Land Conflict Watch — consistently point to is this: sudden prohibition is not the answer. Structured access rather than unregulated access, and genuine resolution of the Forest Rights Act claims that have been left deliberately unresolved for over a decade, are the necessary starting points.
What it will certainly also require is a more honest conversation about what a tiger reserve actually needs to remain one — one that includes Van Gujjar families, forest officials, and the conservationists who have been studying this problem for longer than most forest managers have been in post.
The gate is named after them. The forest has been their home longer than it has been a tiger reserve. Any answer that doesn’t start there is not yet an answer.
IWN will continue to follow this story.
Sources: Mongabay India · Land Conflict Watch · National Herald India · Down to Earth · Kalpavriksh · NTCA