IWN Report — Tuesday, 8 September 2026
Hotels and safari operators around Jawai in Rajasthan’s Pali district can no longer sell a stay on the promise of a leopard sighting, under a Rajasthan High Court judgment that came through over the weekend.
The judgment, dated 5 September, bars baiting, night safaris, artificial lighting and drone use across the landscape, and draws a one-kilometre construction-control zone around the caves, dens, breeding sites and corridors the animals depend on. Hospitality properties and tour operators are specifically barred from advertising or selling accommodation on the promise of a guaranteed sighting from a private suite or resort grounds.
The bench of Justice Pushpendra Singh Bhati and Justice Rekha Borana was hearing a public interest litigation filed by Apoorva Agrawat, a Pali resident. Authorities have been directed to enforce the Rajasthan government’s notification of 31 March 2015, which bars new hotels, resorts, mining and agricultural land conversion within a kilometre of the notified Jawai Leopard Conservation Reserves. The bench described that distance as an interim, evidence-based threshold rather than a settled ecological boundary, and folded three earlier interim orders from March and April into the final framework.
Gaurav Bhardwaj, founder of the conservation group Tiger Trails Foundation, has been pressing for a crackdown of this kind for months, and his account of what happens in Jawai is blunter than anything in the judgment. Tourists there are being offered a money-back guarantee on a leopard sighting, he wrote this week, and hoteliers are delivering on it by putting out chicken and guinea fowl for the animals to take. “You and I can well imagine how these people are managing to guarantee a leopard sighting,” he said. He named no properties, and IWN has not independently verified the allegation.
Senior IFS officer Mohan Pargaien, replying to him, said what Jawai is selling cannot be called wildlife tourism at all. “When carnivores are fed, baited or their movements manipulated for tourists, we are not showcasing conservation — we are commercialising wildness,” he wrote, adding that a leopard is not a performer and a tiger is not a spectacle. Tourism has to sell the experience of being in nature rather than the certainty of an animal, he argued, and warned that leaving sighting guarantees tied to tourism revenue could turn the recovery of India’s big cats into a problem for them.
The court’s restrictions run across forest, revenue, community and private land alike, so a resort standing on privately owned ground gets no exemption. New construction, commercial structures, boundary walls, fresh roads and tracks, excavation, blasting and hill cutting are all barred on identified habitat features, as is anything that materially impedes leopard movement. Safari vehicles and their operators must register with the authorities and run working GPS trackers, and drivers are no longer to cluster around dens or enter restricted areas.
Village life has been left largely as it was. The bench allowed bona fide residential construction inside existing abadi areas, repairs and rebuilding of lawful homes, and public amenities including schools, dispensaries, anganwadi centres and drinking-water works. Farming, grazing and customary livelihood practices continue, subject to wildlife-friendly conditions.
Beyond Jawai
Bhardwaj does not regard Jawai as a special case. He alleged that private farms have opened around Gir where lions are fed chicken at night, said he was deliberately not naming certain tiger reserves to avoid a controversy, and called for a strict law against the practice, describing the display of baited wild animals to paying audiences as a punishable offence. Those wider claims are also unverified. He was making a related argument in August, when he called on Uttarakhand to revoke an order to kill conflict leopards and bears and blamed forest encroachment for the deaths driving it.
Jawai is a working landscape rather than a gated park, a stretch of granite hills, farmland and villages — Bera, Sena, Kothar, Doodni and others — where an estimated 50 to 70 leopards den in rock caves within sight of homes and temples and have long been tolerated by the people living around them. That openness is what made the place famous and also what made it easy to monetise, since access here has never been rationed by gates or permits, and little has stood between an operator and the temptation to improve a paying guest’s odds with a bait.
The consequences of feeding carnivores go well past the ethics of it. Animals that learn to associate people and vehicles with food lose their wariness, shift their movements around a predictable meal and drift towards settlements, which is how conflict incidents begin and how leopards end up trapped, translocated or dead.
Before Rajasthan can frame a long-term policy for the landscape, the state has to complete geo-referenced mapping along with ecological and carrying-capacity studies, documenting dens, caves, resting and breeding sites, corridors, wetlands, water sources, habitations, roads and the pockets where commercial tourism has concentrated. The finished survey must be made public, with copies displayed at gram panchayats. Enforcement of the judgment rests with the District Collector and the Deputy Conservator of Forests, Pali.
Sources: Apoorva Agrawat vs State of Rajasthan · Gaurav Bhardwaj on X · Mohan Pargaien IFS on X · Law Trend · The Hans India · The Pioneer