Chhattisgarh Tiger Reserve Finds Large-Scale Tree Girdling, Encroachment

India's framework for tiger conservation rests on the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972 (WPA) and its 2006 amendment, which created the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and introduced the concept of Critical Tiger Habitat (CTH). A CTH is the core area of a tiger reserve notified as inviolate space, where human habitation is treated as incompatible with tiger conservation. Section 38V of the WPA allows the government to relocate villages from a CTH through a voluntary rehabilitation package, usually land plus a cash grant. The Udanti-Sitanadi Tiger Reserve (USTR) in Chhattisgarh was formed partly from the erstwhile Sitanadi Wildlife Sanctuary. Karka village lay in the catchment of the Sondhur dam inside this sanctuary and was relocated in the 1980s for the dam's construction, a resettlement that predates the formal CTH framework but followed the same basic logic of removing human habitation from a sensitive forest catchment.

A separate and sometimes competing legal track is the Forest Rights Act, 2006 (FRA), which recognises the historical rights of forest-dwelling communities. One of its key provisions is the Community Forest Resource Right (CFRR), which allows a Gram Sabha to protect, regenerate, conserve or manage forest land the community has traditionally used. Karka's Gram Sabha received CFRR over more than 2,200 hectares in 2020. This created an unusual situation. The same community granted legal rights to manage the forest is now accused by the forest department of large-scale tree girdling and encroachment inside the tiger reserve. The episode captures a recurring tension in Indian forest governance between decentralised community rights under the FRA and the centralised conservation model built around CTH and inviolate space under the WPA.