Satpura: Someone’s Home, Someone’s Journey

On the website of Satpura Tiger Reserve there is a list of its achievements. Two of them, to me, seem to stand in striking contrast.

In 2016, the reserve received the National Tiger Conservation Authority’s Excellence Award for village rehabilitation and resettlement. In 2018, it received Madhya Pradesh’s award for the best tourism-friendly park.

The same forest, then, was honoured twice. Once because villages inside it were relocated. And again because tourists began arriving in that same forest.

I do not read these two achievements as official conclusions. I read them alongside memories from journeys I made in these hills.

In 2009, I was in Melghat, Maharashtra, on the south-western side of the Satpura range. In 2011, I did intensive reporting around the Tawa in what was then Hoshangabad district, now Narmadapuram, in Madhya Pradesh. The places were different, yet my encounters with the forest, the hills and the people who lived among them belonged to the same larger landscape.

I have continued to travel through this region since then. But in this piece, I return to the memories of those two journeys. Today, I mostly encounter Satpura’s jeep safaris, boat rides and tourist accommodations through news reports, photographs and publicly available documents.

One morning in 2009, we were riding a motorcycle down from Chikhaldara towards Salita. It was very early. The air was cold. The sun was slowly rising behind the hills.

We felt as if we were the first to wake in the forest. But others had woken before us. Someone had already left for work. Someone was already on the road.

For a while, the road, the hills and the rising sun remained visible together. Had that morning been captured in a photograph, it could have appeared on the cover of a travel magazine. But we had not set out to watch the sunrise. We had somewhere to reach. The sun simply appeared along the way.

There was another morning on the road to Makhla village. Five or six women were coming down a hillside path, water pots balanced on their heads. Children walked with them. Some of the children rolled old bicycle tyres along the road. The water source was about two kilometres away. They would have to carry the water back up the hills.

I watched them for a while. At the time, it was simply a village morning to me. Today, the same scene through a camera could become a beautiful picture of rural life: a hillside path, morning light, pots on heads, children walking alongside.

But the weight of the pot does not enter the picture. The two-kilometre distance does not enter it either. Nor does the fact that water is a household necessity and that this path has to be walked every day to fetch it.

In Salita, the same hillside was a morning scene. In Makhla, the same hillside was a two-kilometre path.

During that same reporting trip in Melghat in 2009, I met an elderly Korku man. He gave his name as Dhandekar. He spoke in Korku. Kaluram Belsare, who had come with me on the motorcycle, explained his words to me in Hindi.

Dhandekar spoke of things that belonged to a much older time. He remembered that the first thing he had bought from the market was salt. Speaking about the British period, he recalled forest work, cutting wood and earning wages. Then he began talking about Korku women, their rights and their freedom.

In his account, the forest was not biodiversity recorded in a book. Which season brought what, which tree was useful for what, where mahua grew, where honey and chironji could be found, how kodo-kutki fitted into the cycle of life, which footpath led where: all of this was part of his lived experience.

That day I heard the forest in two voices: first Dhandekar’s, and then Kaluram Belsare’s as he explained his words to me in Hindi. Between those two voices was a knowledge of the forest that no tourism brochure could contain.

When I reached the Tawa area in 2011, water appeared with a different meaning.

A dam had already been built on the Tawa river near Narmadapuram, then Hoshangabad. Behind it, water stretched across a wide expanse. Beneath that water lay the land and memories of settlements belonging to many families.

I sat among tribal families who fished. There were boats, nets, fish that had to be taken to market and papers belonging to the fishermen’s cooperative. The same water that had covered their land had now become their livelihood.

It was difficult to see that water merely as a reservoir. One fisherman told me that his relationship with the water was the same as a fish’s relationship with water. If he were cut off from it, where would he go? How would he live?

This right had not come easily. People displaced by the Tawa dam had struggled for the right to fish. The Tawa Matsya Sangh was formed in 1996. After the struggle, fishing rights were secured. According to available reports, people from the displaced villages began fishing in the reservoir under a cooperative arrangement from 1997. It brought a major change to their livelihoods.

An important part of that struggle was that the displaced people did not want to remain merely recipients of compensation. They wanted rights over the resource around which their new lives had come to be organised.

In later years, those rights again came under threat. A 2005 report recorded the apprehension that fishing in the Tawa reservoir might be stopped because the reservoir was linked to a protected forest area. At the time, fishing was said to support the livelihoods of nearly four thousand families.

Tourism was not the question before me then. The questions were different. Whose water was this? Who had rights over the fish? And what resource would a displaced family have to live from in its new place?

Today, the same water of the Tawa is also viewed through the lens of tourism. The official tariff information of Satpura Tiger Reserve lists activities such as boat rides and motorboats between Tawa and Madhai.

Two different kinds of journeys are possible on the same water. But before drawing any conclusion from that difference, the reserve’s own position needs to be considered.

According to the reserve’s website, the process of village rehabilitation began in 2004-05. After Dhai village, large forest villages such as Bori, Sakot and Khakrapura were resettled outside the reserve in 2009-10, 2010-11 and 2011-12. According to the reserve, by 2016 more than 3,243 families from 38 villages in the core area had been resettled outside, and approximately 8,450 hectares had been made available for wildlife. Between 2004-05 and 2021-22, a total of 49 villages were resettled outside the reserve.

The reserve presents this as an important achievement for conservation. It says that the process created more continuous habitat for wildlife and reduced human pressure on the forest. According to the reserve, access to electricity, drinking water, schools, markets and health facilities also improved after resettlement. It further states that forest offences declined and the presence of wild herbivores increased after resettlement.

According to the reserve, resettlement was carried out through two options. Under one, each family received a package of 15 lakh rupees. Under the other, the forest department handled the rehabilitation and resettlement process.

There is another aspect that matters here. The reserve itself acknowledges that new livelihood opportunities were necessary for people resettled outside the forest.

Its information on community engagement records efforts to connect local youth with employment in tourism and other activities through training. Training has been provided for work as guides, drivers, cooks and caretakers. There is also mention of 58 new guides being trained in 2021, along with vehicle-driving and hospitality training for youth from resettled villages and surrounding areas.

This is the reserve’s position. It needs to be recorded.

My question is different. I am not against tourism. But changing a home is not simply a matter of changing a house. A mahua tree, a water source, a field, the footpath to another village, the things gathered from the forest, kinship and community life together make a home. When displacement takes place, a house may be provided in place of a house, but an entire world is lost, and there is no compensation for that world.

For Gond and Korku communities, the relationship with the forest did not depend only on whose name appeared on the papers for a particular piece of land. Knowledge of use, paths, seasons and resources, carried across generations, was also part of that relationship.

This is where the Forest Rights Act raises an important question in this story.

The Forest Rights Act, 2006, lays down a specific legal process for relocation from critical wildlife habitats in protected areas. It requires forest rights to be identified and determined, a finding that the presence or activities of people are causing irreversible damage to wildlife, and a determination that no other reasonable option for coexistence is available.

It also requires a rehabilitation and livelihood package, the free and informed written consent of the gram sabha, and the completion of promised facilities and land allocation at the resettlement site.

The law also gives the gram sabha an important role. It initiates the process of recognising forest rights and can consider and pass a resolution on the rehabilitation package.

On the Satpura Reserve website, I found information about the two resettlement options. But I did not find, on those pages, the gram sabha resolutions through which the process was approved in the different villages.

Therefore, I cannot claim that all resettlements were forced. But I can ask how easily the documents relating to the rights, consent and decision-making process of those who were resettled are publicly available.

And then the story of tourism appears. Today, a local person may be the tourist’s guide. He identifies the forest. He drives the vehicle. He cooks. He arranges accommodation. He recognises a tree. He knows the meaning of a path.

Satpura Reserve itself is training local youth for such tourism-related work. This is employment. And employment matters.

But employment and rights are not the same thing. Knowing the forest and participating in decisions about the forest are not the same thing either.

He may know the forest, yet it remains a separate question who decides which part of the forest will be opened, when it will be opened, what the limits of tourism will be, what role local people will have and how much of the income generated will reach the community.

The answers to these questions will depend on different arrangements and documents. I am not presenting them here as facts. I am presenting them as questions of inequality that arose for me from my journeys.

The women of Makhla return to me. For them, the hillside path was not natural beauty. It was the path to water.

The morning at Chikhaldara was sunrise for me. For someone living there, it would simply have been the beginning of another day.

Perhaps this is the hardest thing about Satpura. A place can change its meaning without changing its form.

To understand this change only through the story of employment does not seem sufficient to me. The knowledge of someone whose relationship with the forest goes back generations may be useful to tourism, but the value of that knowledge is complete only when it is accompanied by a share in decision-making.

And perhaps that is why those two awards need to be read together.

In 2016, the resettlement of villages from the forest was honoured.

In 2018, tourism in the same forest was honoured.

Between those two awards lies the story of the people who have had to live through that change.

If two boats were to meet today on the waters of the Tawa, one might have gone out to catch fish. The other might have come to see the hills and the water.

The water beneath them would be the same.

For one, it is life. For the other, it is a journey.

And the person who has known this forest and this water for generations: is he truly a host in his own forest, or is he serving someone else’s guest in his own home?

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Shirish Khare is an independent journalist and writer who has covered rural India, social issues and marginalised communities since 2002. His books include Ek Desh Barah Duniya and Nadi Sindoori.

He travelled to Pipariya and the surrounding Satpura region on a reporting assignment for a national magazine, where he worked as a correspondent; the magazine arranged his basic travel and accommodation.

Sources

• Satpura Tiger Reserve, Village Relocation
• Satpura Tiger Reserve, Achievements
• Satpura Tiger Reserve, Community Engagement
• Satpura Tiger Reserve, Livelihood Initiatives
• Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Forest Rights Act and Rules
• Down To Earth, Fishing in Troubled Waters (15 February 2001)
• Down To Earth, Fishing jobs (15 May 2005)