The tiger (Panthera tigris) has for decades played an iconic role in the global conservation movement. In India, The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) helped the government to finance the Project Tiger from 1973 (Greenough, 2003), while the Global Environment Fund (GEF) has supported eco-development programmes around protected areas, including tiger reserves, since 1996 (Green et al., 2010). The World Bank supports tiger conservation internationally through its Global Tiger Initiative, which hosted the Tiger Summit in Russia in 2011 that raised 33 million British pounds for international tiger conservation. This type of support and funding has resulted in a steady increase in the number of tiger reserves and tigers.

In India, there are currently 50 tiger reserves covering 2.08 per cent of the land area, which are managed by the Forest Department (National Tiger Conservation Authority, 2016a). As of 2013, 787 villages consisting of 51 329 families still lived in the by-then 41 established reserves, while 145 villages with 8197 families had thus far been relocated from tiger reserves (Lok Sabha, 2013). Most people in these reserves are Adivasis who are indigenous forest dependent communities. They constitute about 8 per cent of India’s population.