Adivasi Gallery

Nagarahole national park.

Children playing in Nagarahole village at the centre of the national park. They will shortly be resettled in one of the sites on deforested land outside the national park limits. Many of the adults from the village leave for 3 or 4 months of the year to work in the coffee harvest. Since the Forestry Department has banned the villages living of the forest (including agriculture) survival is difficult.

The resettlement site at Nagapura, near Nagarahole National Park. The area used to be a brush forest until it was cleared to make way for the resettlement site.

The front door of a house in Nagarahole village in the heart of the national park.

The resettlement site at Nagapura, near Nagarahole National Park. Many of the residents of the resettlement sites say they wish they could return to the forest, activists say how villages where forced at gun point out of their homes in the middle of the night and moved to their new prefabricated houses. The residents at nagpura are reluctant to talk about this because to survive they have to work for the Forestry Department, the very same people that evicted them. The residents of the site have tried to make the houses more like traditional huts by adding earth sills around the walls.

Nagarahole village in the heart of the national park.

This resettlement site was built for Adivasi families moved off forestry department land. Subsequently they moved out and illegally built their own houses away from the resettlement site. Some people from a local non-Adivasi village have taken over the resettlement site because they can stay there rent free.