The majority of Indigenous human rights violations at Panna Tiger Reserve concern ongoing evictions / the dislocation of villages from their ancestral lands within the critical tiger reserve. 

As the tiger conservation efforts of the reserve were virtually declared a failure in 2009, evictions have rapidly increased since then with the intensification of the NTCA’s conservation strategies, starting with the relocation of the Budrohd, Talgaon, Malanpur, and Jhalar villages and later with the Badhaun village in 2012. 

In 2015, the Umravan village protested against their forced eviction from the Panna Tiger Reserve and as a result the local administration cut off their electricity lines and let elephants loose around their village to scare/coerce the community into ‘relocating.’ While approximately 70 families were relocated in response, nine families have continued to resist their forced eviction and have submitted a case to the Jabalpur High Court regarding their land rights under the Recognition of Forest Rights Acts (FRA) 2006. These remaining families have been reportedly continuously threatened and harrassed by forest officials. 

In August 2016, Adivasi indigenous communities from 39 villages within the Panna District were evicted without their consent from their ancestral forests after these were declared as buffer zones for the Panna Tiger Reserve

The removal of villages from the lands within the critical tiger reserve would have been done in breach of these communities’ prior and informed consent and without adequate compensation for the harms caused. The process of relocation for Indigenous communities has further been recorded as incredibly haphazard, where the conditions of families who have remained in the boundaries of the critical tiger reserve are better than those who have been relocated, despite the ongoing harassment received from forest officials and systematized encroachment of reserve management on their lands.

Evicted communities have lost their traditional means of livelihoods as they are no longer permitted to enter their traditional forest land to collect firewood and forest products, to enable their cattle to graze, or to cultivate food crops.

Indigenous women would faced harassment and physical abuse by forest officials who confiscated firewood bundles, requested bribes, and filed false cases of encroachment against them[1].