Latest People in Conservation: Biodiversity Conservation and Livelihood Security Newsletter is out!

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We, as a group of individuals, organizations, and representatives of forest-dwelling communities, have released a joint statement expressing grave concerns about the letter issued by the Addl. DGF (Project Tiger) and Member Secretary (NTCA) on June 19, 2024.

This letter asks states to prioritize the relocation of villages from Core/Critical Tiger Habitats, which contradicts the rights of Adivasi and other traditional forest dwellers under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006; violates the procedure to be followed before considering relocation from Tiger Reserves under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972; and disregards international obligations to uphold human rights while pursuing conservation goals under the Convention on Biological Diversity. Additionally, the letter has not been made public and is not available on the NTCA website, raising serious questions about the NTCA’s accountability and transparency. 

The statement calls for the immediate withdrawal of the letter, an independent review of past relocations and their social and ecological impacts, and a more inclusive, rights-based approach to tiger conservation through the implementation of the FRA and the recognition of community-led conservation

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A longer piece on this has been published at:

Partap C Aggarwal
Born Jaranwala in Undivided India on May 20th 1931.
Died peacefully in his sleep September on 28th 2024

The trauma of losing his mother followed by the loss of his ancestral home through partition, marked Partap’s early life and started him on a journey that was remarkable and defied convention.

Inspired by Gandhi and driven by the wish to make a difference in a newly independant country, he joined first, Sewagram and then Friends Rural Center in Central India afte graduating from college. After a few years of hands on “rural development” work, the need to learn more took him to Cornell Universty in upstate New York where he completed a PhD in Social Anthropolgy. With this degree in hand he joined Colgate University as faculty and in five years had become a professor of Anthropology. By now married with three young children, family pictures of that time (early 1970s) depict an American family, doing typically American things having achieved the American dream.

However, he soon began to see the fault lines of the American/ industrial way of life, it’s social injustices and it’s lack of ecological sustainability. And as be became increasingly critical, he decided to leave it all behind and return to India. It was a big leap of faith, to give up the security of a well paying job and there was a fair amount of resistance from the rest of the family. Many people felt he was mad. Back in India he wrote 4 books and numerous articles about caste and other inequalities in India. And then one day he decided he had had enough of academia, he wanted to work with his hands instead of the pen.

So he came back to the Friends Rural center this time as the coordinator and the One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka fell into his hands. The central idea of the book was that Nature knows best and a lot of human endevour lead to creating more problems than solutions. Fukuoka’s way became Partaps way and the under his guidance the center focussed on no till farming. Or creating a forest on the farm.
Given his training in Social Anthropolgy it also became clear to him that social justice and ecological justice go hand in hand. Partap and his team at FRC became pioneers in natural farming and inspired many people across the country to start their own similar experiments. From central India he moved close to Bangalore in the south, and together with a group of like minded people started Navadarshanam on a patch of overgrazed, barren land. Navdarshnam today is a community, “experimenting with alternatives to the modern way of living and thinking seeking both ecological balance and inner peace”

People who met Partap remember telling them “look the jungle is coming back” with a glint in his
eyes. Today this forest is visited by wild elephants, bison and deer. And according to his wishes,
we laid him to rest at his favourite spot in this forest.