India’s wildlife conservation strategy relies on creating ‘inviolate’ protected areas (PAs) free from human disturbance, using policing of PAs and physical displacement of human populations as the preferred tools to do so. Conservation-induced displacement causes not just loss of livelihood and dwellings but also increases vulnerability and impoverishment risks of displaced people. By and large, the state’s record of rehabilitating people displaced from PAs has been quite dismal in India. This article examines a rare case of conservation-induced displacement and resettlement where the livelihood outcomes for the displaced people are said to be positive. The relocation of over 400 households from the Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary in Karnataka in the late 1990s has been held up as a case where both conservation goals and local people’s livelihoods gained from displacement. The success of Bhadra has inspired a spate of calls by conservationists in India to use village relocation as a ‘win-win’ opportunity to attain simultaneously the goals of wildlife conservation and poverty alleviation for forest-dwelling communities. This article delves into the process and politics of displacement, resettlement and rehabilitation in Bhadra from the point of view of examining this claim and assessing its replicability elsewhere.
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