Featured image source: L: Bhavna Menon | R: Ravi Pathak
Trigger warning: Mention of death
My call with Rajkumari Yadav was brief — perhaps the shortest interview I’ve ever done. In just three minutes, the 16-year-old broke down. My simple “How are you feeling today?” brought back the day in June when she returned home to find her mother’s body, mutilated by a tiger.
Rajkumari lives in a fringe village near Madhya Pradesh’s Bandhavgarh National Park. The memories of loss are still fresh. And nothing I could say would make for an antidote to her pain.
But the school principal, Nagendra Singh Tiwari, commends the family’s resilience, particularly that of Rajkumari and her brother Ramdeen (17), who’ve remained stoic throughout this period of grief.
In fact, Nagendra adds, “Ramdeen is part of the ‘Junior Fire Watchers’ squad, which conducts awareness programmes around the villages of the Bandhavgarh National Park.” The student group was formulated in 2024 to help control forest fires, spread awareness about human-tiger coexistence and champion positive forest behaviours in the neighbouring villages.
Bhavna Menon routinely works with children in and around the villages of Bandhavgarh National Park
But resilience has its limits. In 2024, the Madhya Pradesh Government increased compensation for families of those killed in animal attacks from Rs 8 lakh to Rs 25 lakh — a scheme yet to come into effect. Rajkumari’s family received Rs 8 lakh, but she says no amount can bring her mother back. Her grief echoes that of numerous families living in fringe villages around Bandhavgarh.
So what can help?
A decade of working in wilderness spaces has taught Pune-based conservation enthusiast Bhavna Menon that one place to begin is conversation — sitting with families, listening to their anger, their grief, their fears.
Through ‘Prakriti Ki Pathshala’, started in 2024, Bhavna aims to mobilise students in villages around Bandhavgarh to rewild their forests and champion human–animal harmony. Her work in and around the villages of Bandhavgarh includes counselling children whose families are victims of tiger attacks and financing their education, conducting plantation drives, nature education camps, forest walks, door-to-door awareness sessions around the tiger, and programmes to prevent forest fires.
Advocacy isn’t easy work — given the relationship between communities and the wild is often fraught and painful — but, she says, it is a start.
The nature of human-animal conflict in Bandhavgarh
Counselling
Who do you blame when one of your own is killed by a tiger?
“We can’t hate the forest; it gives us so much,” Bhavna was told on one of her visits to a family living in one of the fringe villages of Madhya Pradesh’s Sanjay Dubri National Park, who had lost their 11-year-old son to a tiger attack.
Their perspective underscores emotions that do not fit the binary narrative; they can’t absolutely hate or love the forest. Their sentiments will always linger in between.
Through dialogues with the village women and awareness rallies, Bhavna is attempting to build conversation around human-animal conflict
With the rampant increase in human-animal conflicts, the question is how communities can mitigate these. A study concluded that, between 2001 and 2011, the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve witnessed a total of 194 human casualties and 1,960 livestock depredations.
Positioning counselling as one way to help, Nagendra says that all students of his Government Higher Secondary School in Tala are spoken to routinely. “I go to their homes every week. They need to know that someone cares,” Nagendra explains.
He shares an incident dating back to 2012, when a Class 12 student, after writing her math exam, was returning home and was mauled to death by a tiger. Incidents like these instil fear in the other students; it is natural.
Plantation drive
Through Prakriti Ki Pathshala, Bhavna is creating a model through which the students can become advocates of the jungle, and their ideas assimilated into the wild. Nagendra affirms the mentality change he is seeing in the children as a result of these programmes.
“Two years ago, the children were not interested in plantation activities. Today, not one of them breaks a leaf in the forest.” The 1,500 trees that stand tall in Bandhavgarh villages are a testament to this.
Nature education camps form an important part of Prakriti Ki Pathshala
Kashi Prasad Yadav, the gardener and security guard at the school, who is thrilled to watch the area flourish with trees of mango, peepul(sacred fig), amla(Indian gooseberry) and roses, says, “Now the children want to know more about the different kinds of trees and how to grow them in their villages. They take an active part in the plantation.”
Nature education camps and awareness rallies
“My journey in wildlife conservation has been one of listening, learning, and bridging the worlds of people and nature,” shares Bhavna.
“From engaging with children in the buffer villages of Kanha Tiger Reserve through nature education camps, to planning outreach programmes that addressed human–wildlife conflict, my work was always rooted in creating spaces for dialogue, awareness, and empathy among communities. Those years gave me a deep understanding of how conservation cannot thrive without people at its heart.”
Her work is premised on a question: what can be done to ensure that communities and conservation can sit, not in opposition but in dialogue?
Children conduct rallies to try and change mindsets of people who start fires in order to collect the mahua flowers
Currently, Bhavna’s scope of work extends to curating awareness campaigns, designing education programmes, and amplifying conservation stories, while also focusing on projects that support alternate livelihoods.
As she reasons, “Conservation cannot be sustainable unless it addresses the aspirations and challenges of communities living alongside wildlife. Through collaborations, I have been able to support initiatives that empower communities through skill-based training, encouraging youth engagement that reduces dependency on the forest.”
Prakriti Ki Pathshala is a unique project that turns its gaze towards children. One of its earliest activities was a rally held earlier this year, where 600 children walked through villages spreading awareness about tiger conservation.
Another initiative, ‘Sangharsh Se Shiksha Tak’ (From Conflict to Education), supports the education of children who’ve lost family members to human–animal conflict through donor contributions. Recalibrating their mindsets is crucial, Bhavna points out.
One of the mainstay activities of the club is managing forest fires — how to douse one when it is starting, how to ensure sparks do not burgeon into fires, and how to take preventive measures to stop a fire from spreading.
When children preempt forest fires
In March 2021, a massive forest fire ravaged Bandhavgarh. According to reports, Madhya Pradesh reported around 28,000 forest fires across 77,000 sq km, with nearly 16 percent classified as major — including the one in Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve.
Nagendra says the ‘Junior Fire Watchers’ programme was born out of an idea to mitigate these forest fires.
Prakash Verma, deputy director of Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve, affirms that, following the efforts in the last two years, there has been “a 99 percent reduction in the fires”. “Earlier, we would see large areas of land destroyed by fires. Now people have become more aware because of the efforts of the students and the communities.”
Bhavna interacting with the students of the schools in and around Bandhavgarh National Park
Reports suggest that one of the most rampant causes of forest fires is mahuaflower collections. The communities burn the forest ground so that, when the flowers fall, they can be easily spotted and collected. The fires sometimes get out of control. The flower is a source of livelihood for most communities living in tribal pockets of Madhya Pradesh, but burning the ground seems a method that’s reductive and out of touch with reality, according to Bhavna.
“Along with the undergrowth, many insects and smaller creatures also die in the process. Instead, we have educated the children to reason with them to put a cloth or a sariunder the trees, to collect the falling flowers. The children also create awareness about cigarettes, and are trained in using a jerry can to control smaller sparks,” Bhavna shares.
Pradeep Dahiya (19), who is a Junior Fire Watcher, says he’s learning a lot. “It was common for the people of the adivasicommunity to light fires under the mahua tree, but they have now stopped once they have realised how harmful it is to the jungle and the creatures living in it. But it wasn’t so easy to get people to understand our work. We go from door-to-door in the summer heat trying to change people’s habits, but they have been practising traditional ways of collection for years, and so it will take time.”
Counselling sessions and conversations with the affected families of human-animal conflict are a part of Bhavna’s approach
The second edition of Prakriti Ki Pathshala saw the students help organise 10 camps in April this year, involving 326 students from 25 villages and 26 teachers from the buffer zone villages of the reserve.
Ramniranjan Yadav, a Class 10 student, was a part of this. His father, Anand Ram Yadav, is proud to talk about his son’s efforts towards creating awareness about these forest fires.
“Earlier, we used to have so many forest fires, but these days the incidents of these are fewer. To know my son is partly the reason for this makes me happy. Of course, I cannot say all of the changes are because of him, but in his own little ways, he is trying to do what he can to tell the villagers and me about how we need to respect the jungle,” shares the father.
Constant interaction between students and forest guards helps children understand positive conservation approaches. While these efforts help mitigate the conflicts and challenges in these areas, Bhavna says there isn’t a single solution for these communities. But every small step is an attempt to offer them some respite.
All pictures courtesy Bhavna Menon
