The Sundarbans Villagers Who Share Their Home With Wild Tigers

On the islands of the Sundarbans, the tiger is a neighbor. Even in the 21st century, villagers here are still killed by tigers most years, mostly while collecting crabs, fish, and honey from inside protected forest. They go in anyway. The forest pays better than anything else available to them, and the danger gets factored into the math. Kenoram Mistry, an aged resident of Satjhelia island in the Indian Sundarbans, said as much while showing the scar a tiger left on his arm decades ago:

"The forest is the kingdom of the tiger. The tiger rules there. When we intrude into its territory, it attacks us. Isn't that normal?"

The Sundarbans is a mangrove ecoregion at the delta where the Ganga and Brahmaputra rivers reach the Bay of Bengal. Some of its islands belong to people. Others belong to tigers. Humans here share the food chain with their predator and sometimes serve as prey, but the relationship between the two runs through more than fear. It runs through religion, livelihood, and a clear shared interest in keeping the forest standing. UNESCO has the area listed as a World Heritage site, and the people who live with the tigers describe the arrangement in plain, working terms.

Into The Jaws Of Death

Hundreds of islands sit scattered through the delta. Mangrove forest covers most of them, with trees that have evolved roots and seedlings adapted to twice-daily saltwater flooding. People have settled some of these islands. Tigers hold the rest.

Sundarbans tigers hunt under conditions few of their cousins elsewhere have to manage. They cross deep tidal mud studded with jagged aerial mangrove roots. They swim long distances between islands through currents that also hold crocodiles and sharks. The terrain raises the odds that a tiger searching for prey will run into a human working in the same forest. When that happens, the human is usually the one in trouble.

And humans go into the forest often. Sundarbans crab, fish, and honey all carry high market prices. Most of the forest is legally protected, with permits required to harvest in specific zones, but villagers regularly cross into restricted areas where the catch is better and the tiger risk is higher.

Bhobotosh Mondol and his wife Alpana are among the villagers who enter the forest to collect crabs for a living. Asked what makes them take that risk, Bhobotosh said:

"I tried working outside the Sundarbans as manual labor. The work was hard, and I got little in return. It was not enough to sustain my family. So, I returned and decided that going into the forest near home is a better option for earning even though there is the danger of tiger or crocodile attacks," he said.

The forest department sells annual permits to harvest in approved zones, but they are expensive and tightly restricted. The result is a heavily protected tiger habitat that is also rich enough to draw villagers willing to break the rules. Illegal entries are not recorded, and families of attack victims who went in without a permit are not eligible for government compensation.

"Permits are very costly. We must share the cost and go out in large groups to the forest. That means sharing the profits as well, and we cannot afford that. We have to provide for our children and must earn enough to do so," said Gopal Gayen. He visits the forest with his wife Minati for crab harvesting even though he lost his father to a tiger attack in the past. Gopal and Minati have sworn not to allow their children to take up this dangerous activity.

Poverty is not the only driving force, according to Himanshu Mondal, a member of the Joint Forest Management Task Committee (JFMC) in the Indian Sundarbans.

"The problem is some people go to the forest due to need, but many go due to greed. Several families here earn well from alternative livelihood sources. However, the attraction of making more money in less time by going to the forest is too strong," he said.

As a JFMC member and resident of Satjhelia island, Himanshu helps mitigate human-wildlife conflict in the region. The committee includes forest department staff and village representatives who work together on conservation, and it functions as a communication bridge between the department and the local communities.

The forest department and the NGOs working in the region have spent years trying to give villagers other ways to earn.

"We have introduced the villagers to poultry farming and aquaculture practices so that they can meet their domestic needs of protein and sell the excess to outsiders. We have also helped villagers set up vegetable gardens outside their homes to grow their own food. With the help of Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and other organizations, we also train villagers to multiple crop farming using scientific methods. Tourism is also a major source of income for the locals here. The forest department employs educated local youth as tourist guides and a significant percentage of the revenue earned through tourism is also used in developmental activities. We are also promoting homestays in the villages here so that the tourism money directly goes to locals," said Anil Mistry, Principal Field Officer at Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI), an NGO that runs conservation programs to protect India's wildlife.

Despite all of those efforts, plenty of people still depend on the forest for their living, as the volume of villagers entering the protected zones makes clear.

"Alternative sources of livelihood do exist, but the forest is like an ATM. The profit gained from selling crabs, fish, and honey from the forest is much higher and comes quicker than other ways of living. Also, the older generations are too lazy to start learning farming or new activities. For them, earning from the forest is easier even if the fear of death is always there," said Prashanta Mukherjee, a teacher from the nearby city of Kolkata, who is now a permanent resident of the Sundarbans. He lives in a tribal village in Shamshernagar at the India-Bangladesh border and teaches the village children pro bono.

The younger generation is starting to think differently, he said. "The youth here are now ready to explore different options and not take up the hazard of going to the forest."

The Guardian Angel

None of this means villagers want the tiger gone. The opposite, in fact.

"Yes, we must still save the tigers," said Bhagirath Mondal when asked whether he supported tiger protection in the Sundarbans despite the high rate of attacks. At 70, Bhagirath has watched many friends and family members get killed by tigers in the forest over the decades.

"Imagine my home is unlocked and I am not there, then robbers will come and loot everything and leave. Similarly, if the tiger does not exist in the forest, the forest will disappear. People will cut down all trees and leave nothing since the fear of tigers would not exist. So, to keep the forest intact, tigers are needed. And we cannot survive without the forest," was his explanation.

"We are food for tigers. We catch crabs to eat, and tigers catch us to eat. So, why be angry at the tigers," Kuntala, a woman in her mid-30s, replied. She lost both her husband and her father-in-law to tigers as they went into the forest to collect crabs not far from their home in Satjhelia island. As a single mother of two, she has vowed never to enter the forest or allow her children to do so. She relies on the vegetable garden outside her home to put food on the table.

Asit Gayen, a young man living on Kumirmari island, said the same thing in different words. Asit's father was a regular visitor to the forest and lost his life to a tiger earlier this year. "We persuaded him not to go, but he never listened to us. Going to the forest was like an addiction to him," he said, sitting beside his aged mother.

Asked whether he is angry at the tiger that killed his father, he said: "No, no, we know that the forest exists because of the tiger, and we have also accepted the fact that we can die when entering the forest."

The reverence is real, but it is also relatively recent. A couple of decades ago the situation looked very different.

"If you had come to these villages about 15 to 20 years back, you would have noticed how different it was at that time. The forest department and villagers were at loggerheads with each other. Every time a tiger would kill a person or enter a village, angry mobs would blame the forest department and even attack the tiger. I grew up witnessing many tigers put to death by the people," said Himanshu.

The Sundarbans tiger was not an outlier in this respect. By the second half of the 20th century, every wild tiger population in India was at risk of extinction after decades of large-scale colonial-era hunting. The Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 changed the legal landscape: tiger killing became a crime, and the government invested in serious recovery programs. The tiger was declared India's national animal that same year, formalizing a status it has carried in Indian culture for far longer.

The recovery has been substantial. India's national tiger count has risen across each of the last four censuses: 1,411 tigers in 2006, 1,706 in 2010, 2,226 in 2014, 2,967 in 2018, and 3,167 in the most recent 2022 estimate. Sundarbans tigers gained protection along with the species nationally, and so did the mangrove forest itself.

The forest department ran sustained awareness campaigns and enforced strict rules against tiger killing in the Sundarbans. Restricted forest zones cut off the destruction of tiger habitat and the poaching of tiger prey. Nylon netting now separates village edges from tiger territory along long stretches of the boundary. Government and NGO programs offered villagers other ways to earn so they would not have to enter tiger forest. Over time, the tiger has shifted in local thinking from threat to guarantor: the animal whose presence keeps the forest standing.

An Unpredictable Future

The Sundarbans currently holds around 100 tigers on the Indian side, per the 2022 census, and roughly 125 on the Bangladesh side, per the most recent Bangladesh count. The same region supports more than four million people in India and around three million in Bangladesh. Legal protection and on-the-ground conservation work have eased human-tiger conflict considerably, and most villagers now treat the tiger as the rightful owner of the forest.

That balance is not guaranteed to hold. The Sundarbans is one of the most climate-vulnerable regions on Earth. Severe cyclones have hit the area repeatedly in recent years, and the long-term outlook involves rising seas, salt intrusion, and more frequent extreme weather.

"We now have cyclones almost twice every year. In the past, we used to have one in a decade. Water levels have also changed significantly," said Bhagirath, with concern reflecting in his eyes.

For now, the cyclones have actually pushed villagers closer to the forest in a different sense. Communities have noticed that islands with thicker mangrove cover take less damage when storms hit. That has reinforced the link between forest health and human survival, as Himanshu put it:

"The arrival of cyclones one after the other have made the local communities here aware of the fact that they cannot survive without the forest. Places with thick mangrove forest cover along the coast have suffered lesser damage than others. So, people now are even more ready to join forces with the forest department to protect the mangroves and its tigers. They even fight each other to stop deforestation. For example, if someone lets their goats graze in the forest, another person will scold him as grazing activities deplete forest cover," he said.

How long that tolerance lasts is the open question. Climate scientists project that vulnerable deltas like the Sundarbans will lose land and people to rising seas and intensifying storms over the coming decades. What that does to the tigers, the forest, and the working arrangement between humans and predators here is still unwritten. The world's response to climate change will probably write most of it.

Cover Image: By Samik Dutta

Acknowledgments: Lt. Col. Shakti Ranjan Banerjee, Honorary Director, Wildlife Protection Society of India; Nilanjan Roy Chowdhury, Secretary, Anubhab, Kolkata