On the morning of 26 Dec 2023, residents of Atkona village in Uttar Pradesh’s Pilibhit district thronged near the wall of a local Gurdwara. They gawked at a young tigress that was perching on the wall in full glare of the crowd. The sight created quite a spectacle and before long, the images from Atkona had been beamed across India and the world. The tigress was eventually rescued by the forest department after being tranquilized. Pilibhit is located in the Terai, marshy lowlands that border the lower foothills of the Himalayas. The Terai is a transition zone between the Himalayan range and Indo-Gangetic Plain. In Uttar Pradesh, the Terai stretches from Saharanpur in the west to Kushinagar in the east. It also forms the border between India and Nepal in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Terai is home to some of the tallest grasslands in the world. In 1947, after the Partition of India and Pakistan, for strategic reasons, Vallabhbhai Patel wanted to rehabilitate Sikh refugees in Jammu and Kashmir. Jawaharlal Nehru asked the then Chief Minister of the erstwhile United Provinces, Govind Ballabh Pant to settle the refugees in the Terai. The Sikh refugees bought land from local landowners at throwaway prices and have managed to hold on to these land parcels despite land ceiling laws. They grow sugarcane in these farms over 100 acres in size. The farms resemble the huge Terai grasslands they replaced and tigers find shelter in these inviolate, undisturbed spaces, well-irrigated by water channels. The Terai habitat supports about 485 tigers. Many of them live in these sugarcane farms and are accustomed to human beings.
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