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.

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.

Counselling

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