UP’s Bagh Mitras: The Peacekeepers Helping Villagers and Tigers Coexist

Atul Singh’s voice is coloured with many shades of pride as he tells of his grandfather’s tryst with wild tigers. One of the first private hunters in Uttar Pradesh’s Pilibhit region — part of the Indian Terai Arc Landscape (TAL), a critical tiger landscape that boasts over 819 tigers — Atul’s grandfather was an expert in tracking them. This was in 1958, when tiger hunting was a permitted activity. 

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Atul's grandfather was the first to be contacted by the forest department in cases of a human-animal conflict.  

Atul’s family are among the natural protectors, but this is a slight contradiction to his grandfather’s approach. As a bagh mitra (friend of the tigers) — the Bagh Mitra programme was instituted by WWF-India in 2019 to mobilise locals to act as first responders and conflict managers in incidents involving tigers and other wildlife — Atul’s strategies to protect the village people do not come at the expense of the tigers. His work lies at the intersection of peaceful coexistence. 

The initiative is a collaborative endeavour shaped through the partnership between the Uttar Pradesh State Forest Department and the local communities of Terai, with support from WWF-India. The Forest Department plays a crucial role in identifying and notifying bagh mitras, responding to their field reports, and providing continuous guidance and encouragement to strengthen their confidence. 

Equally vital to the programme’s success is the voluntary commitment of the bagh mitraswhose dedication to fostering coexistence and mitigating human-wildlife conflict forms the foundation of this initiative. 

The bagh mitras protecting Pilibhit   

Shyam Bihari is a teacher in his Maithi Saidulla Ganj village bordering Pilibhit. When he isn’t teaching, he doubles up as a bagh mitra. He vividly remembers the day in 2017 when the farmers of his village brought traffic to a standstill by blocking the Pilibhit highway with a human corpse. They wanted to avenge the death of farmer Devki, who had been mauled to death by a tiger earlier that day while working in her field.  

Over the din of the uproar, Shyam deciphered their demands — “They wanted the tiger killed, or threatened that they would attack the staff members of the forest department.” 

This wasn’t the first time the locals of Pilibhit were lobbying for support. Each time there was a tiger attack, the same sequence of events unfolded. It was a crisis slowly unfolding in Pilibhit, one that WWF-India took cognisance of.  

At the heart of this conundrum was one question — whose fault is a human-animal conflict? But, as Naresh Kumar, senior project officer for the Terai Arc Landscape (TAL), pinpoints, the question is faulty. The alternative is ‘How can such conflicts be prevented?’ 

“Prior to the Bagh Mitra programme, whenever such tiger-related incidents would come up, the locals did not know exactly how to proceed. It would take them a while to arrive at a solution; the smallest conflicts would escalate. After the Bagh Mitra programme, the way forward following a conflict or a tiger sighting is clearer.” Naresh has been part of the programme since its inception. 

As part of their role, the bagh mitras routinely apprise the forest department about tiger occurrences and movement outside the forest, assist in rescue operations, conduct awareness programs, report on injury or death of livestock and humans, report deaths of livestock and wildlife and support health camps and outdoor tiger monitoring.

There are two kinds of training that the bagh mitras are given. The primary training equips them with basic knowledge of wildlife identification — detecting wildlife presence through pugmarks, droppings, rolling, scratches, signal understanding; field information communication; crowd control; patrolling and inspection. 

Advanced training includes capturing GPS locations to record the exact location of the animal, skills in installing camera traps to record wildlife presence in a particular locality, and assistance in rescue operations. 

The programme was lauded by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for its inventive take on mitigating human-animal conflict. Atul was one of the people invited as a special guest to attend the 2025 Republic Day parade in Delhi. 

Commending the power of their work, Dr Anil Kumar Singh, team leader-Terai Arc Landscape (TAL), WWF-India, traces the roots of the programme to an uptick in cases of human-animal conflict around 2018. 

Acknowledging that the community is a major stakeholder in the region, Anil highlights why conversing with the people to address the issue was crucial. 

“There were gaps in how the conflicts were being dealt with. Lack of a rapid response often escalated the problem,” he shares, adding, the Bagh Mitra programme wanted to synergise a dialogue between the wild and its people, championing a vocabulary of coexistence. 

The programme’s success lies in busting myths around the tiger’s behaviour, Atul shares. “The tiger is one of the most upright animals. It won’t attack you unless there is a valid reason for it to.” One of the bagh mitrasfrom Itauria village, Pilibhit, Narendra Pal, concedes. He goes on to share how, in numerous instances, cases that could have escalated into a conflict were averted simply by the bagh mitrasreaching on site and calming the villagers down, allowing the tiger to calmly pass by and find its way into the forest again. 

Live and let live

The intervening decades between 2014 — when Pilibhit was declared a tiger reserve — and 2018 saw the region become a hotspot for tiger conflict; experts blame the blurring boundaries between the reserve and the villages for this. Sugarcane fields doubled as breeding territories for tigers. 

The bagh mitrasunderstand this. Their work taps into navigating through the problem using the most empathetic solution. From 2020 to June 2025, the bagh mitras reported 977 conflicts in and around farmlands and human habitations to the forest department, helping find peaceful ways of mitigating them. The Tiger Express programme, initiated by the Pilibhit Tiger Reserve authorities with CSR support, is an awareness campaign through which they’ve reached 6,660 people in 35 villages in the Pilibhit region. 

Chandra Pal, a bagh mitra from Itauria village, is grateful for a programme of this sort. “For people like us, who live in these fringe villages, it is important to know about the tiger. The training provided by WWF-India and Pilibhit Tiger Reserve management makes us aware of how to protect our village and how to coexist with the animals. The same empathy and skills that are taught to us in the training are the ones that we impart to the village people when we speak to them.” 

It isn’t just the farmers and adults that the programme targets, but also children. As bagh mitra Snaval Husain from Daga village shares, “The children are now turning into animal lovers.” While myths often colour their opinions — “They think the tiger is the messenger of death” — the children are slowly understanding the animal for the fascinating creature it is. 

With every activity, the bagh mitras want to seed a message into the collective conscience that it’s the tiger’s land as much as it is the people’s. And the solution lies in learning to share. 

This story is part of a content series by The Better India and WWF-India.

All pictures courtesy WWF-India

Sources 

'Striping a Balance': by WWF-India, Published on 1 March 2025.

'PTR records first human-tiger conflict-free sugarcane harvesting season': by Keshav Agarwal, Published on 28 February 2025.

'PM praises U.P.’s “Bagh Mitra” initiative in “Mann Ki Baat"': Published in Hindustan Times on 29 July 2024.

'Indonesian marching soldiers, father-son duo & more: The many firsts of this year’s Republic Day parade': Published in Firstpost on 26 January 2025. 

'Connecting Corridors: Terai Arc Landscape': Published by WWF on 27 August 2021. 

'Status of Tigers': by National Tiger Conservation Authority, Published in 2022.