Meet the Father-Son Duo Behind the Initiative That’s Re-Wilding Barren Lands & Helping Locals Earn

To save the forest, you must save the people who live in the forest. 

The life lesson visited Sudeep Mehta (42), a finance professional-turned conservationist, early on. And he channeled it into The Bamboo Forest Experience, an eco-tourism project that includes The Bamboo Forest Safari Lodge at Tadoba, Maharashtra, and The Bamboo Forest Nature Conservancy at Gothangaon, 65 km from Maharashtra’s Nagpur. 

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Perched 20 feet in the air in residences made up of bamboo, local wood, and mud, guests can get a front row seat to the wild playing their game of hide and seek down below. 

The bamboo lends the space a timeless charm, but as Sudeep puts it, beyond design sensibilities, the space lies at the intersection of conservation, patience, and persistence. And at the heart of every endeavour is a commitment to the local community. 

The COCOON Conservancy

Arvind Chuke’s family were avid hunters. He hails from the Adivasi community, where hunting and chopping down forest wood translated to livelihood. “Poaching was very common in our community — wild boar, sambar deer, and chital(spotted deer),” Arvind shares. However, he adds that around 2005, these jungle exploits stopped. 

Today, the members of his community continue to venture into the forest, only this time around, with a different agenda, which is to share their knowledge of the species with guests who visit The Bamboo Forest Safari Lodge at Tadoba, particularly the Camp Alizanza, which lies at one of the buffer gates of the reserve. 

“Ninety percent of my community is earning from the project. Some of them are forest guides, others are drivers, some are gardeners, and others work as chefs and at the reception,” Arvind shares. 

He himself is a safari guide at the Camp Alizanza. Tying this in with the idea of Community Owned Community Operated Nature Conservancy’s (COCOONs), an innovative model that involves transforming farmlands that fall on the migratory routes of the wild animals, re-wilding them, and making the local community an integral part of the experience, Sudeep’s father, Sunil Mehta (68), says there is a dual vantage to this. 

Along with the improvement in the environmental condition of the place, there is also an increase in the employment opportunities for the tribes. 

Especially, in an area such as the Tadoba, which between 1 January and 19 September 2025 witnessed 30 deaths due to tigers, according to a report in The Hindu, which includes statistics provided by the Chandrapur forest circle officials. 

​Initial conversations with the locals revealed that their proximity to the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve was a point of contention for most. As Sudeep shares, “The man-animal conflict here was intense, and so, the locals did not favour the tiger. So we decided to make them stakeholders in The Bamboo Forest Experience.” 

Camp Alizanza was the first experiment. 

Sudeep explains, “Before we created stays on this piece of land, we asked the locals what they were doing with it. Since it was a lowland that was prone to flooding during the monsoon season, they couldn’t farm much here. They shared how they were always scared of either them or their cattle being killed by the tigers since the land was on the fringes of the forest.” 

Sudeep continues, “Our idea with Camp Alizanza was to enable them with skills and tap into their potential.” Through Camp Alizanza, 200 families are being impacted, “earning in two and a half months what they would have otherwise earned in a year through farming”. They haven’t entirely given up on farming. Their fruit and vegetable crops make their way into the dishes served at the lodge.  

Not just in its current avatar, local wisdom featured heavily in the design sentiments even while building. As Sunil points out, “When building the tree houses, the locals suggested making them at a height of 20 feet, such that the gusts of wind would not let the houses sway. They explained to us that when there is wind, some portion of the tree remains stable, and some portion is prone to swaying. Their rustic common sense features in the homes, giving it a luxury Africa-esque feel with an Indian heart.” 

A generational love for the wild

“Destiny always has an alternate door for you when something doesn’t work out,” Sunil learnt when he was dealing with the setback of not qualifying for his medicals during recruitment into the police service. 

“This was after I’d worked hard for the civil services examination and cleared it in 1980,” he says, adding that the rejection turned out to be a boon, as it allowed him to turn to nature. In 2011, Sudeep, who was working in London, joined his father. 

Recounting the story of how The Bamboo Forest Experience began, Sudeep shares that it was around 2019 that someone told him about a ribbon of land in Nagpur that had beautiful biodiversity. 

“When we headed to it, we were amazed at the intrinsic natural beauty of the park and decided that this should be our first foray into a wildlife resort,” Sudeep shares. The piece of land sat between the lake and the road, and just like that, the duo began planning a roadmap to breathe life into it by planting 5,000 bamboo trees, and that is now The Bamboo Forest Safari Lodge.

Speaking about the transformation of the land, Sunil says, they were borrowing from the success of one of their earlier projects on the outskirts of Jaipur, which involved transforming 400 acres of barren land into a thriving forest. 

That project involved refining their imaginative palettes. And once completed, it won them recognition from the Rajasthan Government in 2007 when they received the Jal Mitra Award for rainwater harvesting and groundwater conservation, and the Gram Bandhu Award in the same year for their work with the local communities. 

The real estate project that they built stands among a moodboard of green, a rainforest of its own. Elaborating on their model, Sunil says, “In the monsoon season, the water gushing down the slopes of the Aravalli mountains tended to ravage the villages that fell on its way. We asked the locals if this water could be harvested and if the risen groundwater levels could be used to plant trees. They believed so. So, we dug an 800 m canal, and learnt water harvesting techniques from them.”

In 2008, a cursory glance at the land revealed a makeover. Open wells that had lain dry for decades started filling up with water, and the village farmers who were previously dependent on one crop a year started farming three. By 2010, the land was unrecognisable (in a good way). 

“Trees began fighting for sunlight, and the biodiversity improved. We promised the community a gas connection, but only if they promised in turn that they wouldn’t cut even a branch,” Sunil adds.  

Sharing the recipe that brought change, he says, “We started by working on the top soil layer, adding in leaves so that the soil would get nutrients. Then we added water, and through local techniques, we mulched the soil. We followed this up by adding cowdung that was sundried.” 

All throughout, the locals helped. And today at The Bamboo Forest Experience, they continue to contribute to the process. 

You can get a front row seat to this in the form of a visit to their workshops, where they make artifacts using bamboo shoots, or pull up a chair at one of the many wildlife presentations conducted at the lodge, or opt for a guided tour from them through Tadoba where you will learn about wildlife tracking, and the care and rehabilitation of injured animals. Every activity is a testament to a community’s efforts and how it shares a heartbeat with the wild. 

Book your experience here.

All pictures courtesy The Bamboo Forest Experience

Sources 

'Human-wildlife conflict escalates in Chandrapur as five more fall victim to big cats': by Snehal Mutha, Published on 19 September 2025.