Protected areas have had significant impacts on local communities primarily through the physical removal of people. In some instances, people continue to live within protected areas due to the inability of the state to evict them. The restrictions on livelihoods placed on people living inside protected areas lead to in situ displacement. We show how conservation enclosures in the Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple Tiger Reserve have produced a class of people that the state 'lets die' by banning customary practices such as fire use, hunting and harvesting of forest produce. Using longitudinal ethnographic, socio-economic and ecological data, we demonstrate that conservation policy has alienated indigenous forest dwellers from their agricultural and forest-land. The outcomes of conservation policy include dispossession through increased crop losses, reduced income from agriculture and forest produce, as well as a forest that is dominated by weeds due to fire suppression. The ban on hunting in particular has increased wildlife densities, which has enabled the state to accumulate revenues through the establishment of wildlife tourism facilities. All in all, centralized protected area governance has changed the relationships among people, forest and the state in a way that has produced adverse effects for both livelihoods and the ecosystem.

Background: In India, heterogenous tribal populations are grouped together under a common category, Scheduled Tribe, for affirmative action. Many tribal communities are closely associated with forests and difficult-to-reach areas and have worse-off health and nutrition indicators. However, poor population health outcomes cannot be explained by geography alone. Social determinants of health, especially various social disadvantages, compound the problem of access and utilisation of health services and undermine their health and nutritional status. The Towards Health Equity and Transformative Action on tribal health (THETA) study has three objectives: (1) describe and analyse extent and patterns of health inequalities, (2) generate theoretical explanations, and (3) pilot an intervention to validate the explanation.     Methods: For objective 1, we will conduct household surveys in seven forest areas covering 2722 households in five states across India, along a gradient of socio-geographic disadvantage. For objective 2, we will purposefully select case studies illustrating processes through which socio-geographic disadvantages act at the individual, household/neighbourhood, village or population level, paying careful attention to the interactions across various known axes of inequity. We will use a realist evaluation approach with context-mechanism-outcome configurations generated from the wider literature on tribal health and results of objective 1. For objective 3, we will partner with willing stakeholders to design and pilot an equity-enhancing intervention, drawing on the theoretical explanation generated and evaluate it to further refine our final explanatory theory. Discussion: THETA project seeks to generate site-specific evidence to guide public health policy and programs to better contribute to equitable health in tribal populations. It fulfills the current gap in generating and testing explanatory social theories on the persistent and unfair accumulation of geographical and social disadvantage among tribal populations and finally examines if such approaches could help design equity-enhancing interventions to improve tribal health.

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The indigenous tribal peoples have been living in the forests for millions of years and their livelihood depends on the forest resources, they have symbiotic relationship with nature, before independence there is no much restriction to tribal's in the forest and they can live freely and use the forest resources. Government brought out different forest policies and declares the most of the forest areas into Wildlife Sanctuaries, National Parks, Tiger Reserves, Community Reserves and reserve forest to protect and conserve forest, it helps the wildlife and forest conservation and in another hand it has impacted the livelihood of the millions of tribal's. The major livelihood occupation of Soliga tribal's are Non-Timber Forest Products collection and sale and they also engaged in agriculture, labour and livestock rearing, they are earn income from different sources that 43 percent from labour, 45 percent from agriculture, 7 percent from sale of forest resources and 5 percent from sale of livestock. BRT reserve forest declares into wildlife sanctuary in 1974 and stopped the shifting cultivation and displaced settlements to periphery and allow the some of the settlement to stay inside the forest, NTFPs collection was banned in 2006 and Government did not provide any alternative employment and due to this 32.5 percent of them migrated outside for employment, it made adverse affect on Soliga tribal economy. The recent policy of Forest rights Act 2006 given some space for tribal's to get rights to collect NTFPs and use the forest land, even that also they are facing the relocation problem because of declare into Tiger Reserve in 2011. The study will focus on impact of forest policies and economic scenario of the Soliga tribes.

The Solega community living in the Biligiri Rangan Hills (B. R. Hills) of Karnataka State, southern India, have noticed significant changes to the ecosystem of their forest homeland over the last four or five decades. Originally hunter-gatherers, who carried out swidden agriculture at a subsistence level, they were forced to abandon the semi-nomadic ways of their ancestors, and settle in permanent villages when these forests were first declared a wildlife sanctuary in 1974. In this paper, we present the views of Solega elders on the ecological changes that have taken place in the B. R. Hills, along with the subsequent changes in their interactions with the animals that also inhabit this landscape. The Solega way of life is accustomed to co-existing with wildlife, and they worship several animal deities. Their folklore and traditional ecological knowledge are also replete with ways of avoiding dangerous encounters with wildlife. Many of the detrimental ecological changes observed by Solega people are ascribed by them to the halting of their traditional litter fire regime, and the subsequent rampant growth of the exotic invasive plant Lantana camara, which now dominates the understorey in large swathes of the forest. These factors combine, according to Solega elders, to negatively impact the well-being of both animals as well as their own people. We hope to demonstrate how a deeper understanding of Solega language and culture, both essential facets of everyday life, as well as of their traditional ecological knowledge—can allow a full appreciation of the interactions between small Indigenous communities, such as the Solega, and the natural environment. We argue for a greater appreciation of, and engagement with, Indigenous knowledge in conservation efforts in countries such as India, where the protection of charismatic species, such as tigers, is often perceived to be at odds with the rights of small minority groups, such as the Solega.