HUMAN–WILDLIFE CONFLICT IN THE TERAI OF UTTAR PRADESH (INDIA) IN CONTEXT TO GLOBAL PATTERNS, DRIVERS AND MITIGATION PRACTICES: A COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW

Abstract

Human–wildlife conflict has become one of the defining conservation and rural development problems of the present century, and India carries a disproportionate share of it. This review examines the problem in the Terai belt of Uttar Pradesh, a densely settled agricultural plain adjoining some of the most productive tiger and elephant habitat in South Asia, and places the regional picture within a global comparative frame. Evidence was drawn from peer-reviewed literature, government returns tabled in Parliament and the State legislature, protected-area records, and verified contemporaneous reporting for episodes that have not yet entered the scientific literature. Uttar Pradesh recorded 111 human deaths from tiger attacks between 2014 and 2024, the second highest of any Indian State, and the Dudhwa–Pilibhit landscape is now widely regarded as the country's second most severe focus of human–tiger conflict (SDG 15-Life on Land). Approximately 44.9% of tiger attacks in this landscape occur inside forest or along the forest fringe and a further 43.2% in crop fields, overwhelmingly sugarcane, which occupies about a third of the sown area in Pilibhit district and acts as seasonal habitat for tigers in this human dominated landscape for much of the year. Between March and September 2024, a pack of six Indian wolves killed ten people, nine of them children, on the Ghaghara floodplain of Bahraich district, prompting the State to designate the affected area a wildlife disaster zone. Other conflict-prone species like nilgai, wild pig, rhesus macaque, elephant, leopard, sloth bear, mugger and venomous snakes also impose substantial and often under recognized costs on rural households. The review compares these patterns with evidence from Nepal, Sri Lanka, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and Latin America, evaluates the intervention literature, and sets out a research and management agenda specific to the Uttar Pradesh Terai.