Human wildlife conflicts have been in existence since wild animals and people shared the same landscape and resources. In many places around the world, some species of animals have turned into raiders of agricultural produce, as they compete for the same food sources.

In India, after the introduction of  Wildlife Protection Act (1972) and through the forest management approach, populations of many herbivore species have increased significantly. Some of them have turned locally overabundant and the high farm density results in intense crop damage by the wild herbivores.

In human-wildlife conflicts (HWC) the most severe impact is crop damage by herbivores and loss of life by carnivore predation. This significantly impacts farmer incomes and negatively affects the agricultural economy.

The present measures of mitigation and their implementation are ill designed and insufficient to address this issue. For example, the compensation process in such damages is cumbersome, time-consuming and insufficient to cover the damages. Moreover, the approaches to framing and mitigating conflict compensation emphasizes more on the direct losses while ignoring the indirect costs borne by the farmers.

We believe that this problem needs deeper research, more data and inputs from various stakeholders to be able to clearly define the problem and to develop more effective and sustainable mitigating measures.

This project aims to study the economic and ecological impact of Human wildlife Conflict on farmers, farm incomes, and Agriculture ecosystem. We propose to make recommendations to effectively mitigate the problem of crop damage and to provide guidelines for a more efficient damage compensation mechanism for the state of Maharashtra.