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Hills, and Sathyamangalam forest areas spread in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka. Once executed, the corridor will connect Nagarhole, Bandipur, Wayanad, Mudumalai, Nilgiri North, B.R. Along with it, surrounding villages like Moyar, Singara, Chemmanatham, Bokkapuram, Mavinhall, Kovilpatti, and Thottilikki are also facing a massive eviction to facilitate the gigantic elephant corridor. Now, a pall of gloom has descended all over Masinagudi. A traditional forest dweller, his small house has been marked as illegal. Conservation involves the rest of the forest-dwelling local community and me,” said Valliyamma.Ī little away at Kurumba Padi, 76-year-old Betta Kurumba tribe Soma Bomman too faces the same predicament. “I will resist any attempt to evict me in the name of conservation. At this old age, I feel it would be very difficult to migrate to the world outside along with my granddaughter,” she said, while struggling to contain her emotions. “In the last 45 years, I lived here in perfect harmony with the forests and never engaged in forest resource plundering. For more than a year, Valliyamma’s hut has been marked illegal, and a board carrying the word ‘sealed’ is hanging on the walls. Revenue and forest authorities have found her hut and the agricultural land as encroachments in the proposed Sigur Elephant Corridor, the lone connection link between Western and Eastern Ghats’ forests. Valliyamma, who ekes out a living by planting vegetables, paddy, sugarcane, watermelon, and millets on her land and one-acre additional leased government land, is now facing a peculiar problem. A widow hailing from the backward Adi Dravidar community, she lives along with her 15-year-old granddaughter (the only surviving close relative) in a small hut located inside two acres and 16 cents (2.16 acres) farmland legally bought by her late husband 45 years ago, after verifying all the revenue and ownership documents. In her late sixties, Valliyamma Murugan, who lives close to the ancient Mariamman Temple at Bokkapuram forest village near Masinagudi in the Nilgiris district of Tamil Nadu, has reasons to believe that her gods have stopped smiling. The corridor links different habitats and is thus critical for maintaining a viable elephant population in the region. With Nilgiris, the triangular mountain block, forming the link between the Western and the Eastern Ghats, the elephant migration corridors become ecologically very important. The dispute, which has gone through years of litigation in the courts, got intense after the area to be acquired for the corridor was expanded, displacing those whose lives and livelihoods depended on the lands that were being earmarked for the animals. The recent conflict between the owners of a homestay and a male elephant in the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve in the Nilgiris in Tamil Nadu, that led to the death of the elephant, has again brought into focus the tussle over land that is being earmarked for elephant movement in the area.