New Delhi, July 18: Tourism in Uttarakhand's Corbett tiger reserve is disrupting the social fabric of local villages, creating pockets of prosperity but injecting new tensions, a research report by the Wildlife Institute of India has said.

Researchers at the WII, Dehradun, and their collaborators in Canada have found that tourism in Corbett appears to be driving financial disparity, resentment and conflicts within village communities living at the edge of the reserve.

"We had a hunch that all was not well - but the degree of the negative impacts was something unexpected," said Ruchi Badola, professor of ecology at the WII. "There are lessons here - there is an urgent need to regulate ecotourism."

The study of Corbett comes amid concerns among sections of conservation scientists about the impacts of wildlife tourism on India's protected forests and local communities.

The Corbett reserve in Nainital district is one of India's most popular tiger-spotting zones, a habitat for over 200 of the country's 2,226 tigers estimated by the count last year.

Wildlife biologists believe Corbett's high tiger numbers and prey densities make it a promising habitat for the long-term survival of the big cats without the need to bring in tigers from outside the reserve.

Badola and her colleagues examined how tourism has affected Dhikuli village, a cluster of some 200 households with about 1,600 people, just outside the eastern edge of the reserve. The researchers used satellite imagery to study changes in the landscape around the reserve and asked Dhikuli villagers how tourism has changed their lives.

Their study, published in the journal Forest Policy and Economics, has found that while tourism has brought benefits to local communities, it has also increased the inequalities within the village.

"Households need to have the human resources, the skills and assets to engage in tourism-related activities," Badola told The Telegraph. "Households that don't have such assets find themselves left out," she said.

The researchers say their findings are worrying because earlier studies elsewhere have shown that inequitable wealth accumulation from tourism can increase class division, social tensions and economic marginalisation.

"The findings from Corbett are not surprising - the sharing of benefits by the wildlilfe tourism sector with the local communities has been limited," said Krithi Karanth, a scientist at the Centre for Wildlife Studies, Bangalore.

Karanth, working with Ruth DeFries, an ecologist at Columbia University in the US, had five years ago analysed tourism-generated jobs at 10 protected forest areas across India and found only tiny proportions of local people employed in tourism-linked jobs. The number was just two per 10,000 population at Sariska in Rajasthan, seven per 10,000 at Bandipur in Karnataka and 10 per 10,000 at Kanha in Madhya Pradesh.

"Very little is shared with the local population - handing over schoolbags to local children is not trickle-down economics," Karanth told this newspaper. The findings, she said, highlighted the need to manage wildlife tourism better.

The Corbett study has also found that the influx of tourists has exacerbated the pressure on villagers for water. One villager told the WII researchers that while water was available relatively easily before the growth of tourism, much of the water is now consumed by tourist resorts near the reserve, leaving villagers much less than what they had earlier.

Conservation researchers concede that several village households have gained significantly through tourism. "In some households, their capacity and aspirations have grown, we see local villagers who have learnt to converse in