Jabarkhet: can private reserves restore wildlife and keep tourism gentle?

“A pathway to the left leads up to a rather extensive plateau for the hills, and forms a very pleasant resort for picnics… There is plenty of room for a good foot-race, and the scenery around, from most points, magnificent. Ponies … can go up all the way.”

— Guide to Masuri, Landour, Dehra Dun, John Northam, 1884

A bird with a rufous body and a mohawk sings sweetly, the sound wafting over us. Its head is black, its body orange, but despite the colours, it merges seamlessly into the leaves around it. That is because the leaves are thick, their diversity giving them different colours. There are oaks, deodars, rhododendrons, and walnut trees, and on the ground, where the rufous sibia dives after finishing its warbles, there are nodding ferns and thick inches of leaf litter which no one has swept up. Above our heads, there are scythes in the sky: Himalayan griffon vultures soaring slowly, with all the time in the world.

When you think of wildlife tourism in India, the options are pre-determined. There are safaris inside tiger reserves or there are National Parks, where you enter in Gypsy cars, at stipulated times, and never get off. These are the most well-known kinds of wildlife tourism, but crowding of the star animal — such as a tiger or elephant — is not unheard of. Then there are trails and hides where you can walk as part of other guided tours, usually on community land.

This is usually for the hardcore wildlife-lover, out for a particular sighting of a rare bird. Could there also be a third option, where you can amble at your own pace, in restored woodland, and where wildlife always gets the first right of way, away from mass tourism? Could there, in essence, be picnics without trash, and could this be achieved without emptying one’s pockets?

In 2025, the Jabarkhet Nature Reserve (JNR), near Mussoorie, turned ten years old. This is Uttarakhand’s first privately owned and operated nature reserve, meant to conserve wildlife and habitat as a primary goal.

“These hills are clad with thick forest composed chiefly of Sal [Shorea robusta] and Sain [this could potentially refer to the crocodile bark tree or the Terminalia tomentosa]. The pine grows on the higher crests, and they were the home of many wild animals; tigers, leopards, sloth-bears, hyenas, deer, pig and porcupine used to abound in the jungles.”

In JNR, similar sightings are possible today: leopard, barking deer, goral, yellow-throated marten, leopard cat, jungle cat, black bear, porcupine, wild boar, red fox, jackal, black-naped hare, civet, and sambar. But this was not an easy journey.

Private reserves are popular in Africa. In India, however, with ‘eco-tourism’ labels being used in arbitrary ways, perhaps responsible private reserves are more about potential than reality. In dissecting how wildlife returned to JNR and how it has balanced tourism needs with conservation, it is possible to trace a model for private reserves in India.

More than 40 years ago, alarmed by massive deforestation in the hills, the government called for a ban on tree-cutting above 1,000 metres in (then) Uttar Pradesh. In the 1960s, the Jain family, owners of the Jabarkhet Estate, created a working plan for the area with the forest department. The forest was divided into compartments, dead trees were logged, and new ones were planted. Over the years, even this was discontinued and the Estate lay unused and largely unmanaged.

In the intervening areas, Jabarkhet, once described as a ‘picnic’ spot by Northam in 1889, became more and more crowded. Many different people used the Jabarkhet Estate then, to collect forest produce, as a recreational site, and also to hunt. In 2010, it was evident the area needed stewardship.

“We removed 500 kg of garbage from the slopes. Three tonnes of the weed Eupatorium were removed,” JNR co-founder Sejal Worah said. “Before we did this, in the intervening years, the forest was badly overused with little management. I was so saddened to see the place which I grew up visiting strewn with rubbish.”

If JNR’s fortunes had to be turned around, it would both benefit as well as suffer from its proximity to tourism-glutted Mussoorie. Mussoorie is so stuffed with hotels and ‘getaways’ that it’s easy to forget its name comes from its natural beauty, the red-berried masuri bush. The challenge then was to create a kind of tourism that didn’t further take from the mountain, that didn’t promise helipads, fake fountains and adventure sports, but a slower form of taking in the Himalayas.

And if it was to be eco-tourism, the benefits had to accrue to the local population. But this wasn’t easy because of the locals’ suspicion; they were used to seeing outsiders coming in and ‘developing’ one natural area after another.

The reserve, which now offers affordable ticketed trails, started with selecting people from the neighbouring villages, training them to be guides, and employing them for restoration and maintenance work. This was new for the area, a combination of traditional skills of deeply knowing the mountains and learning bird names in English.

“I didn’t think my passion for wildlife could become a job. I want to do this always,” Virendra Singh, a naturalist at JNR, said. His favourite wildlife memory is seeing a leopard cat cub sunning itself on a rock in JNR while the world shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic.

There might be a lot more to see, but this can only happen if we protect natural stands of habitat without shears or with artificial beautification. In 1848, malacologist and snail collector William Benson found a brown land snail (Bradybaena radicicola) in the slopes around Jabarkhet. Because JNR could be protected, it can also be studied.

True to its Himalayan roots, the area has incredible diversity: insectivorous sundews, ground orchids, more than 40 species of ferns, and hundred species of fungi, dozens of grass species, over 300 types of flowers, and over 150 bird species in about 100 acres of land.

This is more significant when we realise that places known for their natural beauty, whether the Himalayas or the Aravallis, are increasingly being cut up for mining and other commercial projects.

In the Himalaya, widening roads for activities like tourism causes landslides every year. For the Aravallis, the Supreme Court recently accepted a definition of the hills that would have excluded geologically important slopes and ridges, paving the way for ways to use land that does not respect natural topographies or histories. This means, at the landscape level, every stand of natural habitat we can save will be an important stepping stone or refuge for wildlife.

Can we see a rise of private reserves in India where wildlife gets the right of way, and where natural history can return to the present?

Neha Sinha is a conservation biologist and author of Wild Capital: Discovering Nature in Delhi (2026).