The Real Reason the Medaram Jatara Is Slowly Killing the Forest It Worships

Every two years, between 20 and 30 million people travel to a small forest village in Telangana called Medaram to worship two goddesses - Sammakka and Saralamma - who, according to 800 years of Koya tribal tradition, live in the forest around them. These goddesses are called Vana Devatalu. Forest Deities. Their home is the Eturnagaram Wildlife Sanctuary - one of India's oldest protected forests, home to tigers, leopards, crocodiles, and over 200 species of birds. After four days of worship, those 30 million people go home. They leave behind 12,000 tonnes of garbage. They leave broken glass in farmers' fields that takes six months to clean by hand. They leave a river full of E. coli bacteria. They leave 250 hectares of cleared forest. They leave the farming families of Medaram - fewer than 300 permanent residents to live inside the mess for months, without any compensation, without any help, with a 13-year-old court order for basic crop payment that no government has bothered to honour. This paper asks a question that previous studies have been reluctant to ask directly: whose fault is this, really? The answer is not simply the government's. It is not simply a lack of toilets or bins or rules. The primary cause of the ecological destruction of the Medaram Jatara is the collective indiscipline of the pilgrims themselves, millions of individually small, individually thoughtless acts that together add up to one of the most damaging periodic events in the history of Indian conservation. And the deepest irony, the one this paper keeps returning to, is that the people doing the damage came to worship the deities of the forest they are destroying.