A long-pending plan to seal off Sanjay Gandhi National Park with a wall has run into fresh resistance, with tribal residents in the Nagla range halting construction work, exposing a growing faultline between conservation priorities and local access rights.

Even as the forest department accelerates work on a decades-old mandate to protect the park from encroachments, tribals argue that walls restrict traditional movement into forest areas they have long depended on. “In Nagla, we have started work on around 18 km of the wall out of a planned 52 km stretch. Work was stopped by local tribal farmers,” said a forest department official.