Kanchanpur, Aug. 25 -- year-old Jhikadu Rana of ward 5 of Imilia in Beldandi Rural Municipality rarely spends his nights at home. This has been the routine not just recently, but for the past 15 years. Most of the time, his nights are spent in his fields across the Chaudhar river. To protect his crops from wild animals, he keeps watch there at night.

Rana has built a wooden watchtower, known as machan, in the middle of his farmland. In the evenings, after having dinner at home, he crosses the river and heads to the tower, where he sleeps under a thatch roof. Rana owns two bigha [1 bigha = 0.68 hectares] of land, where he has planted sugarcane. It is this sugarcane that draws elephants, rhinos, wild boars, and spotted deer from the Shukla...