Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to announce on Sunday how much the country's tiger population has recovered since its flagship conservation program began 50 years ago.

He will speak of Project Tiger's success just hours away from several of the country's major tiger reserves in the southern city of Mysuru.

Protesters, meanwhile, will tell their own stories of how they have been displaced by such wildlife conservation projects over the last half-century.

Project Tiger began in 1973 after a census of the big cats found India's tigers were fast going extinct through habitat loss, unregulated sport hunting, increased poaching and retaliatory killing by people.

Laws attempted to address those issues, but the conservation model centred around creating protected reserves where ecosystems can function undisturbed by people.

Several Indigenous groups say the conservation strategies, deeply influenced by American environmentalism, meant uprooting numerous communities that had lived in the forests for millennia.

Members of several Indigenous or Adivasi groups — as Indigenous people are known in the country — set up the Nagarahole Adivasi Forest Rights Establishment Committee to protest evictions from their ancestral lands and seek a voice in how the forests are managed.

"We have lost all rights to visit our lands, temples or even collect honey from the forests," 27-year-old Mr Shivu, who belongs to the Jenu Kuruba tribe, said.

"How can we continue living like this?"  

The fewer than 40,000 Jenu Kuruba people are one of the 75 tribal groups that the Indian government classifies as particularly vulnerable.

Jenu, which means honey in the southern Indian Kannada language, is the tribe's primary source of livelihood as they collect it from beehives in the forests to sell.

Adivasi communities like the Jenu Kurubas are among the poorest in India.