The bare necessities: Exploring Pench, Rukhad and Kanha at Jungle Camps India

Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 classic The Jungle Book made the forests of Madhya Pradesh an enduring fixture in popular imagination. Today, the same titular jungle is most closely associated with Pench Tiger Reserve, straddling Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, where the Waingunga River and Seeonee Hills mentioned in the book, and the sweeping sal forests and grasslands of Kanha National Park complete the picture of the Central Indian wilderness that informed Kipling’s stories.

I got to spend a few days in these very forests during a recent stay with Jungle Camps India, whose five properties span four of Central India’s tiger reserves: Pench, Kanha, Tadoba, and Bandhavgarh. Founded by Gajendra Singh Rathore in 2002, Jungle Camps India (JCI) is India’s only publicly listed wildlife safari company, having made its debut on the BSE SME platform in December 2024.

Operating through a combination of owned, leased and management-contract properties, the company focusses on wildlife tourism and conservation.