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Tiger conservation in India has been driven for the most part by a philosophy that prioritizes the need for inviolate tiger reserves free of human beings. Such reserves, it is argued, provide much needed territory to 'care' for the tiger. In this paper, we examine the biopolitics of tiger conservation in India and argue that the current approach to tiger conservation amplifies the nature‐culture divide and ignores other imaginations of tiger conservation that are more cognizant of human—non‐human entanglements in protected area landscapes. The paper argues that tiger conservation has been a mix of sovereign, disciplinary and neoliberal environmentalities, all built on a certain 'truth' about tigers. The paper raises questions and concerns about the 'truth' discourse that underlies tiger conservation and also argues that tiger conservation has marginalized the environmentalism of the poor. It makes the case for more debate and discussion about tiger truths and suggests the need for a more than human approach to tiger conservation that recognizes the adverse consequences of fortress conservation as well as its limits in caring for the tiger in more than human geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper quantitatively analyzes the spatial heterogeneity of district‐level correlates of open defecation in rural India. We employ standard non‐spatial regression, spatially explicit regressions and multi‐scale geographically weighted regression to compare the stability of measurable correlates of open defecation across these different methods as well as across analyzed spatial units. Attributes like ownership of household assets, drinking water inaccessibility and prevalent literacy rates were identified as the most stable district‐level correlates of open defecation. Our results also demonstrated the relevance of our hypotheses about (a) possible negative sanitation externalities stemming from the co‐concentration of Scheduled Caste communities and other communities in densely populated rural districts, and (b) possible positive sanitation externalities stemming from the co‐concentration of Muslim and non‐Muslim communities in densely populated districts. Overall, however, our analyses demonstrate notable spatial clustering and significant spatial non‐stationarity of examined variables. Therefore, in our opinion, research findings that ignore spatial heterogeneity of sanitation drivers provide incomplete information for policy development and implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]