India’s tiger story: A comeback written in conflict
Project Tiger is a roaring success, but behind the rising numbers is habitat loss, human conflict, and a conservation model at a crossroads
In 2006, the number ‘1,411’ began bothering naturalists. This was the population of India’s national animal, the tiger. Tigers virtually vanished from Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan, where their numbers fell from around 20 to zero, mostly due to poaching. The case was illustrative of the threat to tiger populations and habitats.
At the time when the British left our shores, India had around 40,000 tigers in the wild, even after colonial officials and royalty hunted them for recreation. In a span of just 60 years, tiger populations crashed from 40,000 to 1,411. This was a serious wake-up call for the government, forest officials and the public alike.
Hunting of the apex predator was finally banned in 1972.
Officially launched on April 1, 1973, Project Tiger included a slew of conservation efforts. It elevated the status of tigers, recognising them as India’s national animal, replacing the Asiatic lion. Initially, the project painted a successful picture. By 1981, tiger numbers increased from 268 to 757 in nine tiger reserves.
However, continued poaching, complicity of state forest departments, misguided reporting by officials about increased numbers, insufficient training, and shortcomings of the pugmark recording techniques in counting plagued the project. It was these factors that led to the complete extinction of tigers in the Sariska Tiger Reserve.
The second phase
The extinction necessitated a second phase of Project Tiger in 2006. This time, the approach shifted from a single-species to umbrella conservation. As a result, tiger populations multiplied to 3,682 by 2022, according to the All India Tiger Estimation. Today, from covering 18,278 sq km (across 9 tiger reserves) in 1973, the project has expanded to cover 78,000 sq km (across 58 tiger reserves). This area accounts for 2.3% of India’s land area.
No doubt, Project Tiger has helped India increase the population of the charismatic cats and many other animals that co-exist in the dedicated reserves. Even today, however, tiger habitats are threatened by human intrusion, poaching, commercial forestry, habitat destruction due to development work, forest fires, growth of invasive species and excessive cattle grazing.
An analysis of National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) data shows that nearly 35% of all tiger deaths in India continue to be unnatural. Also, data collated by the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI) – a non-profit organisation which provides intelligence to the police to combat poaching – shows that tens of tigers still face the risk of poaching every year in the country.
The illegal trade of tigers has also continued, as per a 2022 report from the NGO, Traffic. A total of 893 poached tigers were seized during illegal trade in India between 2000 and 2022.
In the last five cycles of the all-India tiger census, the country has been reporting an average 6% growth in the tiger population in the wild. A major improvement has been the conservation of the habitat through the creation of an inviolate space for both predators and the prey.
Yet, the extant tiger populations are confined to less than 7% of their historical range in patchily distributed habitats across a range of 12 regional tiger conservation landscapes (TCLs) in southern and north-eastern Asia.
Some experts still doubt the accuracy of the science behind the tiger census and the numbers that are extrapolated from the quadrennial census.
An expert working on Project Tiger says the Indian tiger story faces two major challenges currently. On the one hand, there are certain hotspots with abundant tigers and on the other, more than 50% of the tiger reserves have poor habitat conditions.
“The protected areas in the Nilgiri Biosphere, in central India and the Northern plains, have excess tigers. This has resulted in unbridled human-animal conflict. To mitigate this problem, efforts are being made to translocate the tigers to potential habitats. But these receiving tiger areas have poor ungulate populations and habitat,” he explains.
Dharmendra Khandal, executive director and conservation biologist at the NGO Tiger Watch, cites the case of Kailadevi Wildlife Sanctuary, a potential tiger habitat next to the famous Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan.
He says that while Ranthambore has breached its carrying capacity of tigers, Kailadevi, despite having sufficient area, is unable to sustain tigers due to a high presence of human population (over 22,000) and poor prey base.
The NTCA in its 2022 ‘Status of Tigers’ report, too, notes that the gain in tiger population has been limited to the western half of the country. It notes that serious conservation efforts are needed to help the tiger population recovery in Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
The project cannot be deemed a complete success or failure, given the complexity and long-term efforts it demands.
“Project Tiger, when introduced in 1973, prevented the extinction of tigers from rampant hunting and poaching. The Sariska extinction, subsequent policies of the government and work by the forest department have prevented further slide. It introduced the forest departments across the country to a scientific approach in the management of forests and conservation of species,” says Qamar Quereshi, former nodal officer with the Wildlife Institute of India -NTCA Tiger Cell.
Discarding the technique used to analyse the population of tigers in the census, where surveyors based estimations on indirect evidence such as pugmarks, Quereshi, Yadvendradev Jhala from the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) and Rajesh Gopal of the Global Tiger Forum, came up with the present form of enumerating the tiger. They introduced a more scientific basis to collect evidence through camera traps, ground surveys and remote sensing approaches.
There are fundamental errors in the All India Tiger Estimation reports prepared by NTCA and WII. These mistakes have led to a very confused understanding of tiger population dynamics in India.
A turning point
“The Sariska episode was a turning point in the conservation history in India, as not only was tiger conservation given priority, but so were the country’s tropical forests. The scientific census that started from 2006 also brought forward the importance of studying prey bases and assessing the habitats of tigers,” Quereshi says.
After 2006, the political class started responding to the issue by allocating funds, and officials began working with renewed energy to review the tigers, he adds.
This was evident in the 2022 report — ‘Tigers, co-predators, prey and their habitat’, which provided insights into the quality of tiger habitat, the extent of degradation, the proximity of human settlements, the presence of adjoining corridors, and the availability of water sources and canopy cover, Quereshi says.
Mitigating climate change
A study by Aakash Lamba, published in Nature in 2023, says that India’s tiger conservation policy has not only helped increase the tiger population but has also helped mitigate climate change by avoiding forest loss.
The study found that between 2007 and 2020, enhanced protection within tiger reserves led to a net avoided forest loss of over 5,802 hectares, corresponding to approximately 1.08 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions.
These factors presented Project Tiger, the world’s longest-running project on a single species, as a hot topic for several case studies across continents.
Conservation Assured Tiger Standards, a globally recognised accreditation tool used to assess the effectiveness of forest reserve management in promoting tiger conservation, has recognised 23 of India’s 58 tiger reserves for global best practices in conservation. Karnataka’s Kali and Bandipur tiger reserves are among them.
However, Arjun Gopalaswamy, a statistical ecologist at Carnassials Global, Bengaluru, who has designed and implemented big cat monitoring programmes across several countries, has questioned the reliability of the claims regarding rising tiger numbers under Project Tiger.
“There are fundamental errors in the All India Tiger Estimation reports prepared by NTCA and WII. These mistakes have led to a very confused understanding of tiger population dynamics in India. It is critical for scientists specialising in the estimation of tiger state variables and vital rates to reanalyse these data to uncover the true trends,” he says.
He further adds: “If tiger numbers and their occupied range are indeed expanding naturally, as recently claimed, and if this is genuinely enhancing population and genetic connectivity, then there should be no need for artificial translocations of tigers — especially into unfenced reserves, where such interventions would likely exacerbate conflict. Moreover, if tiger range expansion is real, conservation investments should be directed towards supporting these newly occupied landscapes, rather than focusing on artificial prey supplementation or habitat management within already functional reserves.”
However, prey supplementation may be considered a way of undoing the adverse effects of human activity over the years, says Madhya Pradesh Principal Chief Conservator of Forests Subharanjan Sen. Madhya Pradesh, the state with the highest tiger population, has been the first to implement the soft release of prey into tiger habitats over the last one-and-half decades. Since 2015, his department has translocated over 10,000 spotted deer, swamp deer, and Indian gaur, from areas of excess to deficit as a means to manage the prey base.
“Over the years, we have relocated over 220 villages from the nine tiger reserves and other protected areas in the state. The forest village had degraded the tiger habitat. By managing grasslands and supplementing prey, we are expediting the natural process of tigers taking over these habitats,” says Sen.
Tiger-dense forest reserves, with stagnating forest cover, are hotspots for human-animal conflicts. Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve officials say that this year, 27 female tigers have littered, and the average cub size is three per mother. The 1,800 sq km reserve has over 122 adult tigers, and the Chandrapur district, where the reserve is located, has over 200 tigers. On average, 50 humans are killed in tiger attacks every year in the district.
Will relocation of forest dwellers help?
An increasing number of tigers may also mean that the dispersing population is forced to make their territory within or near human settlements.
An area of major emphasis, under Project Tiger, has been the Voluntary Village Relocation Program (VVRP), which has helped in the creation of uninterrupted space for the wild animals inside the core area of tiger reserves.
The NTCA defines VVRP, launched as part of Project Tiger in 1973, with twin objectives: The empowerment of local communities by providing access to development opportunities, and the creation of inviolate space for tigers.
According to a recent notification by the NTCA, 257 villages comprising 25,007 families have been relocated since 1973. About 591 villages with 64,801 families remain inside the notified core tiger areas of 58 tiger reserves in India.
The recent study from the Wildlife Institute of India — ‘Village resettlement prioritisation from inside tiger reserves’ — highlights the need for the relocation of important villages on a priority basis across tiger reserves.
The report states that India would need nearly Rs 117 billion to relocate all the forest dwellers from the core area of tiger reserves. The study adds that India was the only country with such large carnivores thriving in 5% of the forest area. With around 6% annual growth of the wild tiger population, the co-existence of humans inside the forest remained challenging.
“Out of the designated 58 tiger reserves, only 23 have core areas of more than 800 sq km, a minimum requirement for sustaining the tiger population over time. In the next 10 to 15 years, with the human and wildlife population increasing, there could be an increase in human-animal conflict,” says the report.
Funding
Over the last few years, a major issue in relocation and other conservation strategies under Project Tiger has been an acute shortage of funds released from the Centre to the 18 tiger states. Officials complained that the Centre’s allocation to states has reduced by over 50%, and there has been a consistent delay in the release of even these funds.
“The reduced allocation of funds means the states are unable to take up major works and pay salaries to the grassroots staff, who are the real protectors of the forest,” says Karnataka Principal Chief Conservator of Forest (Wildlife) Subhash Malkhede.
He says that allocation of funds under the VVRP has reduced from Rs 30 crore last year to Rs 10 crore this year, resulting in the slow progress of relocation.
Project Tiger might have successfully completed its initial task of increasing the tiger population, including doubling its numbers in the last decade. However, the bigger challenges lie ahead, according to experts. Today, forest officials face the tough task of containing the large number of dispersing tigers within protected areas.
Enabling policy, slow implementation
There is abundant empirical data from across the country which shows that voluntary resettlement is a win-win solution for both people and wildlife. Yet, the progress on this important activity, barring some exceptions, is a matter of concern. First, a clear analysis of the legal and policy framework reveals that there is an enabling system to facilitate resettlement.
Every citizen has a fundamental right under Article 19 of the Constitution to move and settle anywhere. Anything that is contrary to the law, rules, guidelines or resolutions is void as mandated by Article 13. Legally, this means that a majority resolution of the Gram Sabha that rejects resettlement is void.
Additionally, the Wildlife Act, 1972, and the Forest Rights Act, 2006, contain provisions that allow voluntary resettlement of people. Furthermore, the Wildlife Act enables the surrender of rights on payment of compensation and also specifies that the acquisition of any land or interest for a protected area is deemed to be for a public purpose.
The real bugbear is implementation delay. The voluntary resettlement in Nagarahole Tiger Reserve is a case in point. Out of 1,550 families, the first batch of 50 families relocated as far back as 2000. Yet, after 25 long years, this crucial project remains incomplete and rudderless.
Production: Shobhana Sachidanand
Images: DH Photos, iStock, PTI
Videos: By Independent Wildlife Photographer Arvind Karthik
Source: National Tiger Conservation Authority,
Rajya Sabha replies
Data compiled by: Sweekruthi K
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