Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday released India's latest tiger census summary report, which reveals a rise in the minimum tiger count to 3,167 in 2022 and portends what experts say is a looming overabundance challenge in multiple states.

The new minimum population estimate is 22 per cent higher than the comparable count of 2,591 tigers during the 2018 census and signals a steady nationwide rise, despite “local extinctions” of tigers in some areas in central India and the Western Ghats.

Scientists involved in the quadrennial counting exercise said the tiger population had grown by close to six per cent every year since the 2006 count.

India has not only prevented the tiger population from declining but also provided an ecosystem where tigers can flourish, Modi said in Mysore on Sunday, inaugurating a conference to mark 50 years of Project Tiger, a conservation initiative launched in 1973 by the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

“India does not believe in conflict between ecology and economy, and gives equal importance to the coexistence of both,” Modi said. He also launched the International Big Cat Alliance, a global initiative to enhance conservation efforts aimed at the tiger, lion, leopard, cheetah, snow leopard, puma and jaguar.

The 2022 census summary report from the National Tiger Conservation Authority has recorded a substantial increase in the tiger population in the Shivalik Hills and Gangetic plains where camera traps imaged 804 unique tigers compared with 646 tigers in 2018.

In the Sunderbans, the 2022 census photographed 100 unique tigers, compared with an estimate of 88 tigers in 2018. The Sunderbans tigers are well-suited to the mangrove ecosystem but their habitat is confined, with the tiger population threatened by forest exploration, fishing, timber extraction and the expansion of waterways, the report said.

The earlier nationwide estimates of tiger populations were 1,411 in 2006, 1,706 in 2010, 2,226 in 2014, and 2,967 in 2018. The new minimum estimate of 3,167 is based only on camera-caught snapshots of tigers and does not include extrapolations in camera-free tiger areas which should increase the 2022 estimate.

“We expect to get a larger estimate in the final report, but the trend is clear -- we could face a challenge of an overabundance of tigers,” said Qamar Qureshi, a scientist at the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, who played a key role in the census exercise.

“In some areas, tigers are moving out of their source populations into new areas,” Qureshi said. The report has cautioned that Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh would need to invest in mitigating conflicts with tigers because of their increasing populations outside protected areas.

Wildlife biologists expect India’s tiger population in the coming years to plateau as the numbers rise amid limited resources. “As populations grow, resources become scarce, especially space,” said Ravi Chellam, a conservation scientist based in Bangalore. “Animal populations are resource-limited and as a result, tend to fluctuate -- not necessarily move only in one direction.”

Habitat loss and fragmentation are among the top threats to tiger populations in the country. The 2022 report has revealed local extinctions in several areas such as Sri Venkateshwara, including the Kawal, Satkosia and Sahyadri tiger reserves in central India, and in Sirsi, Kanyakumari and Srivilliputhur in the Western Ghats landscape.

For the 2022 census, wildlife scientists placed over 32,500 cameras across the country’s 53 tiger reserves and other tiger territories and captured over 97,000 tiger photographs. In the second part of the exercise, whose results remain unavailable for now, they asked forest guards cover wider areas on foot, counting tiger pawmarks and scat droppings to use them as proxy indicators of tigers' presence in camera-free tiger areas.