Is India’s tiger conservation project burning bright? There have been tiger sightings in places from which they had virtually disappeared — the recent pugmarks found in the Buxa Tiger Reserve were only the second glimpse of the big cat in the area in three decades — as well as in areas where they had hitherto never ventured before — Dhanchi and Thakuran Char in the Sunderbans had no recorded presence of tigers. The appearance of tigers in newer terrains is a heartening sign. It is an indication that the country’s tiger population is not only stable but also perhaps growing beyond capacity. This comes with attendant challenges. Tigers straying out of protected forests with choked carrying capacities into buffer zones or outside heightens the chances of man-animal conflict. The key, therefore, is to expand forests with adequate prey base along with reviving critical ecosystems — a chain involving fauna and flora — that would make tiger populations in the wild sustainable. Conservation policy has faltered on this count. The data attest to this hypothesis. Forests classified as ‘dense’ within Recorded Forest Areas studied by the Forest Survey of India have declined by as much as one-tenth since the 1980s — from 10.88% in 1987 to 9.96% in 2021. ‘Natural’ forests have also declined by 1,582 square kilometres. Astonishingly, plantations and even tea gardens had been categorised as forests by the Forest Survey of India, perhaps to compensate for the depletions. Contiguous forest corridors that are vital for the redistribution of tigers — they are territorial creatures — continue to shrink on account of invasive human settlements and expanding agricultural tracts. Incidentally, the Terai Arc Landscape, an 810-kilometre-long contiguous stretch straddling the lower slopes of the Himalayas, is no longer protected under the new Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act, 2023 since it falls within 100 km of an international border.

In an age when global conservation practices acknowledge the importance of preserving entire ecosystems to protect threatened species, decision-makers in India continue to be obsessed with the number and the volume of apex predators. The commercial potential of ‘flagship species’ — tourists flock to forests with healthy tiger populations — is a likely explanation for this number fetish. Some other numbers need to be highlighted though. That a decade-high figure of 204 tiger deaths were recorded in 2023 reveals the long road ahead to make sure that the wheels don’t fall off from Project Tiger.