India’s tiger conservation story is one of global ecology’s most celebrated achievements. A population of 3,682 tigers confirmed in the 2023 census — approximately 75% of the world’s wild tiger population — supported a narrative of successful state-led conservation at scale. By 2025, the network had grown to 58 tiger reserves covering approximately 78,000 square kilometres. Project Tiger had merged with Project Elephant to form an integrated conservation umbrella. The world applauded. But beneath the headline figures, a more complex and troubling picture is emerging — one of stark geographical disparities, inflation-eroded budgets, habitat fragmentation, and an invasive species crisis that threatens to undo decades of recovery.
A handful of reserves — Corbett (approximately 260 tigers), Bandhavgarh, Kanha, Pench, and Nagarhole — account for a disproportionate share of the national population. Many of the 30-plus reserves added since 2010, particularly in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh, are still consolidating populations and face severe structural challenges. The aggregate number conceals these disparities entirely. In the absence of reserve-level disaggregation of funding and performance metrics, the national success story provides political cover for chronic underperformance in ecologically critical but politically less prominent landscapes.
The funding trajectory is alarming when viewed through an inflation-adjusted lens. Nominal Project Tiger expenditure rose from Rs 154.7 crore in 2008–09 to Rs 290 crore in the 2025–26 Budget Estimate. However, adjusted for inflation, the 2025–26 allocation is worth only approximately Rs 95 crore in 2008–09 prices — a 38% decline in real purchasing power over seventeen years. Simultaneously, the number of conservation units under active management has grown from 38 in 2008–09 to over 60 today. Per-unit spending in real terms has therefore collapsed, precisely as management demands have intensified through larger territories, greater human-wildlife interface, and the growing complexity of corridor protection.
Lantana camara — the ornamental Central American shrub introduced by the British in the nineteenth century — has emerged as one of the most significant threats to tiger habitat quality across India. It forms dense, impenetrable monocultures across an estimated 40% of India’s protected area network, suppressing native grasses and forbs that support ungulate prey populations, reducing visibility for both predators and monitoring staff, and creating a degraded habitat matrix that tigers avoid. At Amrabad Tiger Reserve in Telangana, aggressive lantana removal campaigns funded by a Rs 14.04 crore NTCA grant for 2025–26 are credited with a rise in tiger numbers from 14 in 2020 to approximately 34 by 2026. The results demonstrate both the severity of the problem and the scale of sustained investment required for management.
Wildlife corridors — linear strips of habitat connecting reserves through revenue forests, community lands, and agricultural matrices — are India’s most critical and most endangered tiger conservation assets. Corridor fragmentation, driven by roads, canals, railway lines, and agricultural expansion, is converting the reserve network from a connected metapopulation system into isolated habitat islands. Genetic isolation drives inbreeding depression, reduces adaptive capacity, and ultimately dooms isolated populations to demographic collapse within decades. The 2022 Tiger Estimation acknowledged corridor pressure as the primary long-term threat; the policy response remains inadequate.
India’s tiger conservation establishment must now confront the gap between success story and sustainable trajectory. The headline numbers are real but they were achieved through concentrated effort at a small number of productive reserves. Extending and sustaining that success across the full network — against the coming decades of climate disruption, land-use intensification, and escalating human-wildlife conflict — requires inflation-proofed budgets, legally protected corridor infrastructure, sustained lantana management, and a genuine reckoning with the human communities whose livelihoods intersect with tiger habitat. The tiger’s recovery is at a critical juncture, not a conclusion.
–Meghana Gogte
