India’s 3,682 tigers represent a global conservation triumph. But the number obscures a story of stark inequality between reserves, eroding budgets, rising deaths, and a sixth census already underway — one whose results may complicate the success narrative further.
On 9 April 2023, when India released the detailed findings of its fifth All India Tiger Estimation, the number that commanded global attention was 3,682 — the average estimated wild tiger population across the country as of 2022. With a lower statistical bound of 3,167 and an upper bound of 3,925, India had not merely maintained its tiger population; it had nearly trebled it since 2006, when the first camera-trap census returned a sobering 1,411. In official communications, the figure came neatly paired with another: India now shelters roughly 75 percent of the world’s remaining wild tigers. Against a backdrop of global biodiversity loss, it was a legitimate, hard-won achievement.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced part of the results himself in April 2023, noting that India’s 75th year of independence coincided with 75 percent of the planet’s tigers and 75,000 square kilometres of tiger reserve coverage — a trifecta of sevens that made for irresistible political communication. Newspapers across the world carried the story. Conservation organisations cited it as proof that protected-area strategies can work. And with good reason: the growth from 1,411 in 2006 to 3,682 in 2022, verified across 53 tiger reserves in 18 states using the world’s largest wildlife camera-trap network, represents one of the most significant large-mammal recoveries ever documented.
But a headline number is, by definition, an average. And averages hide geography.
Of India’s 53 evaluated reserves, just six hold 795 tigers — roughly 40 percent of all reserve-dwelling tigers. Twenty-two reserves together hold fewer than ten.
The Geography of an Unequal Recovery
A detailed analysis of the 2022 census dataset by Down To Earth, published in late 2024, reveals the structural imbalance beneath India’s aggregate success. Of the 53 tiger reserves assessed across 18 states, only six — Corbett, Kaziranga, Bandipur, Nagarhole, Bandhavgarh, and Mudumalai — each hold more than 100 tigers. Jim Corbett alone, in Uttarakhand, hosts 231. Together, these six reserves account for 795 tigers, or roughly 40 percent of all tigers documented within reserves. At the other end of the spectrum, 15 reserves hold five or fewer tigers, and seven more hold between six and ten — meaning 22 reserves out of 53 harbour fewer than ten of the animals they were specifically created to protect.
Three reserves — Buxa in West Bengal, Dampa in Mizoram, and Palamu in Jharkhand — recorded no tigers at all during the 2022 estimation cycle. Indravati in Chhattisgarh and Ramgarh-Vishdhari in Rajasthan could not be properly evaluated. As of 2025, India had 58 notified tiger reserves covering approximately 84,500 square kilometres of land, yet nearly 40 percent of the tiger population remains concentrated in roughly 11 percent of those reserves.
This is not merely a statistical footnote. It represents a divergence between a small cluster of highly productive, well-resourced landscapes — most in Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Uttarakhand, and Assam — and a long tail of underperforming or near-empty reserves spread across ecologically and politically peripheral states. Several newer reserves, established in the past decade in Rajasthan, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh, are still in population-building mode, constrained by weak prey bases, legacy poaching pressure, and incomplete habitat recovery. The national number, in this light, masks as much as it reveals.
What the Deaths Tell Us
Running parallel to the population story is a mortality record that demands serious reading. According to NTCA’s own database, confirmed tiger deaths have risen substantially in absolute terms over the past six years: 96 in 2019, 106 in 2020, 127 in 2021, 121 in 2022, 178 in 2023, 126 in 2024, and 166 in 2025. The 2023 figure was the highest recorded since systematic data collection began in 2012. The 2025 figure, at 166, represents a sharp rebound of 40 deaths from 2024’s relative low of 126.
Authorities emphasise, correctly, that viewed against a growing population of over 3,600 animals, these mortality rates remain below five percent per year and are therefore, in ecological terms, not necessarily alarming. But context complicates this reassurance. In 2025, approximately 60 percent of tiger deaths — around 100 animals — occurred outside protected area boundaries, on farmland, in revenue forests, and in the matrix habitats between reserves. Of the 166 deaths, 31 were cubs, a category that NTCA had historically underreported and is now, by its own admission, beginning to count more fully. The high proportion of deaths in unprotected landscapes reflects an uncomfortable reality: as the best reserves fill to ecological capacity, tigers are increasingly dispersing into human-dominated territory where the risks of electrocution, road collision, retaliatory poisoning, and poaching are dramatically higher.
Madhya Pradesh, India’s self-styled ‘tiger state’ with 785 animals in 2022, accounted for 55 of the 166 deaths in 2025. Maharashtra recorded 38. The spatial concentration of deaths in states with the highest tiger densities is not coincidental — it is the signal of a conservation model approaching a ceiling.
In 2025, roughly 60 percent of India’s 166 tiger deaths occurred outside protected areas — the clearest signal yet that a growing population is dispersing into landscapes that offer neither safety nor connectivity.
A Sixth Census, and What It May Find
The conservation community — and NSH readers — should note with particular attention that India has now commenced the sixth cycle of the All India Tiger Estimation (AITE 2026). Field surveys began in January 2026 across all 58 tiger reserves and surrounding forest divisions, with Phase I involving thousands of forest department personnel and trained volunteers. The final report is expected in July 2027. This cycle is the first to evaluate 58 reserves, up from 53 in the previous round, reflecting the addition of five new reserves notified since 2022.
Early reports from Telangana are illustrative. The Amrabad Tiger Reserve, surveyed as part of AITE 2026 between 19 and 25 January, contributed data suggesting a rise in tiger presence within the broader Amrabad landscape — with 42 individual tigers identified in a reserve that held only 10 a decade ago. This improvement is attributed to a combination of sustained weed management (particularly the removal of the invasive Lantana camara), increased prey density, and improved monitoring capacity. We explore the Amrabad case in detail in a companion feature in this edition.
More broadly, AITE 2026 is expected to show continued population growth in established strongholds, with analysts projecting a possible 10 percent or higher increase nationally. But the sixth census will also examine, more systematically than ever, tiger distribution beyond reserve boundaries, genetic connectivity between populations, and habitat quality indicators including invasive species burden. If earlier estimates are any guide, the aggregate headline will again be encouraging — but the reserve-level data will again reveal a more complicated picture.
Notably, over 140 of the 167 tiger deaths recorded in 2025 remained classified as ‘under scrutiny’ by NTCA at the start of 2026 — their causes officially unconfirmed. This figure, the highest proportion of unresolved deaths in the past decade, reflects a combination of understaffed field investigation teams, limited forensic capacity, and the geographic challenge of verifying deaths in remote terrain. It is a significant transparency issue that the sixth census alone cannot resolve.
The Funding Gap Nobody Talks About
Behind the population numbers lies a budget story that receives far less public attention. When the government merged Project Tiger and Project Elephant into a single centrally sponsored scheme in April 2023, the combined allocation for 2023-24 was framed as administrative streamlining and resource optimisation. What the merger has produced in practice — as we report in detail in ‘Follow the Money’ in this package — is a combined allocation of approximately ₹290 crore in 2025-26, down from ₹314 crore in 2019-20, in nominal terms, before adjusting for inflation over six years of rising costs. In real purchasing power, the decline is substantially steeper.
These funds cover all 58 tiger reserves, multiple elephant landscapes, and an expanding mandate for corridor management and human-wildlife conflict mitigation. The result is thin per-unit spending precisely at the moment when India’s tiger population is generating its most complex management challenges: dispersing animals, contested corridor lands, invasive species in two-thirds of reserves, and a human-tiger conflict burden that killed 349 people between 2019 and 2023 alone.
What Should We Actually Measure?
The cumulative weight of this evidence leads to a straightforward proposition: the national tiger count, taken alone, is an insufficient metric of conservation success. It answers the question ‘how many?’ while leaving unanswered the questions that matter as much for the long-term survival of the species in India: Where are they? Are those landscapes ecologically functional? Are the corridors between populations intact? Are the communities living alongside tigers bearing an equitable share of costs and benefits? Is the money reaching the forests that need it most?
A growing body of conservation scholarship, and an increasing number of policy voices within India, are calling for reserve-level scorecards that integrate population trends with habitat quality metrics (invasive species coverage, prey density), corridor functionality (legal status, infrastructure threat), and social justice measures (rights recognition, conflict burden, compensation timeliness). Such an approach would make visible the chronic underperformance in politically peripheral landscapes — the Buxas, the Dampas, the Palamus — that currently vanish behind a national average that looks spectacular because six reserves are doing exceptionally well.
India’s tiger conservation story is genuine, and its practitioners deserve genuine respect. But a story told only through its best data is not honest journalism, and it is not honest policy. The sixth census, whose results will arrive in 2027, will once again produce a headline number. What NSH will be tracking — and what India’s conservation governance should be tracking — is everything the headline doesn’t say.
– Meghana Gogte
