In the early 1970s, India’s tigers were vanishing. Poaching, habitat loss and prey depletion had driven numbers down catastrophically, with some estimates suggesting barely 1,800 tigers remained in the wild. The alarm led to Project Tiger in 1973, one of the world’s most ambitious conservation programmes, creating a vast network of protected reserves across the country. Five decades later, India holds around 3,600 wild tigers, roughly 70 percent of the entire world’s wild population, a recovery widely hailed as conservation’s greatest comeback story. The story of how it happened, told in decades of fieldwork and policy, holds lessons for saving species everywhere.

The crisis that started it

The tiger’s decline was a perfect storm. Trophy hunting under colonial rule and by Indian elites had already thinned populations; after independence, habitat fragmentation accelerated as forests fell to agriculture, dams and development. Poaching for skins and, increasingly, for bones used in traditional medicine created a lucrative black market. Prey species like deer and wild pigs were themselves overhunted, starving the big cats that remained. By the 1972 census, the first systematic count, the tiger’s future in India looked bleak, and extinction in the wild within decades seemed plausible.

How Project Tiger worked

The programme’s genius was its core-buffer strategy. Each tiger reserve designated an inviolate core zone, free of human disturbance, where tigers could breed undisturbed, surrounded by a buffer zone where regulated human activity continued. Nine reserves were notified in 1973; today there are over fifty, covering a significant share of tiger habitat. Relocation of villages from core areas, controversial but compensated, reduced human-tiger conflict. Anti-poaching patrols, the M-STrIPES monitoring system using camera traps and GPS, and a dedicated wildlife crime bureau professionalised protection. Protecting the tiger’s habitat simultaneously sheltered entire ecosystems, from elephants to hornbills, the classic umbrella species effect.

Counting tigers: the science

You cannot manage what you cannot measure, and tiger censuses became a science of their own. Early pugmark counts were notoriously unreliable. Modern estimates use systematic camera-trap surveys across thousands of locations, with individual tigers identified by their unique stripe patterns, combined with statistical models that estimate populations in unsurveyed areas. The all-India estimation, conducted every four years, is the world’s largest wildlife survey, involving tens of thousands of camera-trap nights. The trend it shows, from about 1,400 in 2006 to over 3,600 in the latest count, is one of conservation’s best-documented recoveries.

The challenges that remain

Success, however, has brought a new generation of problems. Tiger reserves are islands in a sea of humanity, and dispersing young tigers must cross farms, highways and villages, leading to conflict and roadkill. Linear infrastructure is a growing killer: widening highways and railway lines slice through corridors, and several reserves now press for elevated wildlife crossings and speed restrictions. Poaching has not vanished either; tiger parts still command high black-market prices, and the 2005 Sariska wipeout remains a warning that protection can never relax. Habitat corridors between reserves need legal protection to keep populations genetically connected, and as numbers grow, so do encounters: India must manage a landscape where thousands of large carnivores share space with 1.4 billion people. The next phase of Project Tiger is less about protection within reserves than coexistence beyond them.

Lessons for the world

Project Tiger’s playbook has global relevance:

• Political commitment sustained over decades, surviving changes of government.
• Landscape-scale protection, not just isolated parks, with corridors linking them.
• Science-based monitoring that makes success and failure visible.
• Community engagement, compensating livestock losses and sharing tourism benefits so locals become stakeholders.

FAQs

How many tigers does India have now? The 2022 all-India estimation put the number at 3,167 at minimum, with the population now estimated around 3,600 and still growing in many landscapes.

Are tigers still endangered? Yes, globally. The species remains endangered, with wild populations under pressure across most of its Asian range; India’s remarkable success is the bright exception.

What is the biggest threat now? Habitat fragmentation and human-wildlife conflict, as growing tiger numbers meet India’s dense human population.

Project Tiger proved that extinction is a choice, not a fate, and that determined action can reverse even dire declines. With sustained funding, scientific rigour and political will, a species can be pulled back from the brink even in one of the world’s most crowded countries. The tiger’s stripes now number in the thousands, and the world is watching India closely to learn how it was done.

Source: National Tiger Conservation Authority