Project Tiger at 50-Plus: Reviving Struggling Reserves and Securing India’s Conservation Future

Project Tiger at 50-Plus: Reviving Struggling Reserves and Securing India’s Conservation Future

An event marking the 18th anniversary of tiger reintroductions at the Sariska Tiger Reserve in Alwar, Rajasthan, has brought renewed focus to one of India’s most consequential conservation undertakings. Two landmark assessments were released: a road map for managing tigers across India’s 58 tiger reserves, and a comprehensive lessons-learnt review of 12 reintroduction initiatives conducted since Sariska hosted India’s first ever tiger reintroduction in 2008. Together, these documents reveal a conservation programme that has achieved remarkable numerical success but now faces a more nuanced second-generation challenge — ensuring that population growth translates into ecological resilience across diverse landscapes.

India’s tiger census tells an impressive story at first reading: from a recorded low of 1,411 tigers in 2006, the population has climbed to 3,682 in the 2022 All India Tiger Estimation — the most recent comprehensive survey. The country now hosts an estimated 75 per cent of the world’s wild tiger population. Yet the aggregate figure masks a structural imbalance that conservation managers and the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) are now urgently addressing: population gains are concentrated in a handful of healthy reserves, while a significant number of reserves remain ecologically marginal or entirely tigerless.

Project Tiger: Origins and Architecture

Project Tiger was launched in 1973 under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi — one of the earliest and most ambitious wildlife conservation programmes in the developing world. The programme was catalysed by the alarming findings of a 1972 census that recorded fewer than 2,000 tigers across India. Nine reserves were initially notified; today there are 58, spanning approximately 85,000 square kilometres across 18 states.

The legal and institutional framework supporting Project Tiger evolved significantly over the decades. The Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 — enacted just before Project Tiger was launched — remains the cornerstone of wildlife law in India. It establishes the legal categories of protected areas: National Parks, Wildlife Sanctuaries, and Conservation Reserves. Tiger reserves operate under a specific regime within this Act, with a mandatory division into core (critical tiger habitat) and buffer zones.

In 2006, responding to the tiger crisis that emerged when Sariska’s entire tiger population was found to have been poached, Parliament amended the Wildlife (Protection) Act to create the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) as a statutory body. The NTCA now provides technical guidance, oversight, and funding to state governments (which manage the reserves on a day-to-day basis) and coordinates the four-yearly all-India tiger estimation exercise.

The Core-Buffer Distinction and Critical Tiger Habitat

One of the most legally significant aspects of tiger reserve management is the delineation of Critical Tiger Habitat (CTH) — the inviolate core area within which no human habitation or resource extraction is permitted. The 2006 amendment to the Wildlife (Protection) Act made it mandatory for every tiger reserve to notify a CTH after a scientifically rigorous exercise, and mandated that any relocation of forest-dwelling communities from CTHs be voluntary, with full rehabilitation.

The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 — enacted the same year — created a layer of complexity by recognising the rights of forest-dwelling communities to their land and livelihood. Courts and conservation practitioners have had to navigate the tension between inviolate core zones and the community rights recognised under the Forest Rights Act, an interface that continues to generate litigation and policy debate.

The buffer zone surrounding the core is a managed-use landscape where human activity is regulated but not excluded. It serves an ecological function as a transitional zone between the inviolate core and the broader landscape. As tiger populations grow, the buffer becomes increasingly critical — it is the zone through which dispersing tigers move, seek new territories, and occasionally come into conflict with human communities.

Source Populations, Sink Populations, and Metapopulation Dynamics

The twin assessments released at the Sariska anniversary event introduce a framework borrowed from conservation biology: the distinction between source populations and sink populations. A source population is one that produces more tigers than it loses — births and immigration exceed deaths and emigration. Excess tigers disperse outward, potentially colonising new areas or reinforcing adjacent populations. A sink population is one where mortality exceeds recruitment; without immigration from a source, such a population will decline to extinction.

India’s tiger landscape currently has approximately 13 reserves that the assessments classify as robust source populations: these include Corbett (Uttarakhand), Bandipur (Karnataka), Kaziranga (Assam), Pench (Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra), and Tadoba-Andhari (Maharashtra), among others. Together, ten to twelve reserves account for roughly 36 per cent of India’s total tiger population — a remarkable concentration in a small number of ecosystems.

At the other end of the spectrum, 12 reserves have fewer than three tigers, and three reserves — Kawal (Telangana), Kamlang (Arunachal Pradesh), and Dampa (Mizoram) — have been found to have zero tigers. These are classic sink landscapes or reserves that have lost their tiger populations to poaching, habitat degradation, or disconnection from source populations. The assessment recommends prioritising reintroduction efforts in reserves that have fewer than five tigers, provided the habitat quality and protection capacity can support a viable breeding population.

Wildlife Corridors and Connectivity: The Metapopulation Imperative

Conservation biology has established that isolated populations — even if individually viable in the short term — are vulnerable to genetic bottlenecks and demographic stochasticity (random fluctuations in birth and death rates that can drive small populations to extinction). Long-term viability requires connectivity: the ability of individual animals to move between populations, exchange genes, and recolonise areas where local extinctions have occurred.

This is the concept of a metapopulation — a network of sub-populations linked by dispersal. India’s tiger conservation strategy increasingly recognises that protecting individual reserves in isolation is insufficient; what is needed is a landscape-level approach that maintains wildlife corridors between reserves. Corridors are strips or patches of habitat — forests, revenue lands, or even agroforestry zones — that allow animals to move between protected areas without being killed on roads or by humans.

The Wildlife Institute of India (WII) has mapped numerous tiger corridors across the country — the Central Indian Highlands landscape, the Western Ghats landscape, and the Terai Arc Landscape in the north are the three major tiger metapopulation landscapes. Maintaining corridor integrity requires coordination between forest departments, revenue departments, local governments, and communities — a formidable multi-stakeholder challenge.

Lessons from Sariska and Panna: The Science of Reintroduction

India’s two most celebrated tiger reintroduction initiatives — Sariska (beginning in 2008) and Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh (beginning in 2009) — provide the empirical foundation for the 12-initiative review. Both reserves had lost their entire tiger populations to poaching before reintroductions were undertaken.

Sariska received its first translocated tigers from Ranthambore (Rajasthan); Panna received tigers from Kanha and Pench. In both cases, the reintroduced individuals were radio-collared and intensively monitored. The Panna reintroduction is today considered one of the most successful in global conservation history: from a starting point of five tigers, Panna’s population grew to over 50 by the late 2010s, and tigers began dispersing into the surrounding landscape. Sariska has been more challenging, with slower population growth attributed to inbreeding risks given the small number of founders.

The lessons-learnt review identifies several non-negotiable prerequisites for successful reintroduction: habitat of sufficient quality and size; control of poaching; adequate prey base (deer, wild pigs, gaur); minimisation of human-wildlife conflict in the buffer zone; and a genetically diverse founding stock. The review also emphasises post-release monitoring as essential — without intensive tracking, mortality events cannot be detected early and managed.

Human-Wildlife Conflict: The Buffer Zone Challenge

As India’s tiger population grows and disperses beyond reserve boundaries, human-wildlife conflict (HWC) is rising. Tigers entering agricultural areas or human settlements may kill livestock and, rarely, attack people. Retaliatory killing of tigers by affected communities represents one of the most significant threats to the population gains achieved under Project Tiger.

The Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA) provides a financial mechanism through which forest departments can access funds generated from the diversion of forest land for non-forest purposes. A portion of CAMPA funds supports buffer zone management, habitat restoration, and — in some states — ex gratia payments to communities affected by wildlife attacks. However, the adequacy and timeliness of these payments remain contentious.

The NTCA has developed a national protocol for human-tiger conflict mitigation that includes depredation compensation schemes, livestock insurance pilots, and community-based monitoring networks. The broader challenge is ensuring that communities living alongside tiger habitats derive tangible benefits from conservation — transforming them from passive sufferers of wildlife-related costs into active stakeholders in conservation success.

Why This Matters for CLAT

• Constitutional and Statutory Framework: The Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, and its 2006 amendment creating the NTCA are regularly referenced in CLAT passages on environmental law and the institutional architecture of wildlife protection.
• Directive Principles and Fundamental Duties: Article 48A (DPSP — state to protect environment and wildlife) and Article 51A(g) (fundamental duty to protect the natural environment) are constitutionally grounded pegs on which tiger conservation questions are frequently hung in CLAT reading comprehension.
• Rights in Conflict: The tension between Critical Tiger Habitat inviolability and community rights under the Forest Rights Act, 2006, is a paradigmatic CLAT passage topic — two legitimate legal rights in apparent conflict, requiring reasoned balancing.
• Conservation Biology Concepts: Source-sink dynamics, metapopulation theory, and wildlife corridors are increasingly appearing in CLAT science-and-environment passages as the exam tests contemporary environmental literacy.
• General Awareness: Project Tiger (1973), the 2022 tiger census figure (3,682), Sariska and Panna reintroductions, NTCA, and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are standard static and current-affairs GK items for CLAT.

Conclusion

Project Tiger’s five-decade journey from crisis intervention to globally celebrated success story now enters a more demanding phase. Numerical recovery — impressive as it is — must be complemented by ecological connectivity, equitable conflict resolution, and the revitalisation of reserves that have been left behind. The road map and lessons-learnt review released at the Sariska anniversary are not merely technical documents; they are a call to reframe conservation as a landscape-scale, community-inclusive endeavour rather than a fortress protection model.

India’s constitutional commitments — to protect wildlife, to preserve biodiversity, and to ensure that the right to life extends to a healthy environment — demand sustained institutional will. For CLAT aspirants, Project Tiger is a living case study in how law, science, governance, and community interests must be held in creative tension to achieve outcomes that serve both nature and people.

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