How Madhya Pradesh led the pack in tiger population surge

According to the report titled ‘Status of Tigers, Co-predators and Prey in India 2022’, MP is followed by Karnataka (563), Uttarakhand (560) and Maharashtra (444).

Dr Rajesh Gopal, secretary general of the Global Tiger Forum and a former IFS officer who served in Madhya Pradesh at Bandhavgarh and Kanha tiger reserve, told The Indian Express: “Madhya Pradesh has an excellent track record which points to the kind of tiger governance that they have put in place.”

Elaborating on “tiger governance”, Dr Gopal said the state has worked on deploying efficient officers, adequate staff and creating a buffer at core areas.0

“There is also the support they are giving to the voluntary relocation of communities in these reserves, and linking them up with other schemes so they get a fair deal. They have brought in some practices which are worth emulating in other states. The second part is management at the frontline. For example, at Kanha, you have at least 50 prey animals per sq km; that kind of high density you will have nowhere (else) in the world. For every 8 sq km, you have a station which has a staff of three people,” Dr Gopal said, praising “the way they use their wireless network and address the human and tiger interface”.

Dr Gopal said that MP “excelled and codified the boma (enclosure) technique (a technique popular in the African continent that involves luring animals into an enclosure by chasing them through a funnel-like fencing), which has low mortality”.

“You also have good practices wherein you have tigers that are picked up and translocated to other tiger reserves when you have sufficient animals. You have a lot of tigers which are picked up and translocated from Bandhavgarh to Satpura,” Dr Gopal said.

As per the report, 563 tigers were found in six tiger reserves while 222 were found outside the protected areas.

Former Chief Wildlife warden JS Chauhan, who is said to have played a role in the positive trends in the tiger population at Kanha from 1995 to 1998 during his stint as its deputy director, said that the state paid close attention to “protect around 40% of tigers which venture out of protected areas”.

“We had a separate budget for managing wildlife outside protected areas for monitoring and anti-poaching activities. We also built the capacity of the territorial staff, who were earlier indifferent. We created a tiger strike force at five places in the state and dog squads, coordinated with the police department and prosecution wing to investigate and crack down on poaching incidents,” Chauhan said.

On the challenges that lay ahead, Chauhan said, “Four of our tiger reserves are saturated now. Any breeding population will move out, that is an issue. If they want to improve the carrying capacity of the state, we will have to focus on other reserves like Satpura, Madhav National Park, etc. They need to remove villages to provide space to the tigers, to build up the prey population.”

Dr Gopal said that “the biggest threat is the landscape fragmentation”.

“Human actions in the form of crop cultivation, infrastructure development and mining will change the forest character — that is the biggest threat. There is a need to synchronise the human and tiger agenda, the need to protect the corridors by arresting the fragmentation, which is easier said than done,” he said.

Reacting to his state bagging top honours, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said, “It is a matter of great pleasure that as a result of the cooperation of the people of our state and the untiring efforts of the forest department, the number of tigers in our state has increased from 526 to 785 in four years.”

In the Northeast, Arunachal Pradesh saw an alarming dip of 68% in its tiger population — reporting nine big cats in 2022 down from 29 in 2018. Assam had the highest number of tigers in the region at 227. Mizoram, which had six tigers in 2006, has none now. Northern West Bengal, which had no tigers in 2018, now has two.

The number of tigers dropped from 28 to 20 in Odisha; from five to one in Jharkhand; from 19 to 17 in Chhattisgarh; and from 26 to 21 in Telangana.

The number of tigers “within the tiger reserve” is highest in Corbett (260), followed by Bandipur (150), Nagarhole (141), Bandhavgarh (135), Dudhwa (135), Mudumalai(114), Kanha (105), Kaziranga (104), Sundarbans (100), Tadoba (97), Sathyamangalam (85), and Pench (77).

The state’s achievement is all the more commendable considering that between 2012 and 2022, Madhya Pradesh reported 270 tiger deaths as per the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA).