There is one phone call every Divisional Forest Officer dreads. It is the call to the Chief Wildlife Warden reporting the death of a tiger or a leopard. Sometimes, it is a territorial fight. Sometimes, it looks like a revenge killing. Sometimes, it is an animal that did not survive a rescue. The call is brief. But it carries a heavy message. It reflects a system struggling to keep pace with a landscape that is changing faster than the rules meant to govern it.
These calls have become more frequent in Madhya Pradesh in recent years. Not because wildlife management has succumbed. In many ways, precisely because it has succeeded.
For decades, Indian wildlife management rested on a simple idea. Protect the forest, hold the boundary, keep wildlife inside and people outside. National parks and tiger reserves were treated like fortresses.
I remember a senior forest official saying, back in 2017, when five consecutive tiger deaths in Shahdol Forest Conservancy had briefly made national headlines, that humans and tigers are better off in their own separate spaces, and that tigers should be pushed back into protected areas. It was a common view then. Where the forest ended, the wildlife was supposed to end too.
That idea has quietly fallen apart with time. Now, highways cut through corridors. Farms surround reserves. Towns grow into old movement routes. In Madhya Pradesh, forests, villages and city edges now overlap in ways no boundary can manage. Leopards often move through croplands, sloth bears turn up near settlements, wild boars remain a nuisance for farmers, and tigers are now recorded on revenue land well outside protected areas. In districts like Indore, coexistence is no longer something we discuss. It is simply the daily reality.
If anything made this shift possible, it was a genuine resolve toward conservation that ran through Indian society. Madhya Pradesh has shown, more than once, what that resolve can do.
Panna is the finest example. By 2009, tigers had vanished from Panna altogether. Today, the reserve holds more than 70. It took years of disciplined reintroduction, protection, and community work, carried out amid political change and constant public scrutiny.
Smaller sanctuaries tell a similar story. A lesser-known Kheoni Wildlife Sanctuary, located between Dewas and Sehore in Madhya Pradesh, spread across roughly 13,000 hectares, had only two recorded tigers a few years ago. Today it holds around 12, including cubs.
A place once thought too small to matter has become a working tiger habitat within a decade.
The tiger estimation data from Indore adds to this picture. In 2018, the All India Tiger Estimation recorded no tiger signs in the division, though leopard signs were found across 49 forest beats. By 2022, tiger signs had appeared in 16 beats. By 2026, tiger signs had spread to 21 beats, and leopard signs to 74. . A landscape that supported only leopards eight years ago now supports both species, in terrain closely shared with people.
This pattern is not confined to Indore. Tiger movement across Umaria, North Shahdol, Bandhavgarh, and Sanjay Dubri follows a similar pattern. Tigers there do not live only inside reserve boundaries; they move constantly between core forest, buffer land and revenue villages, in what ecologists call a metapopulation. The same belt has its own coexistence stories with other species. Elephants, unfamiliar to central India until recently, now move seasonally from Chhattisgarh to forest pockets of Anuppur, Shahdol and Bandhavgarh. Most of them have become residents of Bandhavgarh. Sloth bears remain a constant, often dangerous presence around Shahdol’s forest edges. Each species brings its own kind of conflict, and its own kind of adjustment for the people living nearby. Taken together, this is real evidence that coexistence can work. Wildlife has returned to spaces shared with people, not away from them.
But recovery on this scale cannot continue on its own. It needs a system that can handle the conflicts that inevitably come with it. The Integrated Human-Wildlife Coexistence Model (IHWCM), conceptualised in the Indore Forest Division, is one such attempt to turn this reality into a working system. It did not begin as a policy document but grew out of field experiences.
Between 2020 and 2025, the division carried out hundreds of rescue operations involving leopards, nilgai, monkeys, snakes and other species. Each rescue follows a set management protocol covering crowd control, veterinary support and a scientifically guided release. The aim is to calm the situation before panic and rumour take over. This matters especially in Malwa, where communities do not share the long familiarity with large carnivores that people around Bandhavgarh, Pench, and Kanha have built over generations. For instance, a single leopard sighting in Indore can quickly turn into a crowd situation.
Three pillars hold this model together: awareness, compensation, and enforcement. Delayed compensation for livestock loss or human injury tends to turn frustration into retaliation. Madhya Pradesh has tried to address this by bringing wildlife compensation under the Madhya Pradesh Public Services Guarantee Act, 2010. This makes payment time-bound and legally enforceable. Enforcement is the other half. Coexistence does not mean weak protection. Electrocution, poisoning and illegal hunting remain real threats, and convictions in such cases send an important signal as a deterrent.
What is less visible outside the department is the scale of rescue work now expected of field staff. Forest guards and range officers posted outside protected areas are called almost daily for leopards in wells, snakes in homes, birds trapped in nets, nilgai stuck in drains, monkeys causing panic in villages. Very few staff have received formal training in wildlife handling. Fewer still have proper equipment, veterinary backup, or modernised transport vehicles suited for a live rescue at short notice.
A leopard rescue and a snake rescue do require entirely different skills, yet the same overstretched team is often expected to handle both, along with the mandatory paperwork and public pressure that follows. This gap between what is expected of frontline staff and what they are equipped to do is one of the least discussed problems in Indian wildlife management today.
Nilgai crop damage remains one of the most persistent problems across the Malwa region. The usual response has been culling under permission during stressed situations. The Indore and Shajapur divisions have instead turned to the BOMA technique, a non-lethal method in which herds are slowly guided into a funnel-shaped enclosure and moved to forest land. In a recent joint operation by forest teams in Shajapur and NATRIX in Dhar districts, the teams worked together to relocate a large number of nilgai in a single sweep. Farmers nearby reported real relief within days, and the approach is now being extended to other districts — Indore and Ujjain — facing the same problem.
Thermal drones could monitor wildlife movement at night. Camera traps track carnivore movement across forest beats. A system called the M-STrIPES App is used to record animal sign data in the All-India Tiger Estimation and is now being extensively used outside protected areas for scientific patrolling.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is starting to find a place here too, though still in early stages. It may be of great help. Some tools could be used to flag likely conflict zones in advance using past incident data and to predict carnivore movement based on known prey patterns. Call Data Record (CDR) analysis, a method commonly used by police investigations, is increasingly being used to trace wildlife crime networks in several cases. None of this is finished or fully proven. But the direction is clear: the work is slowly moving from reacting to incidents toward anticipating them.
But even so, technology remains a support, not a solution. The real measure of coexistence is tougher to capture in data. Basically, it is the level of discomfort people feel when wildlife enters their space, and whether that discomfort is met with trust. That trust is now being tested.
It would not be honest to write about coexistence only in terms of good news. It comes with real costs, and they are growing with time. Human-wildlife conflict has become common across Madhya Pradesh, particularly around tiger reserves. Livestock losses continue every season. Human injuries, and in some districts, human deaths, keep recurring. Each incident tests public patience and stretches an already thin field staff. Leopard territorial fights are now common even outside protected areas, driven by an increasing leopard population running out of space. These are not conflicts with people. They are early signs that some landscapes are reaching their ecological limits.
Disease adds one more worry. Canine distemper, spreading from stray dogs into wild carnivores, has been reported more often and needs close, sustained monitoring.
If coexistence is to hold up as a national approach and not remain a scattered local effort, a few things are worth trying. States could establish a shared, trained rescue cadre for non-protected areas, equipped to handle the range of species that field officers now encounter, rather than leaving this to untrained forest guards on an ad hoc basis. A time-bound and transparent compensation system could be adopted by all states across India. Corridors connecting reserves could be formally mapped and given a planning status similar to eco-sensitive zones, so road and mining proposals are assessed against wildlife movement before approval, not after. Veterinary capacity for wildlife, currently inadequate outside major reserves, needs dedicated staffing at the division level. And AI tools being piloted at Forest Headquarters could be shared as open, low-cost systems across divisions, rather than letting each one build its own from scratch.
No doubt, there has been phenomenal success in wildlife conservation efforts. With tiger numbers still climbing in several landscapes, India is entering a phase where counting tigers is no longer the hard part. Managing what happens once a landscape is full is. Every habitat has an ecological limit, and some of ours are approaching it. Natural deaths will rise as populations mature, and that is not a failure of management as often perceived. Electrocution, poisoning and retaliation indeed are!
Quiet, informal conversations have already begun about whether some tigers from saturated reserves could one day be considered for transcontinental translocation to landscapes elsewhere that lost their own big cats long ago. Although speculative, it is an early and contested idea. But its very existence tells us how close some of our reserves are to their ceiling.
In less than a decade, I can see the narrative reversing, with growing support for coexistence as the guiding philosophy of India’s future wildlife management. In reality, coexistence is what the moment demands, though it may not be the answer we can rely on forever. It has its own limits. We do not yet have alternatives that match the scale and speed of the change happening around us. Making shared spaces work for people and animals is the task before us now. We owe it to future generations to find the best way forward.
Pradeep Mishra is an Indian Forest Service (IFS) officer posted in Madhya Pradesh. He writes on forest governance, community forestry, and environmental policy. The views expressed are entirely personal and do not represent official departmental positions.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth