This is the first of a 5-part series
For the communities in Maharashtra’s Chandrapur district, May 27 was a dark day. In the morning, came news of 45-year-old Sanjeevani Maikalwar, a resident of Chiroli village in Mul taluka, being killed by a tiger.
According to media reports, Maikalwar had gone with her husband and two relatives to collect firewood. They had just reached the forest area near Bhagwanpur village, close to the buffer zone of the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve, when a tiger hiding in the undergrowth pounced on Maikalwar and dragged her away. She died before her family could reach her.
A while later, 52-year-old Suresh Sopankar from Kantapeth village in the taluka took his goats to the same forest area for grazing. When he did not return, his family and forest officials went looking for him. They found Sopankar’s remains, mutilated by a tiger. Media reports said both attacks were a mere 500 metres apart, and quoted forest officials suggesting a single tiger was responsible for them.
The two attacks brought the total number of human deaths by tiger in Chandrapur to 22 since the start of 2025. Eleven attacks occurred in a span of 17 days in May.
Chandrapur is not the only district to report alarming numbers of tiger attacks. In Uttar Pradesh, the Pilibhit Tiger Reserve area recorded five human deaths due to tiger attacks in recent weeks, with the first on May 13. In Uttarakhand, home to the Jim Corbett National Park and Rajaji Tiger Reserve, nine people have lost their lives to tiger attacks. The Ranthambore National Park in Rajasthan has seen three tiger attacks so far, including of a forest range officer and a forest guard. Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu reported one death each.
Overall across India, at least 43 people have been killed near various tiger reserves or national parks in the past six months (see ‘Dangerous trend’, p14). This is on par with January-June 2024, when 44 people were killed by tiger attacks, as per data submitted by the Union environment ministry in Parliament (see ‘Significant numbers’,).
In at least four of the 43 attacks recorded so far this year, including in Sopankar’s case, it was reported that the tigers ate parts of their prey. While instances of “human consumption” in tiger attacks are not officially recorded, media reports from previous years show at least one or two such cases each year. This brings forth the question: are tigers more actively preying on humans for sustenance?
Generally in wildlife circles, it is observed that tiger attacks on and consumption of humans increase in cases when the wild cats age or suffer from injuries and are unable to hunt, or when their natural prey base disappears from the habitat, says Krishnendu Basak, a conservation biologist from Barbil, Keonjhar, Odisha.
In the recent cases, experts and authorities believe the attacks were more circumstantial. For instance, Manish Singh, divisional forest officer at Pilibhit Tiger Reserve, says the five attacks in the area recently may have been due to proximity of people to tiger territory. “The instances involved three-four tigers and occurred 100-300 metres from the forest fringes, where people have started to grow sugarcane,” he says.
“In two cases, there were signs of human consumption by the tigers. This is mainly because it took time for the locals to locate these victims and the tigers got an opportunity to revisit and consume the dead,” adds Singh.
Anish Andheria, president of the Wildlife Conservation Trust, a Mumbai-based non-profit, concurs with this view. “It is very rare for a tiger to become a compulsive human-eater. If human-eating was a usual occurrence, we would see hundreds of human casualties by tigers every week, given that millions of people live in and around tiger habitats in India,” he says.
Basak adds, “On average, a single tiger kills around 50 prey animals per year to meet its dietary needs, which means it requires access to a population of at least 500 wild prey animals to sustain itself naturally. If we were to assume that all tigers were human-eaters needing 50 humans annually, the numbers would be alarming.”
In the Indian part of the Terai landscape (which includes Pilibhit, Dudhwa National Park, and the Kishanpur and Katarniaghat Wildlife Sanctuaries in Uttar Pradesh), the estimated tiger population is around 224. If all the wild cats were human-eaters, they would collectively need to kill 11,200 humans annually, explains Basak. “However, the average number of human deaths attributed to tiger attacks in this region is around 20 a year—just 0.17 per cent of the hypothetical total,” he says.
K Ullas Karanth, another conservation biologist and tiger expert from Bengaluru, says the attacks have nothing to do with tigers acquiring a “taste for human flesh” but are more about the cats losing their fear of humans.
In terms of what else could have led to the attacks, experts refer to the cases in Ranthambore National Park. Two of the deaths, of the forest range officer and of a seven-year-old boy, involved 20-month tiger cubs of Arrowhead (T-84). The 14-year-old tigress had bone cancer and a hip deformity and was unable to hunt or teach her three cubs. So, the four cats were “live-baited”, or offered live prey animals by the reserve staff for the past few months. “This may have caused the cubs to associate humans with food and gradually lose their natural fear of people, which could have ultimately led to the attacks,” says Dharmendra Khandal, conservation biologist with Tiger Watch, a wildlife conservation organisation based in Ranthambore. The cubs were separated and moved to different reserves last month. Arrowhead succumbed to cancer on June 19.
“The Ranthambore incident is a classic case of what should be avoided. Conservation laws in India call for minimum intervention of humans in natural wildlife behaviour,” says Andheria. In general, though, many hu-man attacks may be mounted by young cubs who are inquisitive and still learning how to hunt or by a tigress who is protective of her cubs, he says.
Another factor could be behavioural shifts in tigers after sharing spaces and interacting more with humans. A study published in the journal Science in January 2025 says that in 20 states with tiger populations, about 45 per cent of the tiger-occupied area is shared by 60 million people. It also notes that over the past two decades, the tiger occupancy in India has flourished by 30 per cent, increasing its range by nearly 138,200 sq km.
Rahul Shukla, former wildlife warden at Kishanpur and Dudhwa, says, “The increase in village populations along the forest areas has helped increase familiarity of tigers with humans.” M K Ranjitsinh, wildlife expert from Delhi and architect of the Wild Life Protection Act, 1972, adds that humans are also encroaching upon tiger connectivity corridors.
Abhishek Harihar, a carnivore biologist from Bengaluru, says the growing tiger numbers have put populations within the reserves at a saturation point. “As the territorial thresholds have increased, the tigers are spreading outside protected areas as well,” he says.
Karanth highlights that tiger density has also increased to 10-15 tigers per sq km in some population hotspots, against the typical average of 8 per sq km. “This is often a result of aggressive, scientifically unjustified habitat manipulations by reserve managers,” he says.
Growth in tiger population and density means more competition for limited space and prey. Imran Siddiqui, Hyderabad-based senior field conservationist with Centre for Wildlife Studies-India, describes Chandrapur’s forest area, which had 30-40 tigers in 2006 and now has 250. “The overcrowding, habitat loss and human activities can cause behavioural changes in tigers, leading to attacks. Some 150 of 173 wildlife-related deaths in Chandrapur between 2021 and May 2025 were due to tigers, with 53 fatalities in 2022 alone,” he says.
Also, Chandrapur is now reporting sightings of elephants, a species not seen in the region for decades. This indicates a shift in ecology of the landscape (see ‘Tuskers in tiger country’).
Notwithstanding the reasons, there is a need to reverse the trend of tiger attacks. For this, experts emphasise shifting to community-based conservation strategies and disincentivising human interventions in tiger-dominated areas. “The practices of artificially augmenting prey in fragmented habitats and providing water sources to facilitate breeding and territorial expansion should be discouraged in corridor areas, and funds should be used for mitigating conflict and rescue operations,” says Siddiqui.
“When tiger populations began to increase, it was known that they would expand their territories. But it is concerning that at this stage, we have not preempted or planned for this situation,” says Harihar.
Participatory forest management and the effective implementation of the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, or Forest Rights Act, are essential to enable forest-dwelling communities, who are most directly affected by tigers, to become active conservation partners. Local communities need secure rights and a meaningful stake in managing forest resources as a more inclusive solution to the increasing conflict, says Harihar.
Basak adds that as conservation stakeholders, local communities can play a vital role in identifying tiger movements in village areas, alerting residents and communicating with forest departments during emergencies. “If effective action begins now, there is hope that conflict levels can be brought under control. Otherwise, rising tensions could become a major setback for tiger conservation, potentially reaching a tipping point where coexistence becomes untenable,” says Basak.
This article was originally published in the July 1-15, 2025 print edition of Down To Earth