A three-year-old tigress has been successfully translocated from Bihar’s Valmiki Tiger Reserve to West Bengal recently.
According to media reports, the tigress was transported via Uttar Pradesh’s Nepal border and then flown to Gorakhpur airport, followed by a 125 km drive to West Bengal’s Buxa Tiger Reserve (BTR).
The tigress was released in a soft enclosure measuring 2.2 hectares on October 2 to mark Gandhi Jayanti.
This will be the first tiger to be introduced in BTR since 2018.
According to the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA)’s Status of Tigers, co-predators and prey in India-2022, there are 18 tiger reserves with less than 10 tigers within their administrative boundaries. This includes 13 reserves with less than 10 tigers and five reserves with zero tigers, including BTR.
Nearly 40 per cent of India’s tiger population is thus found in just 11 per cent of the country’s reserves.
The NTCA outlines strict protocols for active animal management through its Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).
According to the guidelines, tiger reserves should ideally maintain a continuous core or critical habitat block of 800-1,000 sq km, free of human disturbance. The candidate should be young and possess necessary skills to hunt wild prey in a new environment. It also demands that the translocated animal has no history of conflict.
After the soft release, the tiger must be allowed to acclimatise to a new place before being radio collared and released to monitor its movements and predatory behaviour.
A senior official from NTCA said translocation has proven successful in various places across India and the failure rate has been very low. However, before any tiger is translocated, it is critical to evaluate habitat suitability, prey base, threats of poaching and other measures that determine the success rate of the move.
The Status of Tigers in India 2018 report stated that tigers had not been recorded in Buxa and identified “prey restoration” as a prerequisite for repopulating the reserve with the big cats, along with strengthening protection.
Later the Leopard Status Report 2022 stated that “Buxa harbours low abundance of wild prey species”. It mentioned that the reserve was preparing for a tiger reintroduction programme, but cautioned that “because leopard numbers were growing, any stocking of wild prey or prey augmentation should take into account the presence of other large carnivores”.
The NTCA assessment recorded prey species including wild boar, barking deer, chital, hog deer and sambar.
A report by NTCA, Roadmap for Active Management of Tigers in India — noted that nearly two-thirds of India’s 58 tiger reserves either have a declining prey base or inadequate habitat or both.
The apex tiger authority also identified pressures around the reserve that affected habitat and prey availability. As many as 46 fringe villages, 34 tea gardens and 37 forest villages were recorded to be of risk to tigers as residents depended on forests for fuel dependency. Hence, there was risk of encroachment and residents’ likely involvement in hunting/poaching.
The NTCA’s 2022 Management Effectiveness Evaluation (MEE) assessment underlined that the BTR’s proximity to international borders - Bhutan, Nepal and Bangladesh — made it highly vulnerable to poaching routes and destinations.
The same report flagged that the reserve has a sanctioned strength of 481 permanent staff, but 56 per cent of the positions are vacant. These numbers are more worrisome among frontline forest protection forces such as forest guards and forest rangers, whose vacancies remained open for 93 per cent of the positions.
NTCA officials said unless these issues are addressed, the repopulation of the reserve with tiger will run into multiple challenges.
Earlier this year, the Uttarakhand forest department initiated the second phase of moving tigers, comprising of one male and four females, from the Corbett National Park to the Rajaji Tiger Reserve to restore fragmented habitats.
Among other recent translocations, the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change approved the translocation of eight tigers (three males and five females) in 2025 to the Sahyadri Tiger Reserve in Maharashtra to revive the big cat population in the northern Western Ghats.
In 2025, a young tigress was moved from Pench Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh to Ramgarh Vishdhari tiger reserve in Rajasthan to improve genetic diversity.