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K Ullas Karanth, a Bengaluru-based wildlife biologist, says the first step could be to reduce prey densities to natural levels by stopping manipulations and restoring habitats to natural conditions. “You cannot pack territorial big cats at ever-increasing densities. Relocating tigers is not a solution. For every success claimed there have been a dozen failures, with tragic consequences which are forgotten and buried,” he says.
Karanth adds that only at sites where habitat and natural prey have been recovered through protection, and where there is no option for natural dispersal of tigers from higher density areas, should artificial relocations to seed a new tiger population be considered. Such opportunities are few because tigers do strongly disperse through forests and even agricultural lands.
Official frameworks emphasise viable breeding populations, prey recovery, secure core habitats and dispersal space. “The voluntary relocation of forest dwellers from core or critical tiger habitats must be understood in this context. It was designed to secure large, undisturbed breeding areas while improving the long-term viability of tiger populations,” says Qureshi.
Karanth suggests that if the human-tiger conflict cannot be mitigated, the problem animals should be killed rather than captured and moved. India captures about 100 tigers from the wild every year and keeps them in captivity, mostly in zoos, says an NTCA official, requesting anonymity. “It is impossible to care for hundreds or even thousands of tigers held captive for 20 or more years. If we had truly good data on tiger population dynamics—which we lack, even with 20 years under the NTCA’S flawed monitoring system—we could consider hunting the potential surplus that big cat populations naturally produce, at least in areas outside protected wildlife reserves,” Karanth tells DTE.
Given the sustained healthy tiger population, India can explore adopting the African model of conservation that involves game hunting, says the NTCA official. As per NTCA, tiger as well as leopard are known to cause loss of human life. Such animals should be eliminated as per the statutory provisions provided in section 11 of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972. The provisions authorise the chief wildlife warden of a state to permit hunting of animals dangerous to human life or disabled or diseased beyond recovery. Jhala also says that chief wildlife wardens should decide what density of tigers should be maintained in a given landscape on the basis of biological and sociological sciences. “Population control should be done scientifically ensuring that tiger population connectivity is maintained and gene flow continues inside and outside the core areas. We need zoning of areas with different tiger densities in a given landscape—high densities in human-free core zones, lower in buffer zones and very few in human use forests,” Jhala says.
Qureshi says tigers and other big cats do not survive just because they are charismatic. “They survive where the state can enforce protection, where local losses are compensated or politically managed, where prey populations recover and where landscapes remain permeable enough for dispersal,” he says. “This is the reason tiger became foundational to Indian conservation. It was the species around which India learned to think simultaneously about inviolate cores, multiple-use buffers, source populations, corridors, poaching intelligence, tourism regulation, habitat restoration, prey recovery, conflict mitigation, and the constitutional distribution of environmental authority bet-ween Union and state governments,” he says.
Experts underline that India has a potential to house at least three times the population the country currently houses, but managing tiger habitats efficiently and improving or restoring the less populated reserves is crucial. Karanth says the potential area of habitats in India that can support tigers and their natural prey is about 400,000 sq km. “If this entire habitat can be recovered and protected to support ‘natural’ prey and tiger densities—which can range between three tigers per 100 sq km to 10-15 tigers per 100 sq km in different habitat types, assuming an average prey density and an average of five tigers per 100 sq km, potential tiger habitat in India can support 20,000 wild tigers,” he says.
This article was originally published as part of the cover story Rethinking Conservation in the June 1-15, 2026 print edition of Down To Earth
