Subscribe
During a routine patrol in Madhya Pradesh’s Kanha Tiger Reserve in May, the state’s forest department team came across an adult tiger carcass. This was the third such case reported from the reserve in a span of two months. In a similar case reported the same month from Rajasthan’s Ranthambore Tiger Reserve, a patrol team had discovered body of a young tiger.
All the four tiger death cases had a common thread—the animals were sub-adults or adults and the deaths were most likely due to territorial infighting among the species, said officials.
Infighting mainly includes cases of adult male tigers competing for territory, tigresses defending cubs, or conflicts due to dispersal of sub-adults into areas already occupied by other tigers. The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA)—the country’s nodal statutory body for the conservation of the Royal Bengal Tiger (Panthera tigris tigris)—does not maintain a record of tiger deaths due to “infighting” or “territorial fight” on its dashboard, but it does list cases of tiger mortality, which have nearly doubled in the past one-and-a-half decade—from 88 in 2012 to 167 in 2025. If not due to poaching or disease, then the deaths are likely due to infighting, say officials.
An NTCA official says infighting, especially in a reserve’s core or central area, is a positive indicator since it shows that conservation is succeeding and the species is thriving to the extent that it is now fighting for territory. But infighting is also a negative indicator since it implies that the habitat is not being developed to keep pace with the rise in species numbers that it holds.
India started tiger conservation in a targeted manner with the launch of Project Tiger in 1973 when the tiger population was estimated to have fallen to just 268. Now, the country’s tiger number stands at 3,682, as per NTCA’s “Status of Tigers, co-predators and prey in India-2022” report. “At the time of Project Tiger, the country had nine tiger reserves, covering 18,278 sq km. Today, India has 58 tiger reserves, spread over 84,488 sq km,” says Qamar Qureshi, a conservation biologist and former professor at the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun. However, the animal is disproportionately distributed across the tiger reserves.
An analysis of the country’s 2022 tiger census data shows that nearly 40 per cent of the tigers are concentrated in just 11 per cent of the reserves. Of the estimated 2,835 tigers recorded within the 53 reserves (the number of tiger reserves at the time of the 2022 census was 53), some 1,144 tigers are documented from eight reserves: Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand (260 tigers—the highest in India), followed by Bandipur (150 tigers) and Nagarhole (141 tigers) in Karnataka, Bandhavgarh in Madhya Pradesh (135 tigers), Dudhwa in Uttar Pradesh (135 tigers), Mudumalai in Tamil Nadu (114 tigers), Kanha in Madhya Pradesh (105 tigers) and Kaziranga in Assam (104 tigers).
The primary reason for some reserves hosting more tigers is their higher prey base. “Status of Tigers, co-predators and prey in India-2022” notes that Bandipur and Nagarhole reserves harbour the highest densities of prey base that mainly consists of wild ungulates such as chital, sambar and gaur, and, therefore, have high densities of tigers. Same is the case with Corbett and Kaziranga reserves.
Tiger density is measured in numbers of tigers per 100 sq km. In India’s protected areas, three to five tigers per 100 sq km is considered low density range, as per NTCA. Compared to this, Bandipur has a tiger density of 9.5, Nagarhole 11.34, Kaziranga Tiger Reserve 13.44 and Corbett Tiger Reserve 14.65. Many forest divisions that are not designated as tiger reserves also report very high densities. These include the Terai West Forest Division in Uttarakhand with 15 tigers per 100 km and the Ramnagar Forest Division at 11.48 tigers per 100 km.
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
