In 2023, India celebrated a major milestone in conservation. The 2022 tiger census yielded an estimated population of around 3,600 tigers, more than double of the 2010 numbers. Ever since the inception of Project Tiger in 1974, tigers, alongside various other megafauna species, including elephants, rhinos, and lions, have recovered from the brinks of extinction.
Unfortunately, it is too early to celebrate. India’s wildlife faces ever-evolving challenges in the world’s largest democracy and fastest-growing economy. Rampant habitat fragmentation and degradation remain a major threat to India’s tigers. Other than fostering human-tiger conflict, this leads to significant inbreeding, which is evident through an increase in melanism in the wild. Moreover, much of the growth in tiger populations have occurred in patches that have been thought to be at its carrying capacity. Meanwhile, large areas of potential tiger habitat, particularly in the eastern states of Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and West Bengal remain void of tigers due to poor management.
On this episode of The Think Wildlife Podcast, I interview Dr. Ullas Karanth, one of the country’s leading and pioneering tiger biologists. Though trained officially as an engineer, Dr. Karanth has spent much of his career studying tigers in their natural habitat, especially in the Malanad Landscape of Karnataka. He also pioneered the scientific application of camera trapping techniques of capture-recapture sampling as the foundation of scientific estimation of tiger population densities in forests. In 1984, he established the Centre for Wildlife Studies, which is one of the leading conservation organizations in India.
In this interview, we cover his illustrious career and stories from the field, which you can read more about in his book, titled “Among Tigers: Fighting to Bring Back Asia’s Big Cats”. We also talk about solutions to human-tiger conflict, voluntary resettlement of forest settlements, and the management of “man-eater” tigers. We also talk about flaws in tiger conservation in India and the way forward.
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