Tiger conservation in the country has undergone necessary evolution through the decades since the seed was laid in 1973, in the form of Project Tiger. Game hunting and poaching for various reasons including the illegal trade in tiger parts (a key ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine) had caused the animal’s population to dwindle to 268, and the urgency of preventing it from becoming extinct in India prompted the government to set up nine tiger reserves to protect it. With the addition of Madhav National Park, as many as 14 new reserves have come up over the past decade.

The next stage of tiger conservation must focus on expanding forest cover and nurturing the ecosystem required to house the growing population. Given the tiger is a solitary animal and is territorial, sustaining such rapid growth in numbers will require earmarking adequate habitat areas. Habitat addition has not kept pace with rising tiger numbers (and other big cat populations), evident in the frequency of reports of human-tiger conflict in recent years. While the population of tigers outside protected areas has been falling, as per the last such estimation by the National Tiger Conservation Authority, one in four tigers still lives outside the proximate reserve. Correcting this will need innovative facilitation of coexistence in the same geography — temporal and spatial insights on tiger behaviour in an area over the long term will be key to this. That said, many conservationists have pointed out that the focus on the flagship species have come at the cost of protecting many other animals.