Project Tiger at Fifty: How India's Reserve Model Saved the Predator and Erased the Forest Dweller

In 1973, the All-India Tiger Census recorded fewer than 1,800 tigers across the country. The number was a shock, not because it was surprising to people who lived near forests, but because it was now official. Project Tiger launched that year under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, designating nine reserves across the country and placing them under centralised management. By the most recent National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) census, conducted using camera traps and pugmark analysis across more than 26 states, the population had crossed 3,600. No other country has achieved a comparable recovery of a wild apex predator at this scale.
The Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) is a territorial animal. A single adult male patrols a home range of 60 to 100 square kilometres, and that range must contain prey, water, and cover. Protecting a tiger, in practice, means protecting the full ecological architecture it depends on. Project Tiger understood this early, which is why the reserve model was never simply about fencing off a patch of trees. It was about managing entire landscapes.
The 1973 framework established a core zone, where human activity was prohibited, and a buffer zone, where limited use was permitted. Over five decades, the number of tiger reserves grew from 9 to 54, covering roughly 75,000 square kilometres. The Wildlife Institute of India developed camera-trap methodologies that became a global standard for large-mammal census work. Anti-poaching units were professionalised. Intelligence networks were built to track the trade in tiger parts, a trade that had decimated populations across Southeast Asia, where recovery has been far slower.
The reserve model also produced measurable co-benefits. Prey populations, chital, sambar, gaur, recovered inside core zones, which in turn supported the predator. Forest cover inside many reserves stabilised or increased during periods when it was declining in adjacent unprotected areas. Ranthambhore in Rajasthan, Corbett in Uttarakhand, Kaziranga in Assam: these became names associated not just with tigers but with the idea that wild India could be held together if the political will existed.

The core-zone prohibition had a cost that did not appear in the census data. Adivasi and other forest-dwelling communities who had lived inside what became reserve boundaries were classified as incompatible with conservation goals and relocated. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, the Forest Rights Act, was passed partly in response to this history, recognising that forest communities had legal claims to land and resources that the reserve model had overridden.
Implementation of the Forest Rights Act inside tiger reserves has been contested ever since. In several cases, relocation was carried out before rights claims were settled. The Nagarhole reserve in Karnataka and the Melghat reserve in Maharashtra have both seen prolonged legal and community disputes over whether relocations were voluntary or coerced, and whether compensation was adequate. The Wildlife Protection Act and the Forest Rights Act sit in tension with each other in ways that courts and ministries have not fully resolved.

The displacement was not incidental to the model. It was structural. Core zones work, in part, because human presence is removed. The conservation gain and the social cost were produced by the same mechanism.A tiger reserve protects tigers. It does not automatically protect the full range of species that share the forest. Biodiversity inside reserves varies considerably depending on management style, the intensity of tourism, and whether buffer zones are genuinely managed or exist only on paper. Some reserves have become, in effect, well-managed islands: the core zone is healthy, but the surrounding landscape is fragmented by highways, canals, and agricultural expansion. A tiger that walks out of Pench into the buffer zone may encounter a national highway with no underpass.
Wildlife corridors, strips of habitat connecting one reserve to another, have been identified, mapped, and in several cases legally notified. The Kanha-Pench corridor in Madhya Pradesh is one of the better-documented examples, with movement of tigers confirmed through camera trap data. But corridor land is not reserve land. It sits under different legal regimes, and protecting it requires negotiating with revenue departments, forest departments, and private landowners simultaneously. The NTCA has corridor guidelines; enforcement is another matter.

The tiger's recovery has also produced a genuine problem: reserves are full. In Corbett, Ranthambhore, and Bandhavgarh, tiger densities have reached levels where sub-adult males are being pushed out of core zones into human-dominated landscapes. Conflict, livestock kills, occasional attacks on people, has increased in villages bordering these reserves. The reserve model was designed to save a species from extinction. It was not designed for what happens when the species runs out of room inside the reserve.
The fifty-year record is neither a conservation fable nor an indictment. The tigers are back in numbers that would have seemed implausible in 1973. The communities who were moved to make that possible are still negotiating the terms of what they lost. And the habitat those tigers now occupy is, in several places, too small for the population it contains. The reserve bought time. What happens next depends on whether India can build a conservation model that works at the edges, not just at the centre.