India’s tiger story is no longer only about saving an endangered animal, it is increasingly about how conservation, development and local prosperity can reinforce one another.

There are forests one visits, and there are forests one keeps returning to until they become part of one’s life. Corbett Tiger Reserve is that forest for me. I have spent innumerable mornings there without seeing a tiger, yet seldom returned feeling that I had missed something. A chital’s alarm call, pugmarks on a forest track, the nervous attention of a sambar or an inexplicable silence in an otherwise noisy forest is enough to reassure that a Tiger is nearby.

Spend sufficient time in tiger country and and the hierarchy of attention changes, you start realising that the importance of a Tiger lies as much for what surrounds it as in the animal itself, if not more.

One begins noticing the river, the beautiful grasslands, the abundance of chital, the elephant trails, the calls of hundreds of birds, the fragrance of the sal forest and the movement between neighbouring landscapes. Eventually one understands that the tiger one travelled so far to see is possible only because everything else remains.

And that to me, is the deeper meaning of India’s tiger success story and the real significance of International Tiger Day.

A tiger is not merely a magnificent predator. It is evidence that an extraordinarily complicated ecological system is still functioning to its best expected capability. For, a landscape to sustain a breeding population of tigers, it must sustain prey. To sustain prey, it needs adequate vegetation, water and habitat. Those habitats, in turn, sustain birds, reptiles, insects, microorganisms and hundreds of plant species. Forests conserve soil, recharge aquifers, moderate local climate, store carbon and secure watersheds on which people living far beyond their boundaries depend. Protect the tiger well enough, and one ends up protecting an entire republic of life. And that is why India’s tiger story deserves to be understood not simply as wildlife conservation, but as public policy.

India deserves considerable credit for understanding this relatively early. The Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972 and Project Tiger, launched in 1973, created the foundations. Subsequent governments strengthened protected areas and institutions, and conservation science steadily improved. There were painful failures too. The disappearance of tigers from Sariska exposed serious weaknesses and forced India to reassess both protection and the way it counted its tigers.

The response is worth remembering. India did not hide from an uncomfortable truth, it improved the system. Camera traps, statistical modelling, GIS, genetic tools and technologyassisted patrolling progressively replaced older methods. Tiger conservation became more scientific and accountable. The results have been remarkable. India’s estimated tiger population increased from 2,226 in 2014 to 3,682 in 2022, and the country now shelters more than 70 per cent of the world’s wild tigers. The number of tiger reserves has also grown from 46 in 2014 to 58 today.

These achievements did not begin in 2014 but the difference definitely came about when the Modi Government took the strong conservation architecture it inherited and increasingly connected it with a wider development philosophy of technology, community participation, climate action, sustainable lifestyles and landscape restoration. Mission LiFE and India’s leadership in establishing the International Big Cat Alliance are expressions of this widening ambitious difference. The next step must be even more important, moving from protecting islands of wilderness to managing whole landscapes.

My years around Corbett and the neighbouring Rajaji landscape have made this obvious to me. A tiger does not know when it has crossed the boundary of a reserve or even a country at times, an elephant does not recognise a district line, rivers certainly do not consult google maps. Hence wildlife corridors, therefore, matter almost as much as protected cores. This does not mean stopping roads, railways, industries or other infrastructure. India must develop.

The question is how intelligently we develop. Wildlife crossings, scientifically chosen alignments and protection of critical corridors can often reconcile infrastructure with ecology. The 12 kilometre long elevated wildlife corridor on the Delhi – Dehradun economic corridor is a milestone example of that. Saying no to every developmental initiative is not a conservation policy, neither is treating environmental safeguards as an inconvenience.

Sariska gave me perhaps the clearest demonstration of another side of this argument. I first visited it in 2005, when its tiger crisis had become a national embarrassment. I remember the subdued tourism infrastructure and the unmistakable sense of a landscape that had lost more than its apex predator. When I returned years after tiger reintroduction began, the difference was striking. Safari vehicles had returned, guides had stories to tell, visitors were staying again and economic activity around the reserve had revived. The tiger had returned, but it had not returned alone. This is something urban environmental debates sometimes overlook.

A living forest can create livelihoods. Guides, drivers, hotels, homestays, artisans and numerous small businesses acquire a direct economic stake in conservation. At the same time, communities living beside wildlife bear real costs. A farmer who loses livestock to a tiger cannot be expected to celebrate conservation because tourists do. Compensation must be quick, conflict management professional and proactive and local communities genuine beneficiaries. India’s tiger success has therefore created its next challenge. More tigers mean more dispersing animals, greater pressure on corridors and potentially more encounters with people.

The next phase of Project Tiger cannot simply be about producing a larger number. It must be about more secure habitat, better connectivity between two protected landscapes and more successful coexistence. The Modi Government has broadly moved conservation in the right direction. The task now is to improve what is working to protect critical corridors more effectively, strengthen frontline forest staff, make compensation faster, keep tourism within ecological limits and insist that infrastructure in sensitive landscapes incorporates serious wildlife science. Corbett taught me what abundance looks like, Sariska taught me what absence costs but more importantly and positively, that decline can be reversed.

On International Tiger Day, therefore, we should celebrate the tiger numbers, but also look beyond them. The real test is whether our forests remain connected, rivers healthy, communities invested in conservation and happy and development intelligent enough to accommodate nature.

When a nation of 1.4 billion people successfully creates space for both human aspirations and the tigers to thrive, conservation ceases to be merely about wildlife or wildlife conservation, it becomes an act of nation-building.

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