New Delhi: A decade ago, Sariska would not have featured as a story of success by any stretch of imagination. It was a story of wipeout and failure in tiger conservation.
Rajesh Kumar Gupta, former deputy director at Sariska, clearly remembers the morning of 28 July 2008, when ST-1—the first tiger flown in from Ranthambore to the Sariska tiger reserve after nearly 3.5 years of a complete wipeout of its tiger population—set foot on the vast but empty reserve. Today, over 17 years after the Rajasthan government reintroduced tigers to the Sariska Tiger Reserve, its population has reached 50.
“It was pouring that morning. ST-1, the male tiger from Ranthambore, was supposed to be flown in on the Indian Air Force MI-17 helicopter, and we were all really tense about reintroducing tigers to the reserve,” Gupta said.
“It had failed once. It could fail again,” he said.
On Monday, Rajasthan’s minister of forests, environment and climate change, Sanjay Sharma, confirmed that the tigress ST-2302 had given birth to two cubs, taking the park’s count to 50.
“The department has camera-trapped tigress T-2302 with two cubs near the Karni Mata Temple in the Alwar buffer zone of the reserve. One cub was recorded last month, and the second one has also been recorded now,” Sharma said.
Officials from Rajasthan’s forest department said that after the last tiger in the reserve died in 2005, Sariska had become a blot on India’s larger tiger conservation efforts. Poaching and poor management had brought the park to a state of complete tiger extinction. But the authorities were not ready to give up.
Since the reintroduction of tigers in the reserve, state and central authorities have come up with several laws, including more rigorous protocols for tiger estimations and the establishment of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB), which went on to become the centre of India’s tiger protection programme.
The extinction of tigers in Sariska also led to two tiger task force reports, titled ‘Joining the Dots’ and the ‘State Empowered Committee Report 2005’, which became the blueprint for the reintroduction of tigers in the reserve.
“We call that day the ‘return of the King’,” Gupta said.
The count reaches 50
Senior officials from the Sariska Tiger Reserve are delighted by the count. They say that reviving the park’s count from a complete wipeout to 50 in less than two decades is an achievement to celebrate.
“Sariska is the first reserve in India where the tiger relocation programme was carried out, and as you all can see today, it has turned out to be a roaring success,” a Sariska official told ThePrint.
This feat is also special for the department because ST-2302, the tigress whose cubs added to the reserve’s final tally, is the daughter of tigress ST-19, who has made the biggest contribution to Sariska’s now healthy tiger population.
ST-19 has given birth to nine cubs, one of which was relocated to the Ramgarh Vishdhari Tiger Reserve in 2024, where he died in a territorial fight.
Fighting poaching
Rampant poaching in Sariska, combined with the forest department’s leniency towards it, became the primary reason for its fall.
On 23 January 2005, the Rajasthan government issued a statement that tigers had “vanished” from the Sariska Tiger Reserve. On 17 February 2005, a team from the Centre confirmed this.
Officials remember that even after ST-1 (male tiger) and ST-2 (female tigress brought in from Ranthambore a few days after ST-1) were brought to the reserve, their biggest challenge was to keep a strict watch on locals from nearby villages attacking the tigers or feeding them meat laced with poison—a common practice among poachers in Sariska.
In fact, in 2010, ST-1—the first tiger to be reintroduced in the reserve—was found dead due to poisoning.
“After the first round of introduction, we got more tigers to the reserve. By 2010, we had five tigers in the reserve, two males and three females,” an official said.
The first real success of Sariska’s tiger reintroduction came in 2012, when ST-2 gave birth to a litter of two cubs. These were the first wild tigers to be born in the reserve in over a decade. And thus began Sariska’s revival.
In a 2025 research article, Gupta and Ayan Sadhu, a research scientist from the Wildlife Institute of India, said: “Sariska shall not die.”
“Sariska’s journey from complete extinction to a thriving population of 48 tigers is not just a narrative of numbers, but a reflection of India’s renewed commitment to wildlife conservation,” they wrote.
“Despite some setbacks, what happened in Sariska was not a miracle but a meticulous, long-term process—one that combined ecological insight, community engagement, political will and institutional reform.”
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
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