New Delhi: Rajasthan’s Ranthambore Tiger Reserve has a missing big cat problem. Twenty-five tigers are missing, some for more than a year. Chief Wildlife Warden (CWW) Pavan Kumar Upadhyay has set up a three-member committee—the first such instance for the reserve—to investigate the case of the missing tigers.
In an order dated 4 November, Upadhyay pulled up the Ranthambore reserve officials for failing to act on his previous letters.
“The tiger monitoring committee’s report mentions dated 14 October that there had been no concrete sighting of 14 tigers for more than a year. The remaining 11 have not been sighted for less than a year,” the order in Hindi reads, adding that there was “no satisfactory response” despite repeated letters and inquiries.
ThePrint has accessed the contents of the letter.
“The idea is to fix the system so that we know why these tigers are missing, and we’re aware of what changes to make so it doesn’t recur. Missing tigers isn’t a good thing,” Upadhyay told ThePrint.
But, the order has been objected to by reserve officials, who claim that the word ‘missing’ is a misnomer. Just because the big cats haven’t been detected—either through camera traps or pug marks—doesn’t mean that they are missing, according to Ranthambore field director Anoop K.R.
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‘Tigers live and die’
“Tigers live and die, it’s part of their natural cycle,” the Ranthambore field director said. “The focus should be on the overall number of tigers in the reserve, rather than on ‘missing tigers’ and blaming the forest department for mismanagement.”
Spread over 400 sq. km, the Ranthambore Tiger Reserve near Sawai Madhopur town of Rajasthan officially had around 88 tigers in 2023. According to the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) data, the reserve has reported three deaths in 2024 and four in 2023.
Additionally, as recently as 4 November, villagers killed a tiger after it was blamed for the death of a shepherd, an incident that the forest department is currently investigating.
The reserve’s forest officials conduct a yearly census of its big cats and also monitor their activity every day through patrolling and camera traps before entering information in a daily report.
“Tigers engage in territorial fights, some are in deep interiors of the forests and perish there. We can’t keep track of every tiger,” said Anoop, explaining that the forest department’s daily patrolling activities are restricted to paths and tracks.
There have been cases of Ranthambore tigers travelling to the nearby Dholpur-Karauli Tiger Reserve in the past. There has also been at least one tiger that went missing from Ranthambore and turned up in Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park in 2013, and then returned to Ranthambore in 2022, he recalled.
“In a scavenger-heavy forest, it is entirely possible that a tiger dies and its carcass is eaten within two weeks without the forest department finding out.”
Possible causes for missing tigers
Led by Additional Chief Conservator of Forests (Wildlife) Rajesh Kumar Gupta, the three-member committee has two months to submit its report.
The panel was tasked to look into the efforts made by the forest department to look for the tigers, go through the tiger monitoring records of the department, flag any incompetency/carelessness by forest officials if found, and submit recommendations to make the monitoring system more stringent. The CWW’s letter also said the panel members could avail services of experts if necessary.
Dharmendra Khandal, an author and conservation biologist with the Ranthambore-based NGO Tiger Watch, gave three possible reasons for the case of missing tigers.
Tigers could have died in territorial fights within the reserve, without the knowledge of the forest department, he said. These deaths are difficult to track, but possible.
“Another is that tigers could have died in retaliatory attacks by villagers nearby, either by poisoning or other methods. Two tigers have been officially killed in the last year or so due to this reason, but the number could be a lot higher,” said Khandal.
The third and main reason, related to the second one, is the lack of community engagement by the Ranthambore officials, he said. Without involving the nearby village communities in reserve activities, the reserve administration isolates the wildlife from the people who live there, thus resulting in more cases of tiger poisoning and human-wildlife conflict.
Earlier this week, Khandal called for more dialogue between the government and villagers who live around the reserve to avoid human-tiger conflict like the one involving T-86 reported recently. “Cases like this show how necessary it is to engage villagers in decisions involving the wildlife they live with,” he asserted.
(Edited by Tony Rai)