In August 2025, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change placed a set of numbers before the Lok Sabha that, on the surface, read like good news. Wildlife crime in India, the government said, had fallen sharply. From 820 registered cases in 2020, the count had dropped to 349 in 2023 and edged up slightly to 354 in 2024. Total cases between 2020 and 2024 were 2,701. In a country that hosts 106 national parks, 573 wildlife sanctuaries, and over 70 per cent of the world’s wild tiger population, the trend appeared reassuring.
It should not.
The data placed before Parliament comes almost entirely from the police. It excludes the majority of wildlife crime cases registered in India, which are filed not by the police but by state forest departments.
The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), which produces the country’s official crime statistics annually, captures only one of two enforcement streams. The other, far larger stream flows largely in the dark, uncounted, and unchecked. What the government presented as a declining crime rate is, in practice, a declining count of the fraction of crimes that one agency bothers to report to a central database.
Two databases, one black hole
The structure of India’s wildlife crime data problem is not complicated, even if the institutional complacency that sustains it has persisted for over a decade. The Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 gives both the police and forest department officials the power to register wildlife offences. The NCRB collects crime data through a chain that runs from district records bureaus to state bureaus and then to the national level. This chain runs through the police.
Forest department cases, however, flow into a separate system managed by the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB), a statutory body under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change established in 2007. The WCCB runs its own Wildlife Crime Database Management System. That database is not in the public domain.
Researcher Shankar Prakash Alagesan laid this problem out with precision in a 2020 peer-reviewed paper published in the Indian Journal of Environmental Education. Alagesan found that two enforcement agencies operate parallel databases with no mandatory integration point. His conclusion was direct:
“In order to measure the extent of enforcement of WPA, wildlife crime data becomes a crucial indicator. As discussed elsewhere, wildlife crime databases are vital information system that helps enforcement officers to detect, prevent, and pursue criminals. Hence, a centralised, integrated wildlife crime database becomes the need of the hour.”
His recommendation, that the WCCB act as a nodal integrator and publish consolidated data in the manner of the NCRB’s annual ‘Crime in India’ report, remains unimplemented five years on.
The Citizen consumer and civic Action Group made the same argument in a detailed 2022 analysis, noting that NCRB data on wildlife crime “cannot make any meaningful assessment of wildlife offences in India” because the majority of cases are invisible to it. This is not a marginal technical flaw. The NCRB’s own publication acknowledges that the chapter on environment-related offences “only includes wildlife crime cases registered by police alone”.
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What the numbers actually show
The gap between what forest departments register and what the NCRB records is not marginal. Karnataka provides a concrete documented illustration. According to documents reviewed by Deccan Herald and corroborated by state officials, Karnataka’s forest department recorded 1,956 wildlife offences between 2018-19 and 2021-22. Over 3,520 cases remained pending before courts, a figure that itself reveals the volume of actual enforcement actions that never enter the national database. In the same years, Karnataka’s contribution to NCRB national totals was a small fraction of that number. Across the five years from 2020 to 2024, the NCRB counted just 84 wildlife crime cases from Karnataka.
The gap between 1,956 forest-department offences over roughly four years and 84 police-registered cases over five years is not a statistical curiosity. It is the difference between what actually happens in Karnataka’s forests and what India’s official record books say happened there.
A Comptroller and Auditor General performance audit (Report No. 6 of 2017) of Karnataka’s national parks and wildlife sanctuaries found that the forest department underreported cases of forest fires and roadkills.
“The forest department underreports cases of poaching, animal death, conflicts, encroachment and forest fire areas,” said BK Mukherjee, then Accountant General (E&RSA), while speaking about the report in 2017.
The CAG auditors noted that encroachment data in official records was a fraction of what satellite maps showed on the ground, and that management plans were absent for most protected areas.
Kerala’s record is equally telling. A separate CAG audit found that the state registered 630 wildlife offences over 17 years, of which only 20 resulted in convictions. The auditors traced this to failures in evidence gathering, forensic incapacity, and procedural lapses at the forest department level.
A 2 per cent conviction rate
The data black hole does not exist in isolation from what happens when cases do reach the courts. Between 2012 and 2018, over 9,253 poachers were arrested across India in wildlife crime cases. The conviction rate, according to a 2023 peer-reviewed study by Ajay Kumar Rana and Nishant Kumar published in the journal Biodiversity and Conservation, was 2 per cent. Thousands of arrests resulted in fewer than 200 convictions, which is low enough to function as an effective impunity guarantee for organised trafficking networks.
Shekhar Kumar Niraj, former Principal Chief Conservator of Forests and Chief Wildlife Warden of Tamil Nadu, identified the root cause in 2022.
“The number of cases detected are high but it is nearly impossible to secure conviction. Lack of trained and specialised staff in investigating and handling such seizures, and the shortage of resources and poor maintenance of records of habitual offenders affect the rate of conviction,“ he told Deccan Herald.
Those words, “poor maintenance of records”, carry particular weight here. Records that are scattered across two parallel systems, incomplete at the point of registration, and then never integrated cannot build a prosecution. The data gap is not merely a statistical inconvenience. It is the institutional precondition for persistent impunity.
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A bureau running on Rs 15.14 crore
The WCCB, the nodal enforcement body that should be integrating and publishing this data, operates on a budget that reveals exactly how seriously the central government treats the problem. The bureau‘s sanctioned annual budget for 2026-27 is Rs 15.14 crore. For an agency mandated to combat transboundary wildlife crime across a country with over 1,000 protected areas and a coastline of 11,098 kilometres, this figure is structurally inadequate.
The WCCB operates through five regional offices located at New Delhi, Mumbai, Jabalpur, Chennai, and Kolkata, three sub-regional offices, and five border units. All positions are filled through deputation, meaning the bureau draws its officers from other services rather than building a permanent, specialised cadre trained in wildlife crime investigation. In this context, the WCCB’s own acknowledgement that 30 to 40 per cent of wildlife incidents go unreported because villagers living near forests fear retaliation should be read as a confession of institutional reach, not just a community policing gap.
Uttar Pradesh, which recorded 297 wildlife crime cases in the NCRB dataset between 2020 and 2024 and sits along trafficking corridors connecting Nepal to domestic markets, has one forest guard for every 50 square kilometres of forest. With that kind of coverage, the cases that do enter the forest department system represent a tiny proportion of what is actually happening on the ground.
When conservation criminalises the wrong people
In May 2025, 52 Jenu Kuruba families marched back into the Nagarahole Tiger Reserve in Karnataka, returning to lands from which their community had been evicted nearly four decades earlier. Their ancestors were displaced when the area was first sealed off in the 1970s and 1980s to create the national park and later, the tiger reserve. The Jenu Kuruba, classified as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group, had submitted claims under the Forest Rights Act, 2006 (FRA) as far back as 2009. By 2025, those claims remained unprocessed.
The forest department’s response was swift. On 17 June 2025, officials issued notices to the families under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, citing illegal occupation. The following afternoon, around 250 personnel from the forest department, the Special Tiger Protection Force, and the police tore down six of the community’s newly built huts. The Karadikallu Gram Sabha, which had passed a resolution supporting the resettlement, documented the incident.
“The forest department has imposed several projects on our lands — wildlife sanctuaries, protected areas, tiger reserves, national parks — all in the name of conservation. We are not the occupiers; we are the original inhabitants,“ Thimanna who has been part of several movements to save tribal land in Nagarahole, including the fight against Taj Hotels, told Maktoob Media in January 2026.
This dynamic carries direct consequences for wildlife crime data. When forest communities lose their legal recognition and their formal relationship with the forest, they also lose the standing to report what they see. A Jenu Kuruba community member who witnesses poaching inside Nagarahole is simultaneously a person whom the forest department has just served a notice under the Wildlife Protection Act. That person does not file a complaint with the department that just demolished her home. Wildlife crime that forest communities know about and could report remains invisible because the enforcement system has made adversaries of those best positioned to provide intelligence.
The criminalisation runs deeper than just the chilling of reporting. As a study on FRA published by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs documented, in Nagarahole Tiger Reserve specifically, Individual Forest Rights were recognised primarily for the Yerawal community but not for the Jenu Kuruba. This selective recognition reflects the forest bureaucracy’s persistent preference for a people-free conservation model. It removes communities precisely where their presence would most complicate the government’s infrastructure and tourism concessions.
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The politics of the data gap
The situation of the Jenu Kuruba community in Nagarahole is not an isolated case of local implementation failure. It reflects a broader direction in India’s forest governance that the data gap actively conceals. The Forest Conservation Amendment Act of 2023 introduced a new definition of “forest” that excludes large areas from legal protection, opening them to industrial and infrastructure use without requiring Gram Sabha consent. In May 2025, the Chhattisgarh state forest department declared itself the “nodal agency” for Community Forest Resource management, an order that would have displaced Gram Sabha authority entirely. The order was placed in abeyance in July 2025 after protests, but the administration’s intention was unmistakable.
These moves make the data gap wider, not smaller. When forest communities lose legal recognition, they stop functioning as intelligence sources for wildlife crime. When Gram Sabha authority over forest management is displaced, the collective surveillance that communities provide over who enters and exits the forest, and with what, collapses. The forest becomes monitored only by an understaffed department with one guard per 50 square kilometres, a WCCB with a budget of Rs 15.14 crore, and a database that nobody outside the ministry can access.
The organised wildlife trafficking networks that move tiger bones from Madhya Pradesh to China, pangolin scales from Mizoram to Southeast Asia, or red sanders from Andhra Pradesh to ports in Tamil Nadu do not operate in the villages of Nagarahole. They operate through supply chains that intersect the forest at its boundary. Those boundaries are guarded most effectively by the people who live inside the forest and know who does not belong. Strip those people of their rights, criminalise their presence, and the trafficking corridor widens while the official data shows, reassuringly, a declining count.
Who is accountable for the numbers
At the national level, no single agency has the mandate, the legal authority, and the public accountability to tell India what wildlife crime actually looks like. The NCRB counts only police cases. The WCCB collects forest department data that it does not publish. The Ministry of Environment makes selective disclosures to Parliament. The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, which handles seizures at ports and airports, maintains its own separate data stream, also not integrated. Researchers who file RTI queries force partial disclosures. All these factors confirm what the academic literature has been arguing since 2020: the official wildlife crime picture is a fraction of the actual one.
India’s forests are not safer just because official numbers are falling. The wildlife crime that threatens tigers in Jim Corbett, pangolins in Mizoram, star tortoises in Andhra Pradesh, and river dolphins in the Gangetic plains continues largely undocumented, underprosecuted, and unaccounted for. The communities who know these forests best, who can distinguish a tribal honey collector from a poacher laying snares, have been systematically excluded from both the data systems and the governance structures that could make those systems better.
The numbers the government presents to Parliament are not a measure of what is happening in India’s forests. They are a measure of how much the state has chosen to see.
Ankit Mishra is an ICSSR Fellow at Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute, Prayagraj. His X handle is @ankitmishra2213, and he is on Instagram @ankitt.mi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)