India’s tiger population has been rising for more than a decade, and the trend line is one of the genuine conservation successes of the past 50 years. But researchers tracking the recovery say the story is no longer just about how many tigers exist — it is about whether they can move safely between the places they live.
According to reporting from Mongabay, India’s tiger count has climbed from roughly 1,827 animals in 1972 — near the species’ national low point — to 3,682 in the 2022 census, the most recent national tally produced by the government’s four-yearly All India Tiger Estimation exercise. India is now estimated to hold around three-quarters of all wild tigers remaining on Earth.
A government-run monitoring system, not a single study
The population figures behind this recovery are not the output of one academic paper or one research grant. They come from the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), the statutory body under India’s environment ministry that administers Project Tiger, working with technical and analytical support from the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), a government-run autonomous research institute under the same ministry. WII designs the camera-trap and sign-survey protocols, processes the data, and co-authors the national tiger status reports that NTCA releases publicly every four years.
That is a meaningfully different data-stewardship model from a typical university research project: the census is a standing, repeatable national monitoring program run by a public research institute as core government infrastructure, rather than a time-limited grant-funded study. The methodology itself has been revised across cycles — incorporating camera-trap density estimation alongside sign surveys — which is part of why comparing counts across decades requires some caution, though the overall upward trend is considered robust by researchers cited in the Mongabay report.
Project Tiger’s reserve network has grown sixfold
The recovery has run alongside a large expansion of protected area coverage. Project Tiger began in 1973 with 9 designated tiger reserves. As of 2026, per the Mongabay report, that network has grown to 58 tiger reserves covering roughly 84,500 square kilometers.
One landscape highlighted in the reporting, the Terai Arc along the India-Nepal border, now holds an estimated 560 tigers — more than triple the population recorded there two decades ago.
Why corridors are now the central issue
Despite that expansion, protected reserves alone do not explain where India’s tigers actually live. The Mongabay report cites researchers estimating that roughly 35% of India’s wild tigers now live outside formally protected areas, dispersing along corridors that connect core reserves to secondary forest patches, agricultural buffer zones, and, increasingly, into land shared with people.
That dispersal is a sign of ecological success — young tigers pushed out of saturated core reserves are finding habitat elsewhere — but it is also where the report’s central tension sits. Corridors are being fragmented by highway and rail expansion, mining approvals, and encroachment, and conservation researchers quoted in the report, including Ullas Karanth of the Centre for Wildlife Studies, argue that India’s forests could theoretically support 10,000 to 20,000 tigers if habitat connectivity were adequately protected — several times the current population.
The human cost of fragmented corridors is concrete. The report cites 150 people killed in tiger encounters in Chandrapur district between 2021 and May 2025, and 19 tigers killed on a single railway route over three years. In response, engineers have built what the report describes as Asia’s longest wildlife underpass — a 12-kilometer stretch beneath the Delhi-Dehradun Expressway designed to let tigers and other wildlife cross safely beneath the highway rather than over it.
Organizations named in the reporting working on corridor protection and human-wildlife coexistence include the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Centre for Wildlife Studies, the Coalition for Wildlife Corridors, and the Coexistence Consortium.
Why this matters for research data governance
For research-administration audiences, the NTCA/WII model is a useful real-world case of long-running, publicly stewarded environmental monitoring data: standardized survey protocols, a government research institute responsible for analysis and quality control, and a fixed public release cadence (the four-yearly national census) that makes trend data comparable and auditable over half a century. That combination — a mandated government research center producing recurring, methodologically consistent public data — is part of what allows researchers outside government to trace a population recovery story with this much specificity across five decades.
Read the full reporting, including additional detail on corridor mapping and railway mitigation projects, at Mongabay.
