At dawn, the sap-slicked sal forests of Madhya Pradesh come alive with a pulse once nearly silenced—striped, muscled, alert. Tigers are back in numbers too big to ignore. But with every roar comes a rising concern: is the jungle large enough to hold them all?
In 2024, Madhya Pradesh cemented its claim as India’s tiger state. The official count hit 785—up from 526 at the last enumeration. Every conservationist's dream. Yet, inside these victory figures lurk stories of bloodied turf battles, ambush deaths, and human screams breaking the dawn chorus in buffer villages.
The state’s vast tiger reserves cover thousands of square kilometres. But even they are beginning to feel small. With territories overlapping, young tigers are forced to wander out—sometimes into other tiger domains, sometimes into farmland. Neither ends well.
Between 2019 and 2024, 46 humans were killed in tiger attacks in the state. In 2025, the pattern of fatal encounters continues. Between January and early May this year, over half a dozen fatal and grievous attacks have been reported from various buffer zone settlements across the state.
For the tigers, death wears many masks. Last year, Madhya Pradesh recorded 46 tiger deaths—the highest in India. Some fell to poison, some to electrocution, and some to road accidents. Others lost brutal fights to stronger rivals. One tiger died in a savage turf clash in Kanha, its flanks ripped open in a bloody battle for territorial control.
Behind the numbers, the machinery creaks. A special probe found that between 2021 and 2023, only two arrests were made in over 40 cases of unnatural tiger deaths. There’s a shortage of beat guards. The jungle, it seems, has more eyes and claws than its guardians can care for. Tiger forays into the densely populated state capital have been reported on several occasions.
To its credit, the state has begun pushing back. Rs 145 crore has been allocated for conflict mitigation in buffer zones. Experts are also urging habitat expansion—linking reserves with corridors and restoring scrublands into forests. But this takes time, sustained political will, and careful negotiation with communities who already live too close to the lurking danger.
The tiger, majestic and misunderstood, is no longer vanishing. But it is now colliding—into fences, into roads, into people’s lives. The question that looms isn’t whether Madhya Pradesh can save the tiger. It’s whether it can live with the growing numbers.
