By Shishir Prashant 
PrashantNews
Building on over five decades of remarkable success under Project Tiger, the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the Dehradun-based Wildlife Institute of India (WII) have released the “Roadmap for Active Management of Tigers in India (2026)”, a comprehensive national framework to guide the next phase of tiger conservation.
The roadmap was released in form of a booklet by Union Forest and Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav at Alwar in Rajasthan on Sunday at a workshop. The roadmap responds to the ecological realities of a rapidly recovering tiger population and provides a strategic, science-based approach for ensuring the long-term sustainability of tigers across India’s diverse landscapes.
According to an official estimate, at least 3,682 wild tigers, nearly 70% of the global wild tiger population, presently reside in 58 Tiger Reserves in 18 states in India. Experts say this extraordinary recovery has been achieved through sustained habitat protection, prey recovery, strong law enforcement, scientific monitoring, and community participation under Project Tiger.
The country’s tiger population has increased consistently from 1,411 tigers in 2006 to 3,682 in 2022, establishing India as the global leader in tiger conservation.
Recognizing that increasing tiger populations bring new conservation challenges, the roadmap introduces the concept of Active Management—a proactive, adaptive, and science-based conservation framework that extends beyond translocation and reintroduction.
It integrates habitat restoration, prey augmentation, landscape connectivity, genetic security, conflict prevention, disease surveillance, climate resilience, community stewardship, smart green infrastructure, and evidence-based management to ensure healthy, connected, and resilient tiger populations.
The roadmap adopts a landscape-scale conservation approach, emphasizing that long-term tiger conservation depends not only on protecting source populations within Tiger Reserves but also on maintaining functional corridors, managing dispersal habitats, and promoting coexistence in human-dominated landscapes. It proposes a three-layer conservation architecture consisting of: (i) strong protection, habitat security and prey recovery; (ii) active management through connectivity conservation, conflict mitigation, mortality reduction, disease surveillance and genetic management; and (iii) future resilience through climate adaptation, smart infrastructure, One Health approaches, nature-based economies and community stewardship.
A major innovation of the roadmap is the development of a national prioritization framework that classifies every Tiger Reserve according to the status of its tiger population, prey base and habitat quality. This allows management interventions to be tailored to the ecological needs of individual reserves rather than adopting a uniform approach. Reserves are placed along a recovery continuum ranging from habitat restoration and prey recovery to tiger recovery, population expansion and ultimately self-sustaining source populations.
The document also establishes a Source – Recipient Network for tiger conservation, identifying reserves with strong, stable populations that can support carefully planned supplementation or reintroduction programmes where ecological conditions are suitable. Such interventions are viewed as assisted dispersal, undertaken only after habitat quality, prey availability, connectivity and protection are secured, thereby strengthening India’s landscape-level tiger metapopulation while maintaining ecological and genetic integrity.
The roadmap identifies six core pillars of active management: habitat and prey management, population management, landscape connectivity, human–tiger interface management, community participation and stewardship, and long-term monitoring, research and adaptive management. It also advocates stronger integration of technology, climate-smart planning, citizen science, green infrastructure, interstate coordination and transboundary cooperation to address emerging conservation challenges.
The Roadmap for Active Management of Tigers in India represents a significant milestone in the evolution of tiger conservation. It transforms decades of scientific research and field experience into a practical national framework for sustaining India’s tiger recovery while balancing conservation, community well-being and sustainable development. As the global custodian of the largest wild tiger population, India continues to demonstrate international leadership by pioneering innovative, science-driven approaches for securing the future of one of the world’s most iconic species.