IWN Original Report — Friday, 10 April 2026

The Tiger Is Moving In — Not Just Passing Through

Something is changing in India’s forests — and the evidence is turning up in places nobody expected to find it.

In Indore’s forest division in Madhya Pradesh, field teams conducting the All India Tiger Estimation 2026 recorded 20 tiger signs on the very first day of surveying. The entire 2022 census for that same area had yielded 10 signs in total. By day two, the count had risen to 18 more — eclipsing years of previous data in 48 hours. Divisional Forest Officer Pradeep Mishra’s assessment was unambiguous: the tigers are not passing through. They are residents.

The survey that measures more than numbers

The sixth cycle of the All India Tiger Estimation — coordinated by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) — is the most ambitious yet. For the first time, it formally extends beyond India’s 58 tiger reserves into the forest fringes, plantation belts, and territorial divisions where tigers have quietly been showing up with greater frequency.

More than 60,000 forest personnel and trained volunteers are participating. Over 40,000 camera traps, deployed in 4-sq-km grids, are capturing individual tigers — identified by AI software that reads unique stripe patterns the way a fingerprint reader reads a hand. Satellite data from ISRO maps vegetation, water, and human activity. Prey density surveys track the ungulates — chital, sambar, gaur — that determine whether a landscape can support a tiger long-term.

The final national results are expected in July 2027. But the early signals are already telling a story.

Tigers filling the gaps

In Telangana’s Amrabad Tiger Reserve, unofficial estimates from the current survey suggest around 42 tigers — up from 33 counted in 2024 and just 10 in the first formal census years ago. Some of this growth reflects genuine reproduction. Some reflects something ecologically significant: individual tigers, following instinct, walking hundreds of kilometres from source populations in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh in search of territory and mates. One male, tracked by forest officials, had travelled from Tipeshwar Wildlife Sanctuary in Yavatmal, Maharashtra, all the way into southern Telangana — a journey of several hundred kilometres across farmland, highways, and human settlements.

Madhya Pradesh, already India’s tiger-richest state with 785 individuals recorded in 2022, is seeing tigers push deeper into non-reserve forests. Of the state’s tiger population, 237 individuals were already documented living outside protected areas in the last census — a number expected to rise.

What this means

India’s 2022 census recorded 3,682 tigers — roughly 75% of the world’s wild population. Experts anticipate a further 10% increase when 2026 results are published. But the more significant story may not be the headline number. It may be where those tigers are living.

The colonisation of non-reserve forest — landscapes that are technically unprotected but ecologically capable of supporting tigers — represents a quiet conservation dividend. Decades of prey recovery, anti-poaching work, and forest protection inside reserves have produced a surplus population that is now naturally dispersing outward, probing and finding habitable space in forests that connect, however tenuously, to the core.

This is how a species heals. Not just by growing in number, but by growing in range.

The 2026 AITE will, when complete, offer the clearest picture yet of how far that recovery has spread — and how much of the landscape India’s tigers have quietly decided to call home.

Sources: NTCA · Wildlife Institute of India · Free Press Journal · The Federal · The Print