IWN Original Report — Saturday, 18 April 2026
India’s highways are expanding at a pace its wildlife cannot easily survive. A growing body of data — from Madhya Pradesh’s forest edges to Karnataka’s national park fringes — points to roads as one of the most consistent and under-acknowledged killers of the country’s big cats. But one highway, opened this month, quietly offered a different proposition: that with deliberate design, infrastructure and ecology don’t have to be in permanent conflict.
The numbers that demand attention
In Madhya Pradesh, an RTI response obtained by wildlife activist Ajay Dubey from the state Forest Department revealed that 149 leopards died across the state in just 14 months, between January 2025 and February 2026. The single largest cause of death was road accidents — 46 animals, or nearly a third of all fatalities, killed in vehicle collisions, including 19 on national highways. Seoni district, bisected by roads running through the Pench corridor, recorded the highest losses. Narmadapuram, adjacent to Satpura Tiger Reserve, and the Raisen–Bhopal belt around Ratapani Wildlife Sanctuary were close behind.
In Karnataka, the pattern is broader and darker still. Between October 2025 and 10 April 2026, the state lost 15 tigers and 13 leopards to a combination of snaring, electrocution, poisoning, road kills and bullets. A 2-year-old female leopard was shot dead in Periyapatna on 7 April — three bullets in her body, the Forest Minister ordering an immediate investigation. In March, a mother leopard and four unborn cubs were killed on Bengaluru’s NICE Road. These are not remote forest incidents; they are happening on city-adjacent infrastructure, on roads that carry daily commuter and commercial traffic through or beside wildlife habitat.
An acknowledgement without a plan
When asked about the MP leopard data, the state’s Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, Subharanjan Sen, acknowledged that roads impose growing risk on leopards. He noted that conditions are being placed on new road construction and expansions through forest. What he could not offer was a plan for existing highways. Retrofitting older roads with wildlife-crossing infrastructure — underpasses, overhead passages, acoustic barriers, fencing at known hotspot crossings — is, by his own admission, not currently on the table.
That is a significant gap, given that India’s highway network has expanded by tens of thousands of kilometres in the past decade, much of it through or adjacent to forested land.
What the Delhi–Dehradun corridor proved
Four days ago, IWN reported on a study that should be required reading for every highway planner in the country. Along the newly opened Delhi–Dehradun Economic Corridor, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) documented 18 wild species — including elephants on 60 occasions — using purpose-built underpasses along an 18-kilometre forest stretch adjacent to Rajaji National Park. The study, Landscapes Reconnected, deployed elevated corridors up to seven metres high, acoustic monitoring to identify noise-sensitive crossing zones, and species-specific engineering informed by real-time camera trap and AudioMoth data.
It is an early result, and the road has only just opened to full traffic. But the methodology — deliberate, monitored, ecologically informed — stands in stark contrast to the approach applied to most of the highways currently killing leopards in MP and Karnataka.
The retrofitting argument
The case for retrofitting is not theoretical. Wildlife crossing infrastructure is standard practice on major highways in Europe, North America, and parts of Southeast Asia. In India, it has so far been treated as a feature of new, high-profile projects rather than a systematic national obligation. Given that the worst-affected roads in MP include national highways already carrying heavy traffic through prime leopard habitat, the question is no longer whether crossings work — the Delhi–Dehradun data suggests they do — but whether the political and institutional will exists to apply them retrospectively.
The answer, at present, appears to be no. Road agencies are not required to conduct wildlife mortality audits on existing highways. No national framework mandates retrofitting at identified big cat crossing hotspots. The MP Forest Department knows which districts are losing the most leopards to roads; it does not yet have the authority or the budget to demand that NHAI address them.
A proposal worth making
What would a credible national response look like? Wildlife conservationists and road ecologists have long argued for a tiered approach: mandatory wildlife mortality reporting on all highways passing through or within five kilometres of Protected Areas; joint NHAI–MoEFCC identification of high-risk crossing zones; and a phased retrofitting programme starting with the ten most lethal highway stretches, using the Delhi–Dehradun model as a design template.
India has the institutional capacity to do this. WII has the data. NHAI, on the Delhi–Dehradun evidence, has the engineering capability. What is missing is a policy trigger — and perhaps the acknowledgement that 149 leopards in 14 months in one state alone is not an acceptable baseline.