India has more leopards than any other country in the world. The fifth cycle national estimation, released in February 2024, put the population at 13,874 individuals — a figure that makes India not just a leopard stronghold but the leopard stronghold. Madhya Pradesh leads with 3,907 individuals, followed by Maharashtra with 1,985 and Karnataka with 1,879.
And yet the leopard is in trouble.
Not because it is rare. Because it is everywhere — and everywhere it goes, it collides with the country that surrounds it.
The cat that refused to disappear
The leopard (Panthera pardus fusca in its Indian form) is, by almost any measure, the most adaptable large carnivore on earth. It has outlasted the lion across most of Asia. It has persisted in landscapes where the tiger was eliminated decades ago. It lives, as research has repeatedly confirmed, in the agricultural margins of Nashik and Ahmednagar, on the outskirts of Mumbai, in the tea gardens of Assam, in the degraded scrub forests of Uttarakhand’s mid-hills. It is not waiting for pristine wilderness. It is making do.
Leopards in central India are increasingly adapting to cities like Indore and Jabalpur as their natural habitat shrinks and cityscapes expand. “With few studies on urban leopards, assessing their presence in cities is now essential,” ecologist Aniruddha Majumder has noted.
This adaptability is the leopard’s greatest survival advantage. It is also the source of nearly every conflict it faces.
The numbers that don’t make it into the census
India’s 13,874 figure counts leopards in tiger range states across forest habitats — approximately 70 percent of expected leopard habitat. The remaining 30 percent — arid regions, the higher Himalayas, non-forest areas — was not surveyed. The actual population is very likely higher. What is not in doubt is that a substantial proportion of India’s leopards live outside protected areas, in landscapes with no buffer, no legal protection, and no management framework that meaningfully accounts for their presence.
The Shivalik-Gangetic landscape has suffered a 3.4 percent annual decline in leopard numbers — precisely the zone where human pressure is highest and forest cover most fragmented. In the same period, Central India and the Eastern Ghats show a modest annual growth rate of 1.5 percent. The leopard is not declining uniformly. It is being squeezed out of the edges while holding on in the core. Every year the core shrinks a little further.
The death toll
IWN has tracked leopard mortality closely this year. The figures are grim. According to WPSI data, at least 544 leopards were reported dead in 2023 alone — 152 of them killed by poachers. The remaining deaths came from road accidents, retaliatory killings by communities, and conflict responses. Karnataka’s six-month tally this year included 13 leopards dead alongside 15 tigers and 8 elephants, with 19 human fatalities — a number that captures the real texture of the crisis: not a war on wildlife, but a landscape under pressure that is killing people and animals simultaneously, without resolution.
The roads problem is particularly acute. IWN reported in April on how the Delhi-Dehradun expressway study found leopard movement compressed and corridor connectivity broken by infrastructure that was built without adequate wildlife crossing provisions. A leopard attempting to cross a six-lane highway at night is not a conservation problem. It is a planning failure.
What the day is asking
International Leopard Day was established in 2023, following the first Global Leopard Conference — the first international gathering ever dedicated specifically to Panthera pardus. The fact that it took until 2023 to hold such a conference is, in itself, a comment on how the leopard has been treated: as a background species, a footnote to tiger conservation, an animal whose ubiquity was mistaken for security.
The hashtags are #InternationalLeopardDay, #LoveLeopards and #ForTheLoveOfLeopards. The ask is simple: that the leopard be seen as an animal worth conserving in its own right, not just as a proxy indicator of tiger habitat health.
In India, that requires something more specific: a national policy framework for leopards living outside protected areas. A road-building protocol that mandates wildlife crossings in known leopard corridors. A human-leopard conflict response system that doesn’t default to capture-and-relocation — a method that research shows consistently fails, displacing the problem rather than solving it. And a census methodology that accounts for the full 100 percent of leopard habitat, not the 70 percent that overlaps with tiger survey zones.
India has 13,874 counted leopards. The country has not yet decided what it wants to do with that fact. International Leopard Day is as good a moment as any to start.
Sources: NTCA / WII — Status of Leopards in India 2022 · Mongabay — International Leopard Day · International Leopard Day · IWN — India’s Roads Are Killing Its Leopards · IWN — Tiger and Leopard Mortality 2026