IWN Original Report — Wednesday, 6 May 2026
On 3 May 2026, a man was killed by a leopard in Kumeria village in Uttarakhand. The attack happened in daylight. It was not the first such death this year.
In Pauri district, January 2026 had the atmosphere of a lockdown. Fifty-five schools shut their gates and shifted to online learning after a leopard killed a woman in the area on the night of 30 or 31 December. Forest department vehicles moved through villages with public announcement systems, warning residents not to step out after dark and to keep their livestock secured. Authorities declared the animal a man-eater and deployed a designated shooter. Days later, the leopard remained at large.
In late February 2026, a leopard was finally captured — trapped in a cage in the forest. But with no forensic confirmation that it was the animal responsible for the attacks, the question lingered. The forest department had an animal in a cage. Whether it was the right one is something no one can say with certainty.
This is not an isolated incident, but more a trend that has been accumulating for years and can no longer be dismissed as a series of local misfortunes.
Over the past 25 years, Uttarakhand has recorded 2,683 leopard attacks on humans — 547 fatal, 2,126 non-fatal. That works out to more than eight attacks every month, every month, for a quarter century. In 2025 alone, the state registered 438 wildlife incidents, including 44 deaths and 394 injuries across all species.
Another geography, same story
If Uttarakhand represents the long-running leopard crisis, Maharashtra’s Chandrapur district has become the most acute site of tiger-human conflict in the country. The district is home to the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve, whose tiger count has risen from roughly 34 animals in 2006 to well over 200 today — a conservation achievement that has become, for the farming communities along the reserve’s edge, a source of daily dread.
In May 2025 alone, 11 people were killed by tigers in Chandrapur in the space of 17 days. By early June, the district’s death toll stood at 22. Stepping back further: between 2021 and May 2025, 173 people died in wildlife encounters across the district, 150 of them in tiger attacks. Recorded injuries climbed from 76 in 2021 to over 314 by 2024, with 129 cases already filed by the middle of this year. Livestock losses over the same period exceeded 10,900 animals.
By late September 2025, 33 people had died in wildlife attacks in Chandrapur — 30 of them from tigers, with the remainder attributed to leopards, elephants, and wild boar. Among the dead was Amol Nanavare, a 38-year-old safari driver who had spent his working days guiding tourists through tiger country at Tadoba. He was killed walking across farmland to deliver a motor pump to his father.
The conflict is not contained within a single state. Across India, at least 43 people were killed near tiger reserves or national parks in the first six months of 2025 — broadly matching the 44 deaths recorded in the same period of 2024. Fatalities were reported from Uttarakhand (9 deaths), Pilibhit Tiger Reserve in Uttar Pradesh (5), Ranthambore in Rajasthan (3, including a forest range officer and a forest guard), and one each from Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu.
Key drivers: why encounters are becoming more frequent
Wildlife scientists and senior forest officials have been careful to reject the framing that India’s big cats are ‘turning into man-eaters.’ The data supports their caution. A back-of-envelope calculation illustrates why: if the estimated 224 tigers in the Pilibhit-Dudhwa Terai were genuinely targeting humans as preferred prey, they would collectively need to kill roughly 11,000 people per year to meet their caloric needs. However, the annual average is around 20 deaths — 0.17 per cent of the hypothetical figure.
What is rising is not predatory intent but encounter frequency, and the structural causes of that rise are well understood. In Madhya Pradesh, the tiger population has roughly doubled over the past decade, compressing territories and pushing sub-adult males and dispersing tigers into landscapes where they have not historically been seen. In Chandrapur specifically, a conservation area that held 30 to 40 tigers in 2006 now holds around 250.
The seasonal factor of tendu leaf collection is also significant. These leaves are harvested to roll traditional beedis, and their collection is economically vital to tens of thousands of people in the forest fringe. During the peak of the tendu season in May, as many as 60,000 people enter tiger habitat every day. Many do so before dawn or after dusk, ignore department advisories, and, in some cases, sleep inside the forest to maximise working hours. Forest officials acknowledge that no technology can fully prevent conflict when that volume of human activity overlaps with active tiger zones.
The pattern in Uttarakhand involves a different dynamic, one that is counterintuitive but well-documented. In Pauri Garhwal and neighbouring hill districts, the immediate pressure does not come from expanding wildlife alone. Rural depopulation has transformed the landscape in ways that remove the buffer between forest and settlement. As families migrate to cities in search of better schools, hospitals, and livelihoods, the terraced fields they once tended are abandoned. Within a few years, those fields become overgrown scrub — ideal cover for leopards. The buffer that once separated the village from the treeline disappears. Attacks that were previously improbable become routine.
IWN spoke to Jagdish Chandra, a daily wager contracted by the Forest Department to help clear the fire lines inside the forest and assist in the recent leopard hunt in Almora district: “With two killings in just 33 days (between March and May), there is a lot of pressure on the department to find the animal. The leopard seems to have developed a pattern on location and time of attack.”
The ecological stress driving leopards in Uttarakhand is further compounded by a collapse in natural prey. Where prey populations are healthy — chital, sambar, wild boar — leopards have little reason to approach settlements. Where prey has declined due to habitat degradation, poaching, or competition with domestic livestock, the calculus shifts. Uttarakhand’s data from 2014 to 2024 reveals that it is not the tigers but the leopards that caused more deaths and injuries — not because leopards are more dangerous, but because they are far more numerous in the fringe zones where humans and forest intersect.
What the people living there are experiencing
In January 2026, after a spate of leopard and tiger attacks in and around Mohaan range in Almora district adjoining the Corbett Tiger Reserve, local administration made announcements asking villagers to desist from travelling alone or at night, and to keep their livestock safe. Suneel Kumar, a resident of Dabra Saural village in Almora district, told IWN that with the increased frequency of these attacks in the last four to five years, villagers no longer venture out alone or at night, even in an emergency.
In September 2025, a seven-year-old boy in Chandrapur was taken by a leopard while returning from a village event alongside adult family members. His body was recovered the following morning just beyond the village perimeter.
In December 2025, a BJP member of Parliament raised the situation during Zero Hour in the Lok Sabha. In the previous three weeks alone, four people had been killed in leopard attacks in the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand and more than fifteen injured. He described a curfew-like situation in the hills after dark. People, he told the House, had stopped sending their children to school.
In response, the Uttarakhand government announced that it would meet the full cost of medical treatment for anyone injured in a wildlife attack, and offer compensation of Rs 10 lakh to families of those killed. The Chief Minister directed the forest department to reach any conflict incident within 30 minutes. The Pauri district forest officer was removed from his post.
In Uttarakhand’s rescue centres, 48 leopards classified as dangerous are currently held in captivity — animals that have made repeated incursions into human habitation and been deemed too bold or too unpredictable to remain in the wild. The question of what happens to them — and to the next cohort of animals that follow them out of a forest that cannot contain them all — does not have an easy answer.
The conservation dilemma no one wants to name
India’s record on big cat conservation is genuinely remarkable. The 2022 national tiger census confirmed 3,167 individuals — the highest count ever recorded anywhere in the world. Leopard surveys estimate India’s population at 13,874, making it the largest national population of the species on earth. These figures represent decades of institutional commitment, the labour of thousands of forest personnel, and the tolerance — often at great personal cost — of the communities that live alongside these animals.
They also mean that many more big cats are sharing much less landscape with significantly more people. This is not a failure of conservation. It is, in part, a consequence of conservation without proportional investment in the spatial infrastructure — the corridors, the buffer management, the community conflict-mitigation systems — that a genuinely recovered big cat population requires.
A January 2025 study published in the journal Science found that across 20 Indian states with tiger populations, approximately 45 per cent of tiger-occupied area is shared with around 60 million people. Tiger occupancy itself has expanded by 30 per cent over the past two decades, increasing the species’ range by nearly 138,000 square kilometres. That expansion is welcome. The question is whether the infrastructure of coexistence has expanded at anything like the same rate.
The honest answer, from the data in Chandrapur, Pauri, and Almora and across the forest fringes of India, is that it has not. Compensation backlogs stretch into years in some states. Rapid response capacity in many range offices means one working vehicle covering hundreds of square kilometres.
Long-term solutions are not a mystery. Ecologists and conservation managers point to the same suite of interventions: restoring and protecting wildlife corridors so that animals have somewhere to go when reserves fill up; strengthening prey base recovery so that predators have alternatives to domestic livestock; improving the speed and reliability of compensation systems so that communities do not bear the economic cost of living alongside protected wildlife; and scaling up community-based conflict-mitigation programmes. None of these is technically complicated. All of them require sustained political will and recurrent public expenditure directed at the communities most affected, rather than at the animals most celebrated.
The people living in forest fringes are not fundamentally opposed to tigers and leopards. They have lived alongside these animals, in many cases, for generations. What they are opposed to is the sense that their safety is treated as a secondary consideration in a conservation framework primarily designed around the survival of the animal. That sense, whether or not it is entirely accurate, is politically and ethically important — and addressing it honestly is a precondition of the long-term public consent that India’s conservation model depends upon.
The forest has always pushed back. The question India now faces is whether it can build, at sufficient scale and speed, the institutions that allow humans and big cats to share a landscape without either paying with their lives.
Sources: News9 Live · India Narrative · Free Press Journal · Paryawaran · Indian Masterminds · Down to Earth · Christian Science Monitor · Outlook Traveller · The Week · Devdiscourse
IWN will continue tracking human-wildlife conflict data across India’s states. Reader inputs and documentation welcome at indiawildlifenews.com/contact-us/