The Union environment ministry granted environmental clearance in April to the Chentikheda irrigation project, which will submerge eight villages around Kuno National Park in Sheopur district, Madhya Pradesh — the only place in India with a wild cheetah population.
rajasthan
Hotels and safari operators around Jawai can no longer sell a stay on the promise of a leopard sighting.
India has published its first dedicated guide to the grasslands, deserts, ravines and scrublands that government paperwork has spent decades filing under “wasteland.”
A gharial went missing in Rajasthan’s canal network in March. It took two forest departments, three sightings and five months of patient tracking to bring it home.
In the Thar Desert of western Rajasthan, blackbuck graze at the edge of villages the way cattle do elsewhere. They do not run. They have learned, over five centuries, that they do not need to.
India has no single word for what happens when a community embroiders a peacock onto a shawl, paints a tiger onto a temple wall, or weaves a blackbuck into a carpet — and has been doing so for five centuries.
The nilgai is India’s largest antelope, one of its most widely distributed large mammals, and possibly its most politically contested. In Bihar it is protected by religious sentiment. In Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh it has been declared vermin. The same animal, under the same law, treated in entirely opposite ways depending on where it stands.
India’s biodiversity does not sort itself neatly by species. It sorts itself by landscape.
India’s land records classify open grasslands as “wasteland” because they carry no trees. That single word is why the Great Indian Bustard is disappearing, why the blackbuck needs reintroduction programmes, and why the cheetah has no secured wild habitat to return to.
On International Leopard Day 2026, IWN looks at India’s most misunderstood big cat — 13,874 individuals counted, thousands living outside protected areas, and a country still figuring out how to share space with them.