Editorial: When leopards come calling
In Gir too, focused conservation efforts have resulted in Asiatic lion numbers spurting by 32 per cent in five years and spilling over into areas beyond the designated sanctuary. There are now 891 Asiatic lions, 394 in the Gir National Park and 491 around the sanctuary in an area straddling 11 districts.
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• Fatalities arising from human-wildlife conflict once used to be stray events and got only passing attention from those living a safe distance away. Now they are everyday occurrences but get no more notice, especially from policymakers on high. The fact that there is still no commonly accessible country- or statewide registry of such incidents, or at least the fatalities, tells the story in a nutshell.
Eighty people died in encounters with wildlife in Tamil Nadu in 2024-25. According to NGO reports, 344 people have been killed in such incidents in Kerala, and 239 in Karnataka, in the past five years. Reporting continues to be uneven, and since most encounters happen in forest-fringe areas, it is likely that actual figures are higher. One can gauge the scale of the problem from the fact that incidents are now spatially ubiquitous, ranging from tiger attacks on tribal honey collectors in the Sundarbans to leopard sightings near homesteads on the fringe of Bengaluru and lions prowling the streets of towns in the Gir region of Gujarat.
Aside from ubiquity, there has been an alarming increase in the frequency of conflict incidents in some hotspots. In Chandrapur district of Maharashtra, home to the Tadoba Tiger Reserve, 40 people have been killed so far this year, 36 in tiger attacks, including four in a span of four days last month. One part of the problem, of course, is the expansion of human activity into forests, as happens in Chandrapur, where women venture into the jungle to gather tendu leaves. The other part is the success of targeted wildlife conservation efforts, because of which the tiger population of Chandrapur has risen sharply from 191 in 2020 to 347 in the latest count.
Similar challenges have arisen in other locations. A camera-trap survey reported last month that scrublands around Bengaluru now host 80–85 wild leopards, higher than in Mumbai. This increases the likelihood of surprise encounters such as the one experienced by a retired couple on the outskirts of Bengaluru who found a leopard walking into their bedroom as they were having a cup of tea.
In Gir too, focused conservation efforts have resulted in Asiatic lion numbers spurting by 32 per cent in five years and spilling over into areas beyond the designated sanctuary. There are now 891 Asiatic lions, 394 in the Gir National Park and 491 around the sanctuary in an area straddling 11 districts.
The paradox of human-animal conflict fatalities is that they occur both due to the success of conservation efforts as well as unchecked human expansion. Humans and animals will surprise each other regardless of whose turf it is. Considering that there are nearly a thousand deaths — counting just the humans — due to these encounters every year, the situation calls for second-order solutions that go beyond shotgun responses—such as the Uttarakhand order authorising the shooting of Himalayan black bears.
Unfortunately, under the BJP-led government, environmental issues get such low priority that we have effectively abandoned the challenge of human-animal conflict to local fixes. What we have are temporary solutions attempted by local administrators to neuter or translocate wild animals, or desperate last resorts by villagers, such as the barbed-wire collars worn by farmers near Pune to deter leopards, or the ferocious masks worn on the back by Sunderbans tribals to discourage tigers attacking from behind.
