Image: Prasant Krishna
Movement dekhi kya [Did you see any movement]?” our forest guide Murari Patel asks his colleague in an adjacent vehicle as it crosses ours along a dusty track. This is jungle land, and Patel’s question can refer to only one kind of movement—the tiger’s.
Inside the Kanha National Park in Madhya Pradesh, prime land for one of the world’s most endangered big cats—the Bengal tiger has only 2,226 adults of its kind in the wild, according to a 2014 estimate by the National Tiger Conservation Authority—visitors gather every bit of information they can lay their hands on in their search for the often-elusive stripes. Anyone who has been on the tiger’s trail—whether a novice or a seasoned enthusiast—will tell you that spotting the animal in the wild is never easy.
Kanha, which was declared a tiger reserve in 1973 under the country’s ambitious Project Tiger plan, is one of India’s largest tiger reserves, covering 940 sq km. Following the addition of the Phen Wildlife Sanctuary in 1983, along with a large buffer zone (an area around the periphery, or connecting, a protected zone), it now forms the Kanha Tiger Reserve, which covers 1,945 sq km. Alongside the nearby Pench National Park and Bandhavgarh National Park, it forms one of the largest swathes of land in central India where wildlife is largely protected. For example, Kanha has a well-equipped and trained anti-poaching unit, forest guards, fire-fighting staff and administrative teams for the core and buffer zones. As of 2016, India accounts for nearly 57 percent of the world’s tiger population, which is estimated at 3,890, according to WWF and the Global Tiger Forum.
(This story appears in the 14 April, 2017 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)