Bhopal: In worrying statistics emerging from the state, more than 45 tigers have died in Madhya Pradesh in the first eight months of 2026.
Madhya Pradesh has the largest number of tigers in the country. The state’s tiger population increased to 785 in the 2022 national tiger count and is now estimated by officials and experts to be around 1,000.
Tigers do die of natural causes such as flights due to territorial disputes, disease and old age, but deaths can also be caused by road and railway accidents, electrocution, poisoning and poaching. The unusually high number of deaths once again raises questions about whether Madhya Pradesh’s expanding tiger population is colliding not only with people, but with an increasingly fragmented and dangerous landscape, as reported by NDTV.
While the number of tigers have gone up, the forests available to them have not expanded at the same pace. This may be forcing the animals to stray close to human habitation, putting them at risk.
The channel has previously accessed RTI documents and reported that 88 tiger deaths across the country in 2020 and 2021 remained unresolved or under scrutiny, with the cause of death not conclusively established in the records examined.
The deaths were spread across Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Assam, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. But instead of answers, the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) is preparing to shut these cases forever, it has been reported.
Madhya Pradesh had one of the most worrying backlogs, including cases from major tiger landscapes such as Bandhavgarh, Kanha and Panna, areas considered among India’s most important breeding grounds for the big cat.
An adult male tiger can require a territory of roughly 50 to 100 square kilometres, depending on the habitat, prey availability and competition. Madhya Pradesh’s nine tiger reserves together cover around 16,233 sq km, including core and buffer landscapes.
The big cats, however, do not remain confined within administrative boundaries. Young animals pushed out by dominant adults disperse in search of territory, sometimes travelling long distances through territorial forests, agricultural fields, village fringes and fragmented corridors.
Tiger strayings have also led to animal-human conflicts. Of the 50 people killed in the state due to such conflict in the last eight months, 22 died in tiger attacks.
