Inside Vembanad's plastic-free houseboat collective
How 34 operators banded together to re-engineer a century-old category — and what travellers can do to help.
India’s jungles are in a curious moment. After two decades of cautious recovery, our tiger numbers are neither the runaway success story the headlines sometimes claim nor the emergency they once were. The truth, as ever with wildlife, is quieter and more regional.
We spent three weeks with the All-India Tiger Estimation team across Corbett, Bandhavgarh and the hills of Valparai — not to count stripes, but to ask what their newest numbers actually tell us about corridor health, tourism pressure and the stretches of forest that haven’t made the front page.
Counting tigers is the easy part
The estimation methodology — a combination of camera traps, pugmark analysis and DNA from scat — is internationally peer-reviewed and, by the standards of the field, robust. Where the conversation starts to split is the next question: okay, but what does this number mean for the ecosystem?
“A stable tiger number in a fragmented forest is not conservation — it’s a zoo with better light.”
Corridors, not fortresses
The parks we obsess over — Corbett, Ranthambhore, Bandipur — are doing fine. It’s the connective tissue between them that’s under strain: the corridors tigers need to find mates, establish territories and avoid the inbreeding that silently collapses small populations. In state after state, those corridors are being severed by highways, pipelines and, increasingly, solar farms.
That is the story the headline numbers miss. A 33% jump in the Western Ghats cluster is extraordinary until you read that the Nilgiri-Eastern Ghats corridor has been functionally broken by the expansion of NH-766. A stable count across central India hides a slow, tragic drift in Panna and Sanjay-Dubri.
So what should travellers do?
More than ever, where and how you travel matters. Choose operators that pay real conservation fees. Skip the sticker parks when you can — go deep into Kanha, Satpura, Pench. Ask lodges point-blank what percentage of your bill goes to corridor work. The honest ones will tell you, and the dishonest ones will squirm.
Meera Thomas
Writes on conservation and jungle travel across South Asia. Previously at WWF-India.
