126 tigers killed in 2021, the Indian Tiger Protection Service (NTCA) said. The service reports that since collecting data from 2012, this is the highest annual number of victims.
India is home to about 75 percent of the world’s tigers. It is estimated that 40,000 of them inhabited the country at the time of its declaration of independence in 1947. A 2006 census showed that the tiger population had shrunk to 1,411 before rising to 2,967 in 2018. – an achievement marked as “historic” by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
‘Natural causes’
Over the past decade the biggest reason for deaths recorded by the NTCA was “natural causes”, but many also fell victim to poachers and “human-animal conflict”.
Human encroachment on tiger habitats has increased in recent decades in the country of 1.3 billion people.
Nearly 225 people were killed in tiger attacks between 2014 and 2019, according to government figures.
Kartick Satyanarayan, founder of Wildlife SOS, told AFP deaths due to human-animal conflict were driven by “the fragmentation of the tiger’s natural habitat.”
India, a country of 1.3 billion people, is struggling to limit the destruction of tigers’ natural habitats caused by urban development and deforestation.
About 225 people died in tiger attacks between 2014 and 2019, according to the data. However, the government has worked to better control the population, creating 50 reserves across the country to protect their habitat.
