India’s tiger-conservation story begins with a crisis in counting as well as a crisis in numbers. In 2004, Rajasthan’s Sariska reserve was thought to hold 16-18 tigers, yet none had been seen for months; an investigation found they had likely been poached to extinction. The scandal prompted a review of Project Tiger and exposed a basic question: how could India know how many tigers remained? Early estimates were rough, but growing concern led to a national census. In 1972, forester S.R. Choudhury trained forest staff to identify individual tigers from pugmarks, using tracing tools and prepared surfaces to improve the prints. The census estimated 1,863 tigers.
The pugmark method reflected both practical innovation and political circumstances. Indian foresters valued its low cost and local knowledge, while resisting dependence on foreign researchers amid tensions with the United States and suspicion of American scientific and military involvement. But research in Nepal’s Chitwan National Park, enabled by radio collars, revealed that key assumptions behind pugmark counts were wrong: tigers did not form stable pairs, their territories overlapped, and roaming “floaters” moved between areas. Tiger movement increased in densely populated habitats, making prints difficult to translate into reliable individual counts. The account presents India’s conservation achievement as a product of evolving methods, scientific learning, and institutional change, while showing that protecting tigers depends on trustworthy ways to measure their populations.
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