New research suggests prey is no longer the main obstacle in Telangana’s Kawal Tiger Reserve. The harder question is whether India can keep a tiger landscape connected long enough for big cats to settle.
On paper, the numbers now look almost reassuring. In Kawal Tiger Reserve, a 893 sq km core of dry deciduous forest in northern Telangana, prey densities have risen enough to support an estimated 35 to 41 tigers. Yet the reserve still has no resident breeding population. Tigers keep arriving, then moving on. In conservation terms, it is a curious and rather telling failure: the pantry appears stocked, but the house remains empty.
That conclusion comes from a long-term study led by Imran Siddiqui of the Centre for Wildlife Studies and the Hyderabad Tiger Conservation Society, published this spring in Oryx. Drawing on data collected between 2010 and 2022, the researchers tracked the fortunes of Kawal’s principal tiger prey, including chital, sambar, nilgai, wild pig and chousingha.
The clearest gain was in chital. Their density rose from 1.94 animals per sq km in 2010 to 6.08 in 2022, a sharp increase that the authors link to improved protection and habitat management after Kawal was notified as a tiger reserve in 2012.
That ought to matter. Tigers are, among other things, creatures of arithmetic. Where prey biomass rises, the chances of a viable population usually rise with it. In Kawal, however, the maths stops short of the outcome.
Over the past decade, 15 tigers have been recorded dispersing into the reserve. Only two were females.
Without females, there is no breeding population. Without a breeding population, there is no recovery, only movement.
A reserve with tigers passing through
Kawal sits at the southern edge of the Central Indian tiger landscape, linked ecologically to the far better known forests of Tadoba-Andhari in Maharashtra and, more broadly, to a wider chain of reserves and sanctuaries stretching across central India. That geography should be an asset. Instead, it increasingly looks like the crux of the problem.
“The reserve has the prey base, but not the conditions needed to retain dispersing animals,” Siddiqui and colleagues argue in the study. Their point is not that Kawal lacks habitat altogether. It is that the landscape around it has become harder to move through, and harder still to settle in.
This distinction matters. Male tigers, especially younger animals pushed out of saturated source populations, will travel extraordinary distances in search of territory. Females are less likely to disperse so far, and more sensitive to disturbance in the places they might establish a home range. A reserve that attracts passing males but not resident females is not recovering. It is functioning as a stopover.
That appears to be Kawal’s present condition.
In late 2025, one male tiger reportedly travelled around 200km from Maharashtra into the Kawal landscape, moving through Bela, Kerameri and Jainoor before reaching Jannaram. Forest officials presented it as evidence that the habitat remains permeable. They were not wrong. But permeability is not the same as security.
The corridor problem
To understand Kawal, you have to look beyond its formal boundaries.
The study points to increasingly fragmented dispersal routes linking the reserve with neighbouring forests, particularly those running north towards Tadoba-Andhari and other habitats in Maharashtra. Roads, railway lines, mining and expanding settlements all squeeze the landscape. Corridors do not have to vanish entirely to fail. They merely need to become noisy, narrow and risky enough that animals stop using them consistently.
That concern is not theoretical. In May last year, the Telangana government notified the Kumram Bheem Conservation Reserve, covering 1,492.88 sq km across the Kagaznagar and Asifabad forest divisions. The new reserve was created under Section 36A of India’s Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972 and is intended to protect a crucial corridor linking Kawal with Tadoba-Andhari, as well as with Kanhargaon, Tipeshwar, Chaprala and, farther afield, Indravati.
It was a significant step, and a tacit admission that Kawal’s problem does not sit neatly inside Kawal.
Corridor protection is one of those conservation terms that can sound abstract until you consider the alternative. A tiger trying to move between forest blocks does not encounter a line on a map. It encounters a road carrying lorries through the night, cattle pushed into the forest edge, wire snares, scrub cut back for cultivation, and villages where the cost of living beside a large predator is paid in livestock, fear and sometimes lives.
Inside the reserve, the pressure does not stop
Kawal’s difficulties are not only external. Human pressure persists within the reserve too.
Nearly 30 villages lie inside the core area, according to the study and subsequent reporting, and dependence on forest resources remains high. Livestock grazing continues. So does the risk of poaching, both direct and incidental. Free-ranging dogs are reportedly used for hunting in some areas, and they bring with them another problem that conservation planners are often slow to discuss in public: disease.
Spillover from livestock and dogs to wild herbivores, and potentially to carnivores, is not a side issue in landscapes like this. It is part of the ecological weather. A tiger reserve can have trees, water and deer, but still fail if the surrounding human footprint keeps eroding the conditions needed for wildlife to persist with minimal friction.
There is also the social contract to consider. Human-tiger conflict in adjoining areas has made some communities wary of any conservation effort that sounds, to them, like an invitation for more tigers. That tension rarely appears in celebratory press releases about tiger recovery, but it can determine whether a landscape remains permeable at all.
What the science says, and what policy does with it
The Oryx paper is careful in tone, but its implications are awkward. For years, Kawal’s lack of tigers could be explained, at least in part, by low prey densities. That explanation is now weaker. The prey base has improved enough that it no longer serves as the main alibi.
What remains are harder problems, because they demand action across administrative borders and political constituencies.
First, corridor management has to become more than a slogan. That means regulating infrastructure in dispersal routes, resisting mining and linear intrusions in critical bottlenecks, and treating the Kumram Bheem Conservation Reserve as a living landscape rather than a paper designation.
Second, chronic disturbance inside Kawal’s core needs reducing. That may mean village relocation in some cases, but relocation in India’s tiger reserves has a chequered history and can quickly become coercive if pursued badly. If people are moved, they need land, services, compensation and a say in the process. Conservation cannot simply externalise the cost onto forest communities and call it success.
Third, the reserve may need active population management. The study recommends assisted dispersal, particularly of females. Telangana officials have already floated the possibility of bringing tigers from Madhya Pradesh to Kawal. Translocation is a tempting solution because it looks decisive. It also makes for good politics. A tiger can be moved in a truck. A corridor cannot.
But translocation only works if the receiving landscape is genuinely ready. Put bluntly, there is little point moving a tigress into a reserve that still struggles to hold one.
A tiger reserve in waiting
There is a tendency in Indian conservation to speak of tiger reserves as if notification itself confers ecological reality. It does not. A tiger reserve is not redeemed by signage, safari plans or official optimism. It works only when the landscape around it still functions as habitat.
Kawal, at least for now, sits in an uncomfortable middle ground. It is not an ecological write-off. On the contrary, the reserve’s prey recovery suggests years of protection and habitat work have achieved something substantial. But neither is it yet a functioning tiger population.
The distinction matters because India’s tiger story is increasingly one of landscapes, not isolated parks. Source populations such as Tadoba can produce dispersing animals. Whether those animals can establish themselves elsewhere depends on a chain of forests, villages, roads, governance failures and political choices that extends far beyond any reserve gate.
For Telangana, the question is no longer whether Kawal can feed tigers. The evidence suggests it can.
The harder question is whether it can make enough room for them to live there.