When releasing the report, Union Minister Prakash Javadekar said and other wildlife were a kind of “soft power” India had to show on the international front. “The Ministry is working on a programme in which efforts would be made to provide water and fodder to animals in the forest itself to deal with the challenge of human-animal conflict which is causing deaths of animals”.

In the tiger reserves in Uttar Pradesh, there were several more tigers that depended on the source but lived outside it. In Corbett, there were 231 tigers within the reserves, but 266 were ‘utilising it.’ Kanha in Madhya Pradesh had 88 inside and 108 dependent on it. The Pench reserve in Maharashtra had 53 inside but 82 utilising them.

These estimates were based on tigers photographed via camera traps .

“In the tall grass Terai and Shivalik hills habitat, highest tiger densities have been achieved. In these habitats, tiger densities at carrying capacity can be between 10 to 16 tigers per 100 sq km,” the authors note.

In the latest report, said Qamar Qureshi, wildlife biologist at the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun and co-author, scientists had plotted a relationship between how much prey was needed to sustain a certain population.

“Many places have reached their maximum... so wildlife managers can plan based on this equation whether their reserves are nearing capacity,” he told The Hindu .

A summary of the report “Tigers Co-predators and Prey” was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi last July. While a detailed report was to have been readied by last December, it has only been publicly released on Tuesday.

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