Rajasthan: Tigers are more actively preying on human beings for sustenance, with over 43 people killed across India between January and June 2025, according to the 2026 State of India’s Environment report (SOE 2026).
The report was released by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) and Down To Earth magazine on February 25, at the 2026 Anil Agarwal Dialogue held in Rajasthan’s Nimli.
According to Himanshu Nitnaware, a senior correspondent for Down To Earth who worked on the report, ecological changes, degradation of habitats, and other factors are some reasons why tigers are changing their behaviour.
“The big cat is changing its stripes. Ecological changes in and degradation of their habitats, human interventions, and skewed conservation strategies are leading to some subtle and not-so-subtle behaviour changes among India’s tigers,” Nitnaware said.
Increasing cases of humans being hunted
The SOE 2026 recorded that across India, at least 43 people were near tiger reserves from January to June last year. And in four of the 43 attacks of 2025, tigers ate parts of their prey.
In 2024, during the same period, 44 people lost their lives.
Tigers rarely become compulsive human-eaters, the report said. “The attacks and consumption of humans increase when the wild cats are unable to hunt for their own food, grow old, have injuries, or when their natural food source disappears.”
Proximity to the tiger territories is one of the major reasons why the wild cats are increasingly targeting humans, the report said. Another factor could be that the “big cats are losing their fear of humans,” the report said, quoting conservation biologist K Ullas Karanth.
Human populations and tiger numbers on the rise simultaneously
The report used a recent study, which said that in states with tiger populations, approximately 40 per cent of tigers’ territory is shared by 60 million people.
Since tiger populations inside reserve areas are at a saturation point, they are moving out of the protected areas. “The overcrowding, habitat loss and human activities near tiger habitats are the reasons behind behavioural changes in tigers,” the report said.
Tigers are moving from their natural habitat in open forests into thickets of Lantana camara, an ornamental plant, which is India’s most invasive species, covering 50 per cent of forests, scrublands and village commons.
The growth of the plant suppresses native grasses and plants, constituting the food base for wild herbivores, such as cheetal and sambhar. Assistant Professor at a Danish university, Ninad Mungi, said that these plants offer “near-perfect cover” for tigers with low visibility and limited escape routes for their prey.
“What Lantana camera has done is to create predator-friendly habitat structures in prey-poor landscapes,” Mungi said.
Tigers in places like Bandhavgarh and Tadoba are increasingly using lantana-dominated patches outside the reserves as their daytime refuge and hunting grounds, the report stated.
To prevent killings, experts have suggested focused local community-based conservation strategies and decreasing human interventions in tiger-dominated areas as some ways to control potential human-tiger conflict scenarios.
