As Nepal marked Global Tiger Day 2025, the conservation establishment presented what appears to be an unprecedented triumph: tiger populations have tripled from 121 in 2010 to 355 in 2022. However, this numerical success masks a disturbing reality that conservation authorities have systematically downplayed. The same period witnessed human casualties increase from 6 nationwide between 2014-2019 to 31 deaths in Bardia National Park vicinity alone between 2019-2024.
The major conservation organizations—WWF-Nepal, the National Trust for Nature Conservation (NTNC), and the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation—now face mounting pressure to address this paradox. Rather than honestly confronting the social costs of their interventions, these institutions are actively crafting narratives that minimize institutional responsibility while maximizing claims of conservation success.
Recent reports highlighting declining conflict rates represent a carefully constructed attempt to reframe a conservation crisis as a management success requiring only minor adjustments. This approach reflects the same institutional blind spots that created the original crisis and suggests a troubling unwillingness to acknowledge fundamental flaws in current conservation paradigms.
Deconstructing the Decline Narrative
Recent data showing human deaths dropping from 21 in fiscal year 2021-22 to 7 in 2024-25 is being presented as vindication of current approaches, but this interpretation reflects precisely the kind of selective analysis that conservation institutions have employed to avoid accountability. The decline narrative deliberately obscures the context that created these casualties in the first place.
More damning still, this decline in human casualties is happening without any rapid or otherwise meaningful intervention from conservation authorities. Local people have been left to fend for themselves mere subject to an ugly experimentation—Ram Bharosey, as we say in Nepali—while conservation institutions take credit for improvements they played no role in creating. Nobody even has any scientific means to attribute the decline in casualties to specific interventions, such is the state of science, preparedness, and accountability in Nepal's conservation establishment. Conservationists like myself are still left guessing whether the change in number is because of change in human behavior, tiger behavior or both, as there is no other variable that has changed representing a silent but dangerous inaction on part of the leading agencies.
The recent decline follows a dramatic spike that directly correlates with artificial tiger population enhancement programs implemented by the same institutions now celebrating the "improvement." The short-sightedness and confirmation bias that contributed to the original crisis is precisely what leads authorities to interpret temporary statistical improvements as complete vindication of their approaches.
Conservation authorities are promoting claims about "sustainable coexistence" and Nepal's capacity to "host up to 500 tigers" based on artificially enhanced conditions that have already proven unsustainable. This represents a fundamental failure to learn from their own mistakes and suggests institutional commitment to maintaining failed approaches rather than acknowledging necessary reforms.
The Ecosystem Dysfunction Authorities Ignore
The emphasis on declining human casualties serves to obscure deeper ecosystem dysfunction that conservation authorities systematically refuse to address. In Bardiya, tiger territories have compressed to just 7-8 square kilometers compared to the natural norm of 30-50 square kilometers—evidence of severe ecological stress that authorities present as habitat optimization success.
Several parks in the Tarai are experiencing declining populations of large ungulates like sambar and swamp deer, while artificial enhancement focused on chittal deer has created dangerous ecosystem simplification. Conservation authorities implemented these habitat manipulation programs knowing that insufficient natural prey would drive tigers toward livestock and human settlements, yet proceeded without adequate safety measures.
The recent decline in human casualties may simply reflect tigers dispersing to unexploited areas, prey base exhaustion forcing behavioral changes, or temporary demographic factors rather than genuine conflict resolution. As long as conservation institutions refuse to address the underlying ecological imbalances they created through artificial population enhancement, claims of sustainable coexistence represent institutional delusion rather than evidence-based assessment.
Institutional Accountability Evasion
Nepal's conservation institutions operate through tightly integrated professional networks that systematically marginalize voices raising concerns about the human costs of tiger enhancement programs. The revolving door between government agencies and international NGOs creates an echo chamber that rewards narrative consistency while punishing critical analysis.
When conservation professionals document institutional failures or advocate for community-centered approaches, they face professional marginalization and exclusion from decision-making processes. This suppression extends to research publication, where behavioral studies on tigers remain largely unpublished while research documenting the artificial nature of population increases faces systematic discouragement.
Human-Tiger Coexistence Amidst Rising Tiger Population
The scientific authority these institutions claim is built on selective data presentation and deliberate suppression of inconvenient evidence. This represents institutional capture of the scientific process that undermines both conservation effectiveness and public trust.
Climate Change as Deflection Strategy
Conservation authorities increasingly deploy climate change arguments to deflect attention from their immediate policy failures. While Nepal's climate has been warming gradually since 1971, this cannot explain the sudden spike in human-tiger conflicts following artificial population enhancement programs implemented after 2010.
By framing tiger range expansion into higher elevations as climate adaptation rather than stress-induced displacement from artificially overpopulated lowland habitats, authorities avoid acknowledging that their habitat manipulation programs have created unsustainable conditions. The focus on climate resilience serves as convenient institutional cover for avoiding accountability for crises they created through reckless intervention.
The 2022 Tiger Recovery Action Plan contains no measures for preventing human casualties despite documented fatalities, yet conservation authorities present this plan as evidence of comprehensive conservation planning. This willful blindness to obvious planning failures demonstrates how deeply institutional dysfunction has compromised decision-making processes.
The Tourism Distraction and Technological Band-aids
Conservation authorities increasingly promote wildlife tourism as justification for maintaining current approaches despite their documented human costs. Claims that "tigers attract high-spending tourists" serve to redirect attention from accountability questions to economic opportunities while conveniently obscuring who benefits from tourism revenue versus who bears the costs of conservation.
This economic narrative facilitates community displacement as locals sell land to urban businesspeople developing tourism infrastructure. The same populations suffering tiger attacks also face economic displacement, creating compounded injustice that conservation authorities refuse to acknowledge or address.
Meanwhile, technological interventions—electric fencing, predator-proof enclosures, deterrent devices—are promoted as evidence of institutional commitment to human-wildlife coexistence. However, these solutions consistently fail because they ignore community capacity and local contexts while serving primarily as public relations tools for demonstrating responsiveness without addressing root causes.
Reactive technological fixes cannot address the fundamental decision to artificially increase tiger densities without community consent or adequate safety planning. The emphasis on technology allows authorities to claim they are addressing human-tiger conflict while avoiding accountability for creating the conditions that necessitate such interventions.
The Epistemic Vice of Institutional Confirmation Bias
The most troubling aspect of current institutional responses is the persistent framing of tiger population tripling as unqualified success requiring only minor adjustments. Conservation authorities refuse to acknowledge that artificial population enhancement without corresponding human safety measures represents a fundamental policy failure requiring immediate correction rather than celebration.
If we continue to call the tripling of tigers a success without identifying that it is first and foremost a crisis requiring resolution, then Nepal's conservation establishment is operating on epistemic vice that prioritizes institutional interests over evidence-based assessment. This willful misinterpretation of outcomes demonstrates institutional commitment to protecting established narratives rather than learning from documented failures.
The recent statistical improvements in human casualties are being weaponized to claim vindication while avoiding the deeper institutional reforms that genuine crisis resolution would require. The declining number of human deaths in later years cannot guarantee ecosystem health or genuine crisis resolution. Temporary statistical improvements may reflect prey depletion, tiger dispersal, community behavioral changes, or demographic factors rather than sustainable solutions.
Moving Toward Genuine Solutions
Immediate Crisis Response
Emergency Safety Protocols: Implementing comprehensive human safety measures in high-conflict areas, including professionally staffed rapid response teams and community-based early warning systems that address immediate threats while conservation institutions develop long-term solutions.
Institutional Transparency: Establishing mandatory public reporting of both conservation achievements and social costs, including independent monitoring of conservation organization performance and community grievance mechanisms with enforcement powers.
Community Agency: Creating formal veto power for communities over conservation interventions affecting their welfare, ending the current system where external institutions make life-and-death decisions without meaningful local consent.
Medium-term Institutional Reform
Accountability Mechanisms: Developing legal liability frameworks for conservation organizations similar to those governing other sectors affecting human welfare, including mandatory social impact assessments for all conservation interventions.
Governance Restructuring: Requiring community representation on conservation decision-making bodies and establishing independent oversight that breaks the current revolving door between government agencies and international NGOs.
Research Democratization: Making all conservation research publicly accessible and mandating community participation in research design to end the current system of knowledge hoarding that serves institutional rather than public interests.
Habitat Management Review: Conducting comprehensive assessment of artificial enhancement programs to determine sustainable carrying capacities that consider social and ecological factors rather than maximizing numerical targets.
Long-term Systemic Transformation
Redefining Success Metrics: Developing comprehensive indicators that measure human-wildlife coexistence quality, community welfare, and ecological health alongside population targets. True conservation success must integrate rather than subordinate social outcomes.
Preventive Frameworks: Shifting from reactive compensation schemes to proactive conflict prevention strategies that address root causes, including halting artificial population enhancement until sustainable coexistence mechanisms are established.
Knowledge Integration: Creating systems that value traditional ecological knowledge alongside scientific research, recognizing that communities possess sophisticated understanding of local wildlife behavior that current institutional approaches systematically ignore.
Community-centered Governance: Restructuring conservation governance to place affected communities at the center of decision-making processes rather than treating them as subjects of external intervention.
Helping Communities Establish Their Agency Over Conservation Practice
Communities possess sophisticated understanding of their scope and limitations regarding information, knowledge, resources, time, and capacity. However, mainstream conservation agencies systematically undermine, underutilize, and misappropriate this community intelligence when they acknowledge it at all. This fundamental dynamic must change to create genuinely sustainable conservation outcomes.
Local communities have developed innovative coexistence strategies including spiritual practices involving shrine construction and ritual protections, informal alert systems and night-watch groups, and seasonal adaptations including modified agricultural schedules. Yet these solutions are consistently devalued in favor of external technological interventions that ignore local contexts and capacity.
What communities need is empowerment to use newer ideas, techniques, and technologies by themselves, building upon the foundation of their own local and traditional skills and intelligence. This approach would minimize dependency on external factors while creating opportunities for groundbreaking local innovations—possibilities that remain unrealized in the current scenario where over-interventionism and repeated mis-adventurism from external players is rife.
By establishing genuine community agency over conservation practice, local populations can integrate traditional knowledge with appropriate new technologies based on their own assessment of needs, resources, and capabilities. This represents the kind of locally driven innovation that conservation institutions should facilitate rather than supplant through top-down interventions that consistently fail to address ground-level realities.
Conclusion: Accountability as Conservation Imperative
Nepal's tiger conservation experience demonstrates both the possibilities of dedicated wildlife protection efforts and the dangers of institutional accountability avoidance. The numerical success achieved shows what conservation can accomplish, while the associated human costs reveal what happens when institutions prioritize targets over comprehensive planning.
The declining casualty numbers provide an opportunity to implement genuine reforms rather than claiming vindication for failed approaches. However, interpreting temporary improvements as institutional validation risks repeating the confirmation bias that created the original crisis.
Nepal's conservation institutions face a fundamental choice: continue the narrative manipulation that protects institutional interests while communities suffer the consequences, or embrace the accountability and transparency required for sustainable human-wildlife coexistence.
The path forward requires acknowledging that artificial tiger population enhancement without adequate safety measures represents institutional failure requiring correction, not achievement deserving celebration. Only by identifying the tiger tripling as a crisis requiring genuine resolution can Nepal begin developing conservation approaches that serve both ecological and human welfare.
True conservation leadership means having the courage to acknowledge mistakes, implement systematic reforms, and prioritize long-term sustainability over short-term public relations victories. Nepal has the opportunity to pioneer this approach, but only if its conservation establishment chooses accountability over institutional self-protection.
The author is a conservationist and humanitarian.
