Eco-Dharmic Ethics: What World Can Learn From India's Tiger Conservation Story

India's tiger conservation story has found itself on the cover of the prestigious Science magazine (January 31, 2025).

A new paper, ‘Tiger Recovery Amid People and Poverty,’ (Jhala et al) authored by scientists from the Wildlife Institute of India (Dehradun), Aarhus University (Denmark), and India's National Tiger Conservation Authority, details this achievement.

In 2010, conservationists for tiger populations across national borders met at St. Petersburg, Russia, charting out a ‘Global Tiger Recovery Program’ with a target of doubling the tiger population by 2022.

Today, India's tiger population now represents a stunning 75 per cent of the world's total, a feat achieved despite some of the planet's highest human densities, according to the Science paper.

This hard-won victory offers a powerful lesson, not just in conservation strategy, but also in the often-fraught interplay of politics and science—and how the science of preservation can be manipulated within political agendas and worldview conflicts.

To note, even the current study highlights that conservation efforts falter in the face of conflict and instability. It cites the decline of the one-horned rhinoceros during armed conflicts in Assam and Nepal's Maoist insurgency.

Even within India, tiger conservation faces challenges in a problematic corridor spanning Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and eastern Maharashtra. These regions, experiencing ongoing insurgencies, correlate with low tiger occupancy and a high risk of local extinction.

The US Model and a Proto-Soviet State

The conservation models initially implemented by the Indian government, particularly under Indira Gandhi, often resulted in disaster and widespread misery.

To this end, in 1966, the BNHS commissioned an American graduate student, Juan Spillett, to write what became 'by far the most thorough critique of livestock in Indian national park.'

Spillett, originally in India to research ungulates in Kanha National Park (having been redirected from wharf rat research in Calcutta by his Johns Hopkins University funders), rapidly boosted his profile to become an authority on all of India's woes. His article, 'General Wild Life Conservation Problems in India,' published in the Journal of the BNHS, identified two root causes for the nation's problems, including 'the scarcity of food, lack of foreign exchange, poor living standards, and so forth': '(1) too many people, and (2) too much domestic livestock.'

Comparing the supposedly unlimited overgrazing by 'domestic livestock' (read cows) to 'cancer,' he declared that this overgrazing had created 'the largest man-made desert in the world.' Spillett's flourishing rhetoric even equated cow grazing in the commons to a bombed public building. The Government had the right to shoot and kill the terrorist who placed the bomb, he wrote.

Historian of environmental conservation movement, Michael Lewis, would later write on this approach thus:

The BNHS at this time was led by Zafar Futehally, Salim Ali's nephew, and himself an ornithologist. Both Ali and Futehally enjoyed close ties with the Nehru-Gandhi family, wielding considerable influence within the institution.

As Lewis notes, this proximity allowed them to "consistently rely upon non-democratic politics to effect" their environmentalist goals.

Coinciding with the rising political popularity of the cow protection movement, Futehally penned an op-ed in the Times of India, citing Spillett as an authority against the cause.

In 1969, a scientific study, 'as a whole directly considered the role of cattle—domestic and feral—in this ecosystem...exactly the sort of specific study that Futehally and Ripley had been pushing for' two years earlier.

This study was conducted in the Gir Forest reserves (home to the Asiatic lion). A paper based on this study, presented at the 1969 'International Union for the Conservation of Nature' (IUCN), helped launch tiger conservation projects.

When Michael Lewis later accessed the full report behind the IUCN paper, he uncovered intriguing observations that contradicted the prevailing wisdom connecting livestock grazing with wildlife sanctuary destruction:

The Smithsonian official overseeing the project was less than pleased.

He wrote to the young researcher, acknowledging that he 'would quite agree that the sudden removal of all domestic stock from the forest would be likely to be detrimental from several standpoints.' He also cautioned the researcher that 'the authorities in India who have been working hard for the establishment of national parks as well as others…would be quite unhappy with the conclusion that can be drawn from a last census of your third paragraph of the discussion….'.

He was right. In 1972, Indira Gandhi's government enacted the 'Wildlife (Protection) Act', criminalising livestock and related human activities within national parks.

Bharatpur was declared a national park nine years later in 1981, but villagers and their livestock continued their traditional grazing practices. In 1982, Indira Gandhi chaired a high-level meeting and mandated strict enforcement of the grazing ban. That same year, nine villagers protesting the ban were shot dead by police.

The tragic irony? By 1987, a mid-study report revealed that bird diversity in Bharatpur had declined since the ban on grazing and fodder collection took effect.

Dharmic Model for Tiger Conservation?

Of course, the tiger occupies an exalted place in Hindu culture and spirituality, as seen in the countless calendar art renderings of Sri Aiyappa and Durga Devi. Beyond depictions too, the ecological dynamics of big cat conservation—in a very human context—have been given a deeper and holistic understanding in Indian culture.

The relationship between livestock grazing in forests and predators like lions was not absent from the Indian consciousness. In his renowned work Raghuvamsa, Kalidasa depicts a lion attacking Nandini, the sacred cow, deep within the Himalayan forest. When Dileepan, the ancestor of Rama attempts to intervene, he is inexplicably immobilised. The lion asserts its right to the cow's blood, comparing it to the moon's light being eclipsed by Rahu—the traditional Hindu name for the north lunar node, the point in the moon's orbit that causes an eclipse.

The lion, thus, cleverly implies that the livestock trespasses onto the predator's territory, giving the predator rightful claim—a logic Dileepan concedes. Recognising the right of the lion in the web of life, but at the same time not backtracking on the compassion for the life of cow, Dileepan offers himself in the place of Nandini.

Clearly, Indian tradition recognised the complex dynamics of livestock interaction in the peripheral zones of even pristine forest ecosystems.

Eco-Dharmic ethics recognise the profound interconnectedness of human well-being and the welfare of all living things. The act of Dileepan is not merely a Puranic or Ithihasic tale; it embodies a deeply ingrained value system that respects ecological niches and strives to harmonise human activity with the delicate web of life.

It is this very value system that underpins India's unique approach to tiger conservation—an approach that transcends the limitations of vast, isolated national parks and the myopic predator eradication in the name of narrow human interests.

The Dharma of India also understands that the socio-economic welfare of its communities can become a natural safeguard for wildlife when along with such progress the Sanatana value system remains intact.

—Yadvendradev V. Jhala et al., Tiger recovery amid people and poverty, Science, Vol. 387 Iss. 6733, pp.505-510

—Michael Lewis, 'Cattle and Conservation at Bharatpur: A Case Study in Science and Advocacy' - Chapter 8 in 'Inventing Global Ecology: Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal in India, 1947-1997', Ohio University Press, 2004, pp 199-232