Living With the Wild

India’s conservation future lies not in separating people and wildlife, but in learning how both can share an increasingly crowded landscape

- SINGARAM KULANDAIVEL

India is not merely a nation of villages, megacities, rivers, mountains, and monsoons. It is one of the world’s last great shared landscapes, where humans and wildlife coexist amid extraordinary demographic pressure.

From the elephant corridors of Northeast India to the tiger forests of Central India, from the leopard-inhabited sugarcane belts of Maharashtra to the mangrove islands of the Sundarbans, the story of India is also the story of coexistence — fragile, complex, often dangerous, yet profoundly remarkable.

No other major nation on Earth supports such enormous populations of both humans and megafauna within the same living landscape. India holds nearly 18 per cent of the world’s human population on only about 2.4 per cent of the global land area, yet it supports almost 8 per cent of global biodiversity. The country shelters around 3,682 tigers, over 32,000 Asian elephants, the world’s only population of Asiatic lions, one-horned rhinoceroses, snow leopards, gaurs, wolves, bears, and thousands of lesser-known species spread across forests, wetlands, deserts, grasslands, mountains, coasts, and agricultural landscapes. According to the India State of Forest Report 2023, forest and tree cover together account for approximately 25.17 per cent of the country’s geographical area. India today has 107 national parks, over 573 wildlife sanctuaries, 53 tiger reserves, 33 elephant reserves, 18 Biosphere Reserves, and numerous eco-sensitive zones. Yet the reality of modern conservation is that wildlife no longer remains confined within these protected boundaries.