Tiger Trafficking Shifts From Reserve Boundaries To Wider Landscapes

India's wildlife protection regime rests on the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, which places the tiger in Schedule I, giving it the highest level of legal protection against hunting and trade. Project Tiger was launched in 1973 with nine reserves covering 16,339 sq km; it has since grown to 58 reserves spread across 18 states, covering over 84,000 sq km of core habitat. The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), created through a 2006 amendment to the Act, oversees these reserves and monitors tiger status nationally. The same amendment also established the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB), a statutory multi-agency body tasked specifically with countering organised wildlife crime, working alongside state forest departments, Customs, and the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence.

Internationally, India is a party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which places the tiger under Appendix I, banning all commercial international trade in the species or its parts. Much of the data on how this trade actually functions comes from TRAFFIC, a joint programme of the WWF and the IUCN that monitors global wildlife trade. TRAFFIC is not a United Nations body; its role is to track and analyse trade patterns so that conservation and enforcement agencies can respond with evidence rather than assumption. Its recent 25-year assessment of tiger trafficking, spanning seizure records up to mid-2025, forms the evidentiary base for a broader argument about how tiger crime itself has changed.

For decades, tiger protection was conceived largely as boundary defence: strengthen patrolling, camps, and intelligence around the reserve to keep poachers out. This approach remains necessary but is increasingly insufficient, because the tiger's actual ecological range now extends well beyond reserve limits.