Telangana to Join Nationwide Tiger Census from December 2025
Forest officials will deploy camera traps, record direct sightings, and analyse scat and pugmarks. Teams will also audit water sources, prey availability, and signs of human disturbance. Data will be processed with software developed by national wildlife agencies.
Hyderabad: The Telangana Forest Department has begun preparations for the next All-India Tiger Monitoring exercise, a quadrennial census coordinated by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA). Fieldwork for the 2025-26 round will start in December and continue into early 2026.
The survey, conducted simultaneously across major forest landscapes, including the Central Indian Landscape, Western Ghats, Eastern Ghats, and the North-East, collects data on tiger populations, co-predators, prey species, and habitat quality. Telangana forms part of the Central Indian-Eastern Ghats landscape.
In the last nationwide tiger assessment, completed in 2022, Telangana had 21 tigers and 297 leopards. Although species like sambar, chital, blackbuck and the four-horned antelope (chousingha) are also recorded during fieldwork, the NTCA releases only tiger- and leopard-specific figures at the state level.
Forest officials will deploy camera traps, record direct sightings, and analyse scat and pugmarks. Teams will also audit water sources, prey availability, and signs of human disturbance. Data will be processed with software developed by national wildlife agencies.
“The final results generally take eight to 10 months to compile after fieldwork ends,” a senior forest official said, adding that the exercise is “critical for gauging forest health and guiding conservation policy at a time of rising human-wildlife conflict and rapid land-use change.”
