How Bhopal's big cats survive inside an expanding Indian city

BHOPAL: By the day, Bhopal looks like any other fast-growing Indian city with crowded roads, expanding colonies, concrete pushing steadily outward. But after dark, when traffic fades and neighbourhoods fall silent, another city wakes up.In forests skirting residential colonies, around lake catchments, hill slopes and fragmented green patches woven into the city’s edges, around 10 to 12 tigers begin to move. Silent, watchful and largely unseen, they navigate an urban landscape after midnight. Some are not merely passing through. They are breeding.What makes the phenomenon extraordinary, researchers say, is adaptation. Rather than competing with people for space, Bhopal’s tigers appear to have adapted to the city’s rhythm, avoiding daylight movement and emerging when human activity declines.“These tigers have adapted in a way that they avoid venturing out during daylight and move only when the city sleeps,” Madhya Pradesh chief wildlife warden Samita Rajora told TOI. The behavioural adaptation, scientists say, may explain why Madhya Pradesh’s capital has quietly become one of the world’s most unusual conservation stories, possibly the only major city globally where breeding tigers survive inside urban green spaces with virtually no direct conflict with humans.Unlike tiger-bearing cities such as Nagpur and Chandrapur, where big-cat movement frequently escalates into panic, rescue operations or attacks on livestock and humans, Bhopal has so far maintained an uneasy but remarkably stable peace, say officials.Rajora said the Madhya Pradesh forest department is preparing a radio-collaring project for some of Bhopal’s tigers to better understand how the animals move, behave and survive inside an expanding urban landscape. “A new project is underway under which some tigers will be radio-collared to understand their behaviour and movement patterns,” Rajora said. The exercise is expected to generate crucial data on how tigers navigate roads, lake systems, forest edges, fragmented habitats and human-dominated spaces.The larger Bhopal–Ratapani–Dewas landscape, identified under the All-India Tiger Estimation (AITE) 2022, supports more than 96 tigers. Around 12 tigers are estimated to use habitats in and around Bhopal, including green spaces lying close to residential colonies, institutional campuses and lakes.“What makes Bhopal unique is that breeding tigers are using urban green spaces within the city,” wildlife researcher D P Srivastava said. For carnivore ecologists, breeding tigresses are among the strongest indicators of habitat functionality. Tigers may disperse through disturbed landscapes, but tigresses raise cubs only where prey, shelter, connectivity and safety exist.The science behind Bhopal’s tiger paradox was presented on Thursday at the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) Asia Conference in Kathmandu, Nepal, one ofAsia’s biggest conservation gatherings attended by more than 600 researchers from 42 countries.The study on tiger survival in Bhopal’s rapidly urbanising landscape was presented by D P Srivastava, who has studied urban tigers in and around Bhopal since 2018 as part of his PhD at the Wildlife Institute of India, with support from the MP forest department.The presentation emerged as a major point of discussion among researchers because it challenges one of conservation science’s longest-held assumptions, that large carnivores and expanding cities inevitably end in conflict.A recent paper by Srivastava found that coexistence in Bhopal works through “temporal segregation”, humans and tigers sharing the same geography but rarely at the same time.While roads, settlements and open spaces remain dominated by people during the day, tiger movement peaks between 8 pm and 5 am. Large carnivores, including tigers, were found most active between 6 pm and 7 am, sharply reducing direct overlap with people. “The study clearly shows that wildlife and peoplein Bhopal are sharing space through temporal segregation. Tigers avoid peak human movement hours, which is one of the key reasons why conflict remains low,” Srivastava said.To understand whether tigers were merely dispersing through or actually establishing territories, researchers conducted one of India’s most detailed studies on carnivore persistence in urban landscapes between 2019 and 2022.The research covered 112 grids of 5x5 km each across Bhopal, Sehore and Obedullahganj forest divisions, documenting tiger presence in 78 grids, including habitats within 30 km of Bhopal municipal limits and green spaces embedded inside the city. Researchers deployed 10 camera traps across 135.52 sq km for 570 trap nights, generating 8,641 independent detections of wildlife and humans.The findings reveal an ecosystem negotiating coexistence in real time: 52% of detections captured human activity, 24% wild prey, 19% domestic animals, and 4.89% carnivores, including tigers, leopards, striped hyenas and sloth bears. The city’s ecological foundation lies in the Vindhyan landscape, which continues to support prey and copredators outside protected reserves.Researchers analysed 229 scat samples, documenting 14 prey species across the broader landscape and 12 species inside city limits, including nilgai, blackbuck, spotted deer, four-horned antelope, langurs, wild boar, porcupines and Indian hare.Former APCCF (wildlife) L Krishnamurthy, who began systematic tiger monitoring around Bhopal during the early 2010s while serving as Bhopal DFO, said the city’s tiger story stretches back centuries.“There is enough prey base for these tigers, including nilgai and wild boars,” he added.“Tigers have always been here. Bhopal was known for trophy hunting during the British period as well as the Begum era,” Srivastava said.Recognising increasing tiger presence near settlements, the Bhopal forest division launched a volunteer programme. Villagers from sensitive areas were trained, provided technical kits and involved in daily monitoring to improve awareness and reduce the risk of conflict. Retired forest officer R S Bhadoria, who monitored Bhopal’s tigers for years, cautioned that coexistence should not be romanticised.“Urban landscapes are dynamic and constantly evolving due to various human and developmental activities. At the same time, the presence of tigers and other large carnivores in such areas poses risks both to people and to the animals themselves. This situation must be recognised as a challenge in advance,” Bhadoria said. “Bhopal is fortunate that coexistence currently exists here, but it also remains a sensitive and high-risk issue. Regular monitoring by the MP forest department, active involvement of different stakeholders, and continuous research are the keys to successfully managing wildlife in such human-dominated landscapes,” he added.