
India’s tiger boom at risk: Trafficking resurges amid soaring demand for tiger bones in China & Vietnam
Maya’s team—which included another woman, two men and a child— was carrying the skin of an adult tiger and 17 kilos of bones. Before “someone from Meghalaya” could come and collect the consignment from Maya, the police swooped in.
“We were stunned to find that these were the remains of a second tiger— we had already missed the first tiger,” says Pranjal Baruah, a range officer of Kamrup, Assam, who had spearheaded the initial probe. Forensic tests traced the skin to one of the three missing tigers from the faraway Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve in Maharashtra.
That was a clue something was going awry with the striped beast. Even as India’s tiger population has been steadily climbing over the past couple of decades, it could get derailed. A surging appetite for tiger bones in China and Vietnam and the revival of a smuggling route through Mizoram-Myanmar have reignited dormant trafficking networks.
The Assam case was transferred to the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB), an arm of the ministry of environment and forests, which cracks down on organised wildlife crime. The agency’s trail led to multiple arrests in Maharashtra. They also caught Mishram Jakhad, an octogenarian from Dwarka in Delhi, believed to be a key link between tiger poachers and smuggling syndicates.
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The wildlife sleuths pursuing the Guwahati case struggled to piece together the puzzle—until two tiger poaching cases, one in Maharashtra’s Chandrapur and the other in Madhya Pradesh’s Jabalpur, threw light on the smuggling of tiger parts and the people involved in it. Maharashtra recorded 12 tiger deaths in just 24 days—between December 30, 2024, and January 22, 2025— according to the state’s forest department data, cited in a January 28