Ahmedabad: Gujarat’s sole tiger has inspired a singular census exercise — 500 forest department staff will be deployed and 250 camera traps will be installed to confirm the presence of Big Cat No. 1.Gujarat vanished from India’s official tiger map more than three decades ago. But a solitary tiger has made the forests of Ratanmahal and adjoining areas along the Gujarat-Madhya Pradesh border its home since Feb 2025.This tiger has triggered a full-fledged census operation by the National Tiger Conservation Authority, or NTCA. The exercise, likely to be conducted in June or July, will cover Ratanmahal, Purna, and Soolpaneshwar sanctuaries.The tiger does not have a mating partner.“About 500 staff will be deployed in these three sanctuaries to count the tiger,” confirmed Jaipal Singh, the principal chief conservator of forests (wildlife).Forest officials said the extensive exercise is aimed not merely at documenting the solitary tiger, but also at determining if any additional tigers are present.Since the animal frequently moves around areas connected to Madhya Pradesh forests, authorities suspect another tiger — possibly even a female — could be using the landscape.“It is surprising that the tiger has been staying here for over a year without a mating partner. The NTCA wants to rule out the possibility of the presence of any other male or female tiger in the area,” said a senior forest officer.The tiger, estimated to be around 5 years old, first began moving along the Ratanmahal-Madhya Pradesh border in mid-Feb last year before settling in the sanctuary landscape. Since then, officials have consistently recorded its movement through camera traps and CCTV footage, establishing what wildlife experts describe as a “stable habitation” rather than a temporary dispersal.The prolonged stay has now earned Gujarat a place once again in the All-India Tiger Estimation 2026 exercise, one of the country’s largest wildlife surveys.Gujarat’s last tiger census was conducted in 1989 when officials could only record pugmarks but failed to sight a tiger. The state was subsequently dropped from the list of tiger-bearing states in 1992. Since then, there has been only one confirmed tiger sighting in 2019, but that animal survived in the state for barely 15 days.“This extended stay makes Gujarat’s reinstatement as a state with tiger presence not only justified but necessary,” an NTCA official said.Once the census exercise is completed, officials plan to formally tag the tiger and assign it an identification code under the national stripe-pattern database used for monitoring tiger movement across the country.“So far this tiger has not been tagged,” an official said, adding that NTCA teams will also train Gujarat’s forest department staff in using stripe identification software.
