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Govt says India’s wildlife crime numbers are down. Here’s why that is only half true

At the national level, no single agency has the mandate, the legal authority, and the public accountability to tell India what wildlife crime actually looks like.

In August 2025, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change placed a set of numbers before the Lok Sabha that, on the surface, read like good news. Wildlife crime in India, the government said, had fallen sharply. From 820 registered cases in 2020, the count had dropped to 349 in 2023 and edged up slightly to 354 in 2024. Total cases between 2020 and 2024 were 2,701. In a country that hosts 106 national parks, 573 wildlife sanctuaries, and over 70 per cent of the world’s wild tiger population, the trend appeared reassuring.

The data placed before Parliament comes almost entirely from the police. It excludes the majority of wildlife crime cases registered in India, which are filed not by the police but by state forest departments.

The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), which produces the country’s official crime statistics annually, captures only one of two enforcement streams. The other, far larger stream flows largely in the dark, uncounted, and unchecked. What the government presented as a declining crime rate is, in practice, a declining count of the fraction of crimes that one agency bothers to report to a central database.

Two databases, one black hole

The structure of India’s wildlife crime data problem is not complicated, even if the institutional complacency that sustains it has persisted for over a decade. The Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 gives both the police and forest department officials the power to register wildlife offences. The NCRB collects crime data through a chain that runs from district records bureaus to state bureaus and then to the national level. This chain runs through the police.

Forest department cases, however, flow into a separate system managed by the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB), a statutory body under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change established in 2007. The WCCB runs its own Wildlife Crime Database Management System. That database is not in the public domain.

Researcher Shankar Prakash Alagesan laid this problem out with precision in a 2020 peer-reviewed paper published in the Indian Journal of Environmental Education. Alagesan found that two enforcement agencies operate parallel databases with no mandatory integration point. His conclusion was direct:

“In order to measure the extent of enforcement of WPA, wildlife crime data becomes a crucial indicator. As discussed elsewhere, wildlife crime databases are vital information system that helps enforcement officers to detect, prevent, and pursue criminals. Hence, a centralised, integrated wildlife crime database becomes the need of the hour.”

His recommendation, that the WCCB act as a nodal integrator and publish consolidated data in the manner of the NCRB’s annual ‘Crime in India’ report, remains unimplemented five years on.

The Citizen consumer and civic Action Group made the same argument in a detailed 2022 analysis, noting that NCRB data on wildlife crime “cannot make any meaningful assessment of wildlife offences in India” because the majority of cases are invisible to it. This is not a marginal technical flaw. The NCRB’s own publication acknowledges that the chapter on environment-related offences “only includes wildlife crime cases registered by police alone”.

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What the numbers actually show

The gap between what forest departments register and what the NCRB records is not marginal. Karnataka provides a concrete documented illustration. According to........

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