The Indian government says 626 poachers have been arrested in 268 wildlife cases since 2020. On paper, it sounds like progress. In reality, that number is either incomplete or incriminating. Divide it across five years and 28 states, and you get barely five arrests per state per year. Five. For a country that hosts about 4,000 tigers and some of the busiest illegal wildlife markets in Asia, that statistic of 626 poachers arrested isn’t success — it’s surrender.
The Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB) calls it a record of enforcement. Tamil Nadu reports 30 cases, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh 24 each, Odisha 23. Even if accurate, these figures are absurdly low. Dozens of tigers, leopards, and pangolins vanish annually without an arrest. To accept 626 poachers as national progress is to mistake paperwork for protection.
626 Poachers — a number that hides decay
Each arrest is supposed to mark a break in the trade chain, yet few reach conviction. Most cases collapse before trial. Evidence spoils, witnesses vanish, and forest departments shrug. The WCCB releases totals but no verdicts. Justice evaporates between ministries while the trade adapts and expands. In this vacuum, corruption thrives.
At the local level, bribes buy silence. Patrol logs are altered, seized skins reappear in circulation, and confiscated claws become private trophies. When the chain of custody breaks, the entire investigation dissolves. The number 626 becomes a distraction from the real question: how many officials helped make those poachers invisible again?
Political denial dressed as discipline
When the Supreme Court recently demanded that the Centre and Maharashtra explain a “transnational network” killing tigers in central India, the ministries responded with silence. The courage to act ends where political embarrassment begins. India’s tiger protection doesn’t fail for lack of knowledge—it fails from deliberate inertia, a failure born of political corruption. Politicians celebrate tiger counts but bury poaching statistics in unread reports. Or make sure the data will never come to the surface anyway. Each year’s data release becomes theatre: a parade of arrests without proof that the trade itself has shrunk.
The arithmetic of apathy
If we divide 626 poachers across five years, the math exposes the myth. One poacher per month for every five states. That would be laughable if it weren’t lethal. The WCCB’s “achievements” don’t reflect surveillance—they reflect blindness. Snares found in Chandrapur or Bandhavgarh rarely become cases. When forest guards discover carcasses, they’re told to classify deaths as “natural” to protect the reserve’s image. Internal corruption masks ecological collapse.
The bureaucracy’s fear of bad headlines has turned data manipulation into policy. Officials inflate tiger numbers, under-report poaching, and declare each arrest a milestone. Meanwhile, local mafias connected to tannery operators and illegal traders work with near-total impunity. A fine paid here, a file closed there — and another tiger disappears without record.
From rangers’ courage to courts’ collapse
No one doubts the dedication of India’s frontline rangers. They patrol unarmed through forests where traffickers carry guns. They die for these animals. But when their reports reach district courts, the system turns against them. Trials drag for years; defendants bribe their way out; officers retire before judgments arrive. For every ranger risking his life, there is a clerk ensuring his case never reaches the bench. That is the real meaning of 626 poachers — a number that measures not protection, but obstruction.
The missing mother-file of justice
Each seized skin or claw points to paperwork that rarely survives audit. The absence of a national wildlife-crime registry ensures that offenders caught in one state re-emerge under new names in another. In theory, India could integrate forest and police data through the National Crime Records Bureau. In practice, departments compete for jurisdiction, not justice. Transparency would expose negligence, and that’s precisely why it never happens.
Technology isn’t the barrier — accountability is. Satellite mapping, DNA forensics, digital case management — all exist. What’s missing is the political will to connect them. Instead, ministries publish selective numbers to sustain the illusion of order. Arrests are publicized; trials are forgotten.
The economics of silence
Every tiger body part has a buyer, and every buyer has a protector. Illegal traders in Nepal, Myanmar, and China depend on Indian complicity to move goods. The CBI occasionally intervenes, but without coordination from state governments, each bust is isolated. There’s no financial tracing, no asset seizure, no international warrants. 626 poachers in five years means the trade’s leadership remains untouched.
Corruption doesn’t only enable poaching —it profits from it. A bribe at a checkpoint can move a tiger skin faster than any official permit. Each compromise filters upward: from ranger to range officer to ministry advisor. The network survives because exposure would implicate too many.
What real success would look like
True success would be hundreds of convictions annually, not 626 poachers in 5 years. It would mean live data, shared intelligence, and prosecutions that target financiers, not just forest villagers. It would mean a political system unafraid of numbers that embarrass it. Right now, India’s wildlife justice reads like a performance report written for donors. The forest remains a crime scene wrapped in paperwork.
The tigers deserve more than symbolic arrests and slogans. The rangers deserve more than stalled cases. And the public deserves more than propaganda. Until India admits that 626 poachers is not proof of progress but evidence of paralysis, its tiger protection story will remain a statistical mirage — a triumph declared from the podium, betrayed in the forest.
Source: The Tribune, India
Photo: The Tribune, India
